Elephants -- Juvenile literature; India -- Juvenile literature
Realizing the danger we were in, I went up a very heavy banyan
tree out of Kari's reach and lay among the leaves. The first
thing he did was to go and put his foot on the automobile of the
chief engineer, which happened to be standing outside of the
shed. In a few minutes there was nothing but a mass of twisted
steel on the ground, over which the elephant danced in anger.
Then he saw the chief engineer and two other men standing on the
porch of a bungalow. He rushed at them, but they knew what it
meant to have a mad elephant about, and ran into the house. Kari
then pulled down part of the thatched roof of the bungalow with
his trunk, and finding no one there made straight for two new
trucks that had only been in use a fortnight and broke them to
pieces. Then he rushed at a bull which was grazing in a field,
and wound his trunk around his neck. The bull dropped dead. In a
few moments Kari was out of sight.
[Illustration: IN HIS MADNESS HE MUST HAVE GONE BACK TO THE
JUNGLE]
For a fortnight no one heard anything of him. I expected him to
return to me, but he never came back. Even to this day no one
knows what happened to him. Evidently those miserable engineers
had driven him out of his mind. In his madness he must have gone
back to the jungle and by the time he recovered his senses was so
lost in its depths that he could not come back. When his mind
returns to him, an elephant can never remember the road that he
took in his insanity, and if he runs very far into the jungle he
may never come back because the Spirit of the jungle seizes him.
Kari's last impression of human beings must have been so terrible
that when the Spirit of the jungle asserted itself in him, he
allowed it to lure him away forever from the habitations of men.
That is how it came about that I lost my friend and brother, the
elephant. Though as an animal Kari is lost to me, my soul belongs
to his soul and we shall never forget each other.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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