Elephants -- Juvenile literature; India -- Juvenile literature
We tried to train Kari by taking him to villages that he had not
yet seen. There were no dogs in the first village we came to. We
went through it without any trouble. In the second village we
came across one or two dogs that barked a few times, then
disappeared in the distance. Then, as we were leaving this
village we heard terrible snorts and growls all around us and
were suddenly surrounded by a pack of angry mongrels, curs and
wild dogs. It was terrible to see Kari trying to chase them with
his trunk. Sometimes he would try to step right on the back of a
dog, but the dog would slip away from under him. Little by little
as the dogs began to bark all around him, he started to go round
and round in a circle, faster and faster till he was spinning
like a top.
We had a hard time sitting on his back because we felt terribly
dizzy. We were almost falling off, when we heard a piercing yell
and saw the whole pack of tormentors running away. Kari had
stepped on one of the dogs and killed it and that frightened the
others away.
We then brought Kari home, gave him his bath in the river and
offered him nice saplings and twigs, but he would eat none of
them.
From that day on, Kari was never upset by the barking of dogs,
but went through strange villages without paying any attention to
them, no matter how hard they barked at his heels.
Now that he had become immune to dogs, we tried to make him like
monkeys. Monkeys, as you know, are very annoying little
creatures. I had a pet monkey of my own named Kopee, who was
red-faced and tawny-coated. He never came near the elephant, and
Kari never thought of going near him. Whenever we went out, this
monkey used to sit on my shoulder, and if we passed through
bazaars where mangoes and other fruits were sold, it was very
difficult to keep Kopee from getting into mischief. In India
everything is shown in the open, and the mangoes lie in baskets
piled up one above the other like little hills. There were places
where oranges were heaped up like big burning rocks. Here and
there you could see brown men robed in white sitting near these
mountains of fruit, bargaining about the prices.
Now it is very good to smell the fragrance of fruit, and one day
while going through the lane of a village, as the fragrance of
the fruit grew stronger, I forgot all about Kopee, and did not
realize that I was carrying him on my shoulder.
Somehow the little monkey always knew when I was not thinking of
him. At such moments he would invariably jump off my shoulder and
run straight for the oranges or mangoes, take one or two of them
and then make a dive for a sheltered spot. This upset the whole
bazaar. Hundreds of men would pursue him from tree to tree,
yelling and throwing stones till he vanished out of sight.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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