But now about Salar's early boyhood. After his Mamma had taught him to swim, to eat from the boughs of trees, and to drink for himself by dipping his trunk into the water, she had another useful thing to teach him. In the jungle there are swarms of tormenting flies; they come buzzing around the elephants, and bother them, just as they bother us. Now, _we_ can whisk off the flies with our hands, but how about an elephant? Of course, you will say, his trunk is his hand; and so he can use the trunk to slap the flies or whisk them off. True, but the trunk will not reach more than halfway down the side of the body; and the elephant is too stiff to bend his body as we do; and his tail is too short to reach even a yard each way. Then how can he get rid of the flies where he cannot reach them? Just think! If he only could make his trunk _longer_! But how could he do that? Very simply! Of course he cannot actually make the trunk longer, but he breaks off a small bough of a tree and holds it at the end of his trunk; then he uses the bough like a fan, and whisks off, or brushes off, the flies with it. And that is what Salar's Mamma taught him to do. After that he was very comfortable. Not quite; he had just one more thing to learn from his Mamma, to make him quite comfortable. The sun gets very hot, and when the elephants are feeding from tree to tree, or marching through the jungle, they feel the hot sun on their backs dreadfully--although they have a thick skin. Now, how could they guard themselves from the hot sun? Just think! Why, just as _we_ do, you will say, by using a kind of umbrella! Of course you mean that an elephant could break off a large bough, and hold it over his head and over his back! But his trunk would soon get tired of holding anything as big as that! Besides, he has to use his trunk all the time to feed! If _you_ had only one hand, you could not eat with it and at the same time hold an umbrella over your head with it! Then how _does_ the elephant manage it? _Elephant Covers his Back from Hot Sun_ I shall tell you. He breaks off many small boughs, one at a time, and lays them on his back with his trunk; he is careful to lay them in proper order, and to criss-cross them, so that the boughs will not fall off. In fact, he tries to arrange them very much like the thatched roof of a cottage. That is very clever of him, is it not? But then he does something else, still more clever! When a cottager builds his thatched roof, he has to plaster the ceiling to prevent any rain or sunshine from creeping in through the little spaces between the thatches. So also the thatch on the elephant's back has many gaps, through which the hot sun can still beat down on his skin. So what does he do to fill up the gaps?