The Elephant Keeper. Christopher Nicholson

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СКАЧАТЬ if the Elephants would die, and I told him that I hoped not. ‘They must not die,’ he declared in a fierce voice, ‘I will not allow them to die;’ whereupon he knelt and began to pray for their recovery, and I knelt as well, and who can tell that our prayers did not succeed, for soon after this the stronger of the two Elephants, the female, took a long draught of water, after which she fell asleep again. The male remained on the border between Life and Death for much longer, and although he drank water on the third day it was not until more than a week had passed that he began to make a slow recovery.

      After two or more weeks, both Elephants had struggled to their feet, and I was able to tempt their appetites with fresh hay and vegetables, which I bought in quantities from the Corn Market in Union Street. Once they had remembered how to eat, they ate in prodigious haste, cramming their mouths, I would say full, but an Elephant has a very capacious mouth. They liked fruits and vegetables of all kinds, including turnips, beans and potatoes, and had an excessive fondness for carrots. I remember the great excitement they both shewed when I first placed a heap of carrots in their feeding troughs. This relish of carrots being so marked, made me speculate that the Elephants must know what carrots were; in short, that the taste of the carrots must stimulate memories of their lives in the natural state. Whether this is so I cannot say for sure, I have asked several travellers who have seen troops of wild Elephants in the Cape and the Indies, but none has ever been able to recall whether there were carrots present.

      Their consumption of water was vast, amounting to a dozen barrels a day, and I also gave them fresh milk, in order to help them recover their strengths. Here I should mention that, when Elephants drink, they do so by means of their trunks, which they use as straws, sucking up long draughts of liquid which they squirt into their mouths. I have heard it said that very young Elephants do not use their trunks, but bend down to drink directly with their mouths; whether this is true or not I do not know, but I never saw my two Elephants using their mouths to drink. However, they were clumsy, and it was not uncommon for them to knock over the pails with their feet, which when they understood an expression of surprize would cross their faces. Their pleasure in food and drink was evident, and once they had finished their meal they would demand further nourishment by waving their trunks and uttering little squeals.

      One thing I quickly discovered was that their sense of smell was acute, far more acute than that of a horse; whether as sharp as that of a blood-hound I would not know, but if I entered the stables with a carrot or another tid-bit in one of my pockets, both Elephants would promptly scent it out, and the way in which their trunks greedily reached toward the pocket and, indeed, into the pocket, made me think that they could all but see with their trunks. This cannot be so, and yet in an Elephant the scent organ, which lies in the tip of the trunk, is so sensitive that it is akin to a third eye. Once, when the male was asleep, I made the experiment of concealing some carrots in a heap of hay, and upon awakening he instantly detected the carrots and tossed the hay aside to reach his favourite food.

      I was exceedingly cautious of their strength and power, and took care not to be caught between their bodies, nor against the stable walls, when I might easily have been crushed. I kept them in view all the time; I did not once turn my back on them, or let them gain any advantage of me with their trunks, which would suddenly sway in my direction. They had suffered so much on the voyage that they might easily nurture a hatred of human beings, and I had no intention of letting them take their revenge upon me. If they felt hatred, however, they never shewed it in their eyes, which rather seemed to convey an utter weariness. The eyes of an Elephant are close-set and small, relative to the vast size of the skull, indeed they seem to be much smaller than the eyes of horses, which appear large and globular; but they are nonetheless highly expressive.

      Mr. Harrington and little Joshua regularly came to see the Elephants, and Joshua always wanted to pet them, as he did the horses; but this I strongly counselled against. However, I would hold him up to the stable doors, and then he would offer each of the great animals a carrot, which they would twitch from his hands.

      ‘Do you think they will ever forget the experience of the voyage?’ Mr. Harrington asked me once.

      I answered that both dogs and horses would remember illtreatment many years after it had happened. Mr. Harrington said he had heard from one of his acquaintances, a certain Mr. Coad, who had travelled widely in the Indies, that Elephants had infinitely superior memories to other animals, indeed, in that respect, were perhaps second only to Man, and that it was likely that some traces of their ordeal would never be lost. ‘Yet I believe,’ he continued, ‘that by treating them with kindness and respect, we may gradually cause these unhappy memories to dim in their minds.’

      Mrs. Harrington also visited. She was very nervous of the Elephants, and even more so when she saw me lifting Joshua toward them in order to give them carrots. Her husband assured her that the boy was entirely safe, and Joshua said fiercely, ‘Tom will look after me!’, but she remained fearful. She asked how much larger the Elephants would grow, and Mr. Harrington said he believed that they might grow a good deal more; the male would grow larger than the female. She said, ‘No one else owns Elephants, why should we?’—‘If I had left them by the quay, they would have died.’—‘It might have been better if they had,’ she said. Mr. Harrington: ‘How so?’ Mrs. Harrington: ‘Because, as they increase in size, they will grow more dangerous.’ Mr. Harrington: ‘That they may grow larger does not mean they will be more dangerous. They are peaceful enough now, are they not?’—‘At the moment, they are.’ Mrs. Harrington looked very uncertain, however. Mr. Harrington smiled: ‘Would you prefer me to have bought you a little Negro boy, for a pet slave?’—‘Not at all,’ she replied, ‘you know that I abhor slavery, it is a barbaric custom.’—‘Yet it serves a need,’ he answered, ‘and indeed most slaves are grateful to their masters, for how otherwise would they be cloathed and fed? How would they live?’—‘That may or may not be, but I still do not understand what you purpose in keeping these creatures.’—‘I myself am not sure, but everything has a purpose. In time, they may breed.’—‘Why, I very much hope not,’ cried Mrs. Harrington, ‘if they are brother and sister, as you say!’—‘So the Master of the Dover told me, but who knows?’ replied Mr. Harrington. This was the first time that I had heard of the Elephants being brother and sister, or of the idea that they might breed.

      The history of the Elephants before their capture is a blank, and for a long time I was not even sure whether they were from the Indies or from the Cape, though this particular doubt I later resolved when the same Mr. Coad, whom I mentioned earlier, came to see the two animals at Harrington Hall, and told me that they must come from the Indies: for in the Indies, the male grows tusks, while the female does not; however in the island of Ceylon none of the Elephants, either male or female, grows tusks, whereas in the Cape the male and the female both have tusks, though the females’ are no more than short things.

      I used to puzzle as to how such large creatures as Elephants could be taken into captivity. Were they caught in nets? However it was done, it seemed to me, the matter must be extremely hazardous, for if the Elephant chose to resist capture, as it must, who could stand against it? I have since heard of the ways in which they are taken prisoner in the Indies.

      The first is used to capture single male Elephants, which, said Mr. Coad, are known as tuskers. A tame female Elephant is sent into the jungle; when she finds a herd of wild Elephants, she makes advances to one of the tuskers, giving him caresses with her trunk until his desires are inflamed. As he responds to her advances, she artfully leads him away from his family into some quiet nook where, as he hopes, he will achieve a conquest, and with his mind thus engrossed two young natives creep up and slip a sort of rope round his hind legs. This they wind round some sturdy tree. The wily female now moves away from the tusker, who on discovering the restraints on his legs flies into a terrible frenzy, roaring and trumpeting shrilly, and attempting to recover his liberty. At length, after some hours, he seems to fall into a fit of despair, but the rage soon returns, and he roars again, and tries to rip up the ground with his tusks, and then again gives himself up to despair, and so on, for several days, until the cravings СКАЧАТЬ