A Circle of Elephants Read online

  Behind me Hira Prashad rumbled in anger.

  I grabbed the boy by the shirt and whipped out my grass-cutting blade. The boy cringed, expecting the worst, but I used my blade to free him from the thorny vine. He was scratched and bleeding all over from the sharp thorns, but too scared to run again with my elephant so close.

  “Go back to where you came from. Never come here again!” I shouted.

  The boy slipped away into the forest.

  I went back to where Indra was standing, cradling the fawn in his arms. My tusker followed behind me.

  “Look, Nandu.” Indra pointed to two snares on the ground. While he held the fawn, I searched for more. Along the forest edge, where the spotted deer liked to graze, I found fifteen wire snares. Fortunately, they were empty.

  “Nandu, you let him go?”

  “He is gone for good,” I said.

  “How do you know that?” Indra asked.

  “Because I do.”

  We reached the edge of the stable with me walking next to Hira Prashad. He had dropped his bundles of grass in the excitement when he came crashing through the forest to find me. We would have to go back and reload. But first we had to find a new home for the fawn.

  Indra was holding her close to his chest. He was already attached to the fawn, I could see. There is no animal in the jungle cuter than a baby spotted deer. I waved to Rita, who was standing by the cookhouse when we returned. She ran over, followed by Ritu and Rona, the two orphaned rhino calves she was raising as part of our family at the stable.

  “We found her caught in a snare,” I said. Rita took the fawn from Indra’s arms and carried it toward the cookhouse. Tonight the two rhinos would share their milk bottles with the fawn.

  I saw my father hobbling back to his bungalow. His gout was bothering him again.

  “Nandu, if this gout keeps troubling me, you will have to take over as Subba-sahib sooner than I had planned.” I wanted to share in his joke, or even show how flattered I was by him thinking of me in this way, but I could not at this moment.

  “Subba-sahib, I have something important to tell you.”

  “You did not feel another earthquake, I hope.” His eyes twinkled. He loved to tease me and normally I loved it, too.

  “Look at the new member of our stable,” I said. Rita had brought the fawn out of the cookhouse and the tiny spotted deer was sniffing the two rhinos who were sniffing her.

  “Where did you find this fawn?”

  “Subba-sahib, remember the boy and the bearded man along the river? The ones wearing the shoes? We caught the boy setting snares. He had just caught the fawn and had set fifteen more traps.”

  “Where is this boy now?” my father asked. He spoke to me in a sharp tone and instantly I realized that I had made a mistake. Two mistakes really. I never should have threatened to hit him with the stick. Instead, I should have brought him here. My father or the warden could have questioned him. I decided not to tell my father about threatening the boy. What I had done was bad enough.

  “He ran away. I should not have let him go.”

  “It has been many years since anyone has come into the jungle to kill. Let me see our new fawn, Nandu. I know you meant well and you saved her life. We must be more vigilant now.”

  My stomach churned at the thought of more poachers.

  I went back to the cookhouse to help Rita. “Come, Nandu. You hold her while I give her the bottle,” Rita said. She was a magical mother to animals. Her dark eyes focused on the fawn’s face. She rubbed it between its ears while coaxing the bottle into its mouth, humming a soft song. After a few tries, the exhausted fawn started to drink.

  That afternoon I went to resume my studies with my tutor, Father Autry. He had been my teacher at the boarding school in the city my father had made me attend for two semesters. Now Father Autry had retired to the Borderlands. We were both happier here.

  Hira Prashad and I approached my tutor’s bungalow. A tall, skinny Tharu man walked quickly up the path ahead of us. He carried a small knapsack on his back, which was all he wore aside from a bright white loincloth. He also carried a long, pointed spear in his hand that bobbed up and down as he walked. To my surprise, he went straight through Father Autry’s gate.

  I left Hira Prashad to snack on banana leaves and entered the gate. Through the open door, I saw Father Autry sitting across his breakfast table from the man, who was so wrinkled and slender he looked like he was a hundred years old. The man’s spear was resting against the wall next to a wooden crucifix, a symbol of Father Autry’s religion. In the shadow of the cross cast by the sun through the window, a gecko clung to the wall, its orange toes spread wide.

  “Nandu, welcome,” Father Autry said, having spied me there. “I was just asking my friend about the origin of his spear. He said in the old days he used it to protect the mail and himself from encounters with robbers and sloth bears!”

  Now I saw that, in addition to tea and biscuits, the table held Father Autry’s mail. This was the mailman who brought a satchel of letters for Father Autry from Nepalganj once a month. Father-sahib loved his letters. Much of his family lived far away, in the United States, so he made every delivery a celebration with tea and cakes.

  Father Autry had retired from teaching, but he was still working, pursuing his dream of being a full-time naturalist. I was his assistant. His brain already held the names of every living thing in the Borderlands, maybe in all of Nepal. I supplied him with our local names for the “flora and fauna,” as he liked to call it. I also taught him what I knew about my faith. As a religious man, Father Autry was interested in the different ways to worship a holy spirit.

  I nodded hello to the mailman. He slowly blinked his thickly lashed, almond eyes as his reply. Tharus are generally talkative, but it was clear that this man was not. I was excited that here, in my own village, there were still things I didn’t know—like this mailman. The jungle was not the only place for discovery.

  I asked him in Tharu, “Have you needed your spear lately?”

  The mailman smiled. He took a slow sip of tea, then answered. “No. I meet few wild animals these days. But it keeps me clear of human trouble, too.”

  I laughed and translated for Father Autry, who hadn’t seemed to quite understand the man’s Tharu dialect. Then the mailman stood ramrod straight like a rosewood tree. He could not stay long, with so many people waiting for their monthly mail delivery. I watched his long, wrinkled fingers grip the heavy spear, lifting it from its resting spot against the wall. I could tell he was still a man of considerable strength—no matter his age or thinness. We bid one another farewell.

  “Nandu, look!” my teacher said, holding up a thick journal with a yellow rectangular border. It was the latest issue of National Geographic. We read several articles aloud every month as part of our study. Father Autry said that reading this magazine as a boy was how he started on his journey to becoming a naturalist.

  As he took a closer look at the magazine’s cover, his face changed from a glow to a deep frown.

  “What is it, Father-sahib?”

  “Maybe we should save this for another time.”

  “Why?”

  “Nandu, I think we should . . .”

  Before he could finish his sentence, I picked up the magazine he had placed facedown on the table. On the cover was a photograph of an African elephant lying on the ground. Half of the elephant’s face was missing—and his tusks were gone. The title on the cover read, Slaughter of Africa’s Wildlife.

  “Nandu, I do not want you to see this,” implored Father Autry.

  But I was determined to look. I flipped to the story to find picture after picture of dead elephants sprawled on their sides. Some had been shot with high-powered rifles, others with poisoned arrows.

  One of the biggest photos in the article was of a dead white rhino. I recognized the square lip, but it was missing both horns. Only bloody stumps remained on the giant’s face. I read the caption aloud: “Poachers removed the hor
ns of this white rhino and fled.”

  The photos on the next pages were smaller but worse. I saw ivory carvers at work, taking the once beautiful tusks of a living elephant and turning them into trinkets. I saw a necklace, a bowl, and even a tiny elephant statue. The caption described them as ornate carvings—all I saw were dead animals. Another photo was of a man shaving rhino horn into a dish for a customer. My hands shook with rage. My stomach grew tight like a drum.

  “This is a horrible reality,” Father Autry said. “I only wanted to spare you from seeing it.”

  “Who could be so cruel, Father-sahib? And for what purpose?”

  “The people who buy ivory are very rich, but it is all decorative, there is no use to it. It only signifies their wealth. But others, who are ill, buy the horn of rhinos because they believe the horns have magical healing powers,” said Father Autry. “They pay a lot of money even though it is nonsense. And the people who live near these wild animals are often very poor. So one horn or one tusk can be a year’s salary.”

  “This poaching would never happen in the Borderlands. We guard our wildlife like our family.”

  “Nandu, it is always a struggle between humans and the wildlife—”

  I interrupted. I hated to, but my mind was racing. “Father Autry, there was this boy that my father and I saw fishing with his father, only they were wearing shoes. I thought something was wrong. And there was. Earlier this morning I caught the boy setting out snares. These people are not from our area, I know it.”

  “They may have been displaced by the earthquake, Nandu, or the drought has dried up their fields. We never know the plight of another until we ask, or until we have walked a mile in their footsteps.”

  My face grew hot as I remembered the time I had killed many paradise flycatchers, thinking that it would please Father Autry to send their skins to the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC, for research. How foolish I had been to do such a thing. But I hadn’t known they were never to be collected, and I had thought I was helping. Still, the shame of that day stayed with me.

  “What is it, Nandu?” Father Autry asked, seeing my blazing face.

  “I should check on the fawn. I will return tomorrow, and we will visit the Baba as we planned,” I said.

  “Until tomorrow, then, Nandu,” said my tutor quietly, giving me time to think. He knew me well and understood that when I was struggling, I needed to be alone to uncover the truth about my feelings.

  On the way back to the stable, my mind raced. If I killed beautiful birds, what would stop someone else, someone without a love for animals like mine, an understanding of their intelligence and souls, from killing them to keep from starving? It is easy to miss the truth of what is really happening, especially when the truth is something you do not want to see.

  y mid-May, every animal seeks a shady spot from the blistering sun during the day. It is the hottest month of the year, and the absence of any rain made life miserable for all but the brain-fever bird. The males kept calling through the morning. It was only ten o’clock, but after cutting grass with Indra, I was drained from the heat. Even Hira Prashad did not want to leave the cool river when we stopped for him to drink. But if we did not move, we would be late for Father Autry and our meeting with the Baba.

  Every region in Nepal has its priest, and we had the Baba. He tended a small temple in the jungle, which he found abandoned while on a long wandering. He lived there, a hermit, in a one-room hut. Every week I brought him firewood. Sometimes Hira Prashad and I would be his only visitors for days. The Baba had declared the forest around his temple off-limits to hunting and trapping. The villagers obeyed the law of the Baba.

  Hira Prashad banged the end of his trunk against the ground and let out a long low rumble as we neared the tiny whitewashed temple. A large male tiger glided across our path, unconcerned by our presence.

  “Nandu, the tiger is in,” Father Autry whispered, putting his fingers to his lips for us to be silent. The tiger walked around the clearing, turned to stare at us once, and then vanished into the ravine beyond the temple.

  “What a magnificent animal,” he said.

  We followed the tiger slowly along the trail by the river, the Jogi Khola, or Holy Man’s River, as it was called because of the holy men from the temple who drank and bathed in its waters. The tiger slipped into a deep pool under an overhanging fig tree. In these days of intense drought, this was its refuge. Forty feet down from the tiger was the Baba, lounging in another pool, waving to us and pointing, indicating we should meet him at his temple.

  The Baba entered his hut next to the temple to change his robe. He came to greet us with easy simplicity, the same manner in which he had just held his visit with the tiger. The Baba was ancient. He was dressed in his normal saffron robes, and his hennaed hair and beard were unshorn. What was most unusual about him was his friendship with the tiger.

  Perhaps because of the law that no one could disturb nature around the temple, this enormous tiger had joined the Baba. They lived peaceably together and formed a friendship of kindred spirits—even though the Baba was as frail as a wood splinter and the tiger had shoulders broader than a man’s.

  The Baba walked in his careful way toward us, a beaming smile on his face. Ever since the Baba had taken a vow of silence, his eyes glowed brighter, his gestures more comical or gentle, depending on the situation.

  “Good afternoon, my friend,” said Father Autry.

  “Hel-lo, Ba-ba,” I sang, a greeting he particularly liked.

  The Baba touched his chest with all ten fingers and bowed his head, receiving our greetings. Then he fanned his fingers away from his chest to greet us in return. He invited us to sit on the benches outside his hut, then he went inside, returning a few moments later with teacups. Father Autry spoke in Nepali and the Baba responded with gestures, nodding, and by raising and lowering his eyebrows. More than a year ago, about three months after he had taken up residence in this jungle temple, the Baba had given his voice to Krishna as a sign of devotion. When gestures failed them, they picked up pieces of chalk and wrote to each other in Devanagari script on the writing tablet Father Autry had brought.

  I poured the boiling water into the Baba’s blue ceramic teapot. I watched the tea leaves swirl and sink into the darkening water. Finally, I found the courage to speak with the two men I trusted like my own father.

  “I hope you both will not mind my asking you a serious question,” I began.

  “Of course not, Nandu,” said Father Autry. The Baba gestured with his hands moving from me to his chest, so I continued.

  “As Father-sahib knows, yesterday Indra and I rescued a spotted deer fawn, only two months old, from a snare set by a boy in the forest. We arrived just in time to free the fawn before it was killed. We found fifteen other snares he had set, too.”

  The Baba held up his hand to tell us to wait. He tiptoed off in his funny gait and went behind his hut. He returned with five wire snares. They were like the ones I had found.

  “Where did you find these, Baba?”

  He took a stick and drew their locations in the sand. The snares had been set around the temple and in his sanctuary. He made a gesture with his fingers of the tiger walking through the area and put his hand to his heart, fearing the tiger would be snared.

  “I will search all over when we are done with tea, Baba, and I will tell Subba-sahib. He will speak to the new warden.”

  “Nandu, tell the Baba what happened to the boy that was setting the snares,” said my tutor.

  “I warned him never to return.”

  “You did the right thing. He was probably a village boy trying to feed his family.”

  I looked down. I never believed this excuse. We rarely eat meat at the stable. What did the villagers need with a fawn?

  “Nandu, I can see how upset you are. But you did what we call ‘turning the other cheek.’ Showing kindness gives people a chance to change.”

  The Baba nodded his head vigorously. He touched hi
s finger in some ashes and pressed it to my forehead to offer his blessing.

  I so basked in their praise I could not bring myself to ask the question that I had wanted to ask. How do you stop people from poaching? How do you stir in others the love for animals that we three shared so deeply? I didn’t see how turning the other cheek would work at all. I could not bear to tell them that I had scared the boy with a stick. But I was not sorry. That is what I felt in my heart.

  Sometimes religion gets in the way of doing what is needed, I thought. Religious activity—the prayers of Father Autry, the silent chanting of my Hindu Baba, or even the sacrifices to Ban Devi made by my father the shaman—cannot help you find and pick up snares. That was my thought as I left them and set to work. I checked for traps, looking carefully under fruiting trees and where the grass was lush. This boy was smart. I only found one more snare, this one large enough to catch a deer but probably not a tiger.

  After I had calmed the Baba’s fears about the snares, Father Autry and I rode away on Hira Prashad into the jungle, the Baba waving, as he always did, until we were out of sight.

  On the way to Father Autry’s bungalow, we must have disturbed a small swarm of horseflies along the trail. At least they seemed to be thriving in the drought. “Nandu,” Father Autry said, “I believe we have a special subject for today’s lesson, which we can have on the back of an elephant.”

  Lessons with my tutor transported me to another world. Each of Father Autry’s teachings pulled another thin veil away from my jungle view. The more I learned, the clearer my vision became.

  The horseflies zoomed around us and landed while I rushed to cut branches to swat at them. Horseflies, which often bite me and my elephant, were not what I would have chosen as the subject of today’s talk. When I was about to swing my branch at them, Father Autry held me back. “Wait, Nandu, the cavalry has arrived.”

  From nowhere, several flies—even larger than the horseflies—snatched them from the air. “Behold, Nandu. Meet the robber fly.” I had never seen a robber fly. I did not know they even existed! I was always too busy whacking at the horseflies to notice their predator, the robber kind.