Elephant dance (1937)

and overcome the leader. One night we thought our Lone Wild tusker had rejoined the herd, for he disappeared. But Tusker. the following night he came back, so he probably had no luck. It is these outlaws, Muthanna says, whose tempers get sourer and sourer until they become the dreaded rogues. The Jemadar has all his mahouts working preparing strands of hempen rope, twisting them together to the thickness of ships' cables. He wants to go out with his cows and rope that tusker. Going up to a wild tusker in the jungle and putting a rope around his leg was a way of catching a creature, reputed to be the most dangerous of jungle animals, that I had never imagined. Was this some speciality of the Jemadar's? The impression was that since it was the Jemadar, it could be done. He had done it before. As a matter of fact it was in this way in these very jungles nine years before that he had caught Irawatha. Irawatha, the biggest tusker in Southern India, was his own single-handed catch. Now it was the rounded perfection of strength and audacity in this half-grown specimen of a potential 'rogue' that set all the Jemadar's elephant-catching nerves a-tingle. The day appointed for the capture came. A special mahout had been sent for and had travelled all the way from up-country to be the Jemadar's right hand. The thick, heavy coils of rope were loaded on to five 89