Elephant dance (1937)

An old Tusker year and a half they nursed him and how well they that died nursec[ nim yOU can imagine. Then one day someone took him out into his old jungle. It was too much for him. He came back to the stables and refused to eat, and died. It is a commonplace here that elephants die of a broken heart. True Stories There are so many extraordinary elephant stories we hear at first hand. I was telling Mrs. Whitehead, wife of the Chief Conservator of Forests for Madras Presidency, how extraordinary I had found it to watch those cows at the capture of our tusker, as though, quite independent of the mahouts, they were doing the whole thing themselves. She said, yes, her husband had caught a mother and baby in a pit. The mother, after fighting frantically, just gave up and lay down a dead weight and they couldn't get her up. So they prodded the baby, which put her on her feet again raging, and they hauled her out. But she was in such a rage that the big tusker and two big cows, to which she was tied, couldn't hold her, and off she tore into the jungle, dragging them after her and spilling the mahouts. Fortunately, as it happened, the leading rope caught in a tree and snapped with such suddenness that it threw the mother. So what did the tame tusker and cows do then, quite of their own accord, but turn and stand over the mother and not let her up, but held her there. And there they were when the mahouts 94