Elephant dance (1937)

area and they know when the elephants may be expected to cross. The area is about sixty miles square. In it there are Jungle Men ten forest lodges with rangers. And scattered through it by twos or tens are about eight hundred Kurubars or jungle men, who live in grass and bamboo shelters on wild honey and roots. They are used for the elephant drives only in company with villagers, because, left alone, they are afraid of elephants and at sight of a wild herd will scramble into trees — probably because the wild elephants trample and destroy their huts. Though they look like nothing but long, slender bones covered with black skin, they are very strong. We are building our keddah on one of the two We prepare traditional keddah sites in a dense bamboo thicket the Stockade between the road and the river. The line of the enclosures— an inner stockade seventy-five feet in diameter, and leading into it another about six hundred feet long — is being pricked out in enormous holes to receive the timbers which are being brought in by train after train of bullock carts. In about two weeks' time, Muthanna says, everything will be ready. From this time on the plot thickened. It was only a few days to Christmas. As soon as the stockade was finished, the wild herd would be surrounded and held by the beaters until time for the drive. The area within which a herd is held is called a 'sur 105