A Thing to Think About

An elephant is a thing to think about. Its many parts are somehow larger than life: the bristly hairs as long as pine needles, the squishy feet as baggy as bell-bottom pants. Even on its knees, an elephant impresses. In its genuflection there is no submission. An elephant kneeling may be the wisest and bravest of all, we concluded while contemplating elephants up close this week.

Six of us traveled to the forested mountains west of Taunggoo, where we arranged to ride and watch working pachyderms. Their job that day was pulling felled tree trunks from where they had been cut to where they could be turned into planks. Our job, not that we had given it any thought, was to stay out of their way.

Three “carrying elephants” knelt as we approached them. That way, pairs of wooden seats that had been laid across their broad tops became low enough for us to climb into. The seats faced sideways. After two of us sat back to back on each elephant, the mahouts leapt up on the elephants’ necks and signaled that it was OK for the animals to stand up.

Three more “pulling elephants,” each with a mahout but no other passengers, then led us along a quiet ridge. We could hear the wooden jangle of the elephant bells over the sound of a light wind. Our parade consisted of six elephants, six mahouts, and six tourists. We had left behind the city, the highway, even the village. All was right with the world.

Then we plunged into the jungle down a steep hillside trail. We realized we would simply have to hold on tight. There were no seatbelts. After about 20 minutes of jouncing we reached a clearing. A few loggers stood waiting for us, holding the ends of three chains they had wrapped around three tree trunks. The logs, lying on the ground, were about half as long as telephone poles. I guessed each one weighed about 500 pounds.

It emerged that the elephants knew their business. Generally, they were willing to take orders from their mahouts, but sometimes they judged that the easiest way would be blazing their own trail instead of following the one we had ridden in on. From our three carrying elephants we watched with both awe and dread when the three others headed off cross-country. The huge loads behind them scoured the tilted landscape.

The logger boss mostly paid attention to the youngest-looking mahout. The kid tried not to look nervous but he gave himself away by the rough way he used his elephant hook. Or perhaps he and his elephant were still getting acquainted. All we knew for sure was that the mahouts on the other two pulling elephants managed to communicate with their voices rather than by prodding.

Then the elephant under the kid mahout misread the terrain. Its log began to roll downhill. The kid shouted and thrashed wildly as the elephant dropped to its knees, grunting and crawling forward. Our elephants steered clear as we stared with train-wreck fascination. The log lurched. Five seconds felt like fifty. Finally, the pulling elephant snorted and straightened, the cargo under control.

The boss told us later that two or three times in 20 years, he had seen a log drag an elephant. Once, a leg broke.

Half an hour later, back on the ridge, we all breathed normally again. “It never occurred to me when we set out that we would be eight feet away from a working elephant,” said one of my friends, who is roughly the same age as I am. His teenaged son’s comment was “Dope AF,” which I gather is high praise and maybe best left abbreviated.