Author
Bio
The author is a retired
practising lawyer now resident in Singapore. Ung
Yong is his pseudonym.
He was born in 1939 in a
town near the Thai border on the east coast of the Malay Peninsula.
His hobbies include
story-writing, gardening, drawing and sculpting. All the illustrations in this
book are his own.
WHEN THE HERD OF ELEPHANTS WAS FEEDING
on the grassland at the verge of a forest, Nuer and his two cousins were running
about, chasing one another, amidst the adults.
He was two and a half years’ old. He’d
begun eating vegetation but wasn’t completely weaned. After having tried a
mouthful of the grass, he preferred playing with the cousins, both a year
younger and still on their mother’s milk only.
“Stop running and be quiet for a moment,”
Juu, one of the aunties, told the kids and asked Nuer’s mother, “Merba, do you
hear someone coming? I think it’s him!”
“You’re right,” she answered. “I can tell
he’s bouncy and cheerful.”
“Who’s ‘him’ coming?” Nuer asked.
“Your father,” his mother said. “He’s
stomping the ground to let us know. I guess he’s about
a mile away.”
“But I can hear nothing.”
“Of course, you can’t hear footsteps so
far away with your ears,” Aunty Juu said. “When you grow older you can feel the
ground. You’ll sense all sorts of vibrations passing beneath the soles of your
feet. You’ll slowly learn how to recognise them.”
“Wow, you can recognise everybody’s
footsteps? Can I stamp my feet now to let my daddy know I’m here?”
They laughed and his mother said, “You
have to grow much bigger and heavier first before the pounding with your feet
can make sounds that travel under the ground.”
“I suppose, like everything else, it has
to wait till I’m big and tall,” Nuer muttered, but in the split of a second he
cheered up, asking, “Isn’t Daddy going to take us to the waterfall?”
“See, children never forget promises,” the
aunty nodded her head. “I remember Kenki did promise so on his last visit. Let’s
hold him to it. I haven’t been to that highland waterfall since we migrated here
some fifteen years ago.”
“Just that it has become dangerous to go
back south. Humans keep encroaching on the forests,” Merba explained. She was in
her mid-thirties and was the herd’s leader. It was her prerogative to decide
where they should roam about.
The elephants are social animals like
human beings but they have a different social system. They live in small groups.
Each group, or herd, is matriarchal. That is to say, it consists of and is
self-governed by cows (as female elephants are called) with their eldest as its
chief. The herd takes care of and raises their calves (as baby elephants are
called). Growing up, bulls (as male elephants are called), stay with the herd
until the age of six to seven when they leave the herd to be on their own. By
then they have attained maturity and grown to the adults’ size (up to 12 feet
high at the shoulder and 21 feet long from the tip of the trunk to the end of
the tail).
All adult bulls, like Nuer’s father, live
a solitary life. Each of them is like a carefree adventurer who wanders from
place to place over a large territory. Because they are the largest and most
powerful animals in the forest, even ferocious predators such as tigers,
leopards and bears would keep away from them. But, from time to time, they visit
their families.
IT WAS MID-MORNING on a sunny day.
The air was still and cool. The heavy rain last night had washed all green grass
and leaves clean and fresh. The ground had dried up but was still soft under the
surface. It was the sort of hour when many animals are out foraging and feeding,
and birds come down for worms and other invertebrates on the ground.
Nuer rushed about, telling everyone that
his father was coming. Some young adults in the herd started guessing the
direction of his approach. It was no easy feat to pinpoint his position from the
ground vibrations of his faraway thumping. This is similar to the situation when
you hear an airplane in flight high and far away. The sound often belies its
source. You have to see it or its vapour trail to know where it is. Therefore
the young elephants’ game is to look for visible signs.
“There!” one of them shouted with his
trunk pointing to where a flock of birds suddenly flew up at a distant forest
ridge.
“No, that’s too far,” they discounted it.
There were noises of monkeys but too close
to matter. The consensus was that Nuer’s father should be about half a mile away
by now. At times he seemed to be coming in various directions. When they finally
heard the scurrying of some animals deep in the forest behind them, they all
took it as conclusive and openly declared their prediction. So the entire herd
was expecting Kenki, the bull, to emerge from between the tall trees on the
higher ground adjoining the grassland. But, to their surprise, the ground
vibrations of his footsteps suddenly stopped.
“What has happened to him?” Juu asked
worryingly.
“It’s fine,” Merba said calmly but quite
loudly so that everyone could hear her. She knew Kenki was tricking them because
he was good at sneaking up on her and that he could move fast and quietly
despite his body weight.
After quite a long while of anxiety,
suddenly, the bull strode through the shrub terrain from the direction
least expected by the herd. He split and overran the bushes in his way, humming
a marching tune in tempo with the resumed drumming on the earth with his giant
limbs.
“Where is his trunk?” Merba wondered
because Kenki used to raise it high to the sky as he trumpeted sounds of
jubilation on his arrival.
This time his trunk was lowered and
curving inwards around something he was carrying. The herd couldn’t make out
what it was (as all elephants have poor eyesight).
“Tada! Here it is,” he declared after
laying it on the ground for them to see.
It was a bundle of huge bananas, each of
the size none of them had ever seen before.
“These bananas don’t grow in the wild,” he
told them proudly. “I had to grab them and run from a farm. The human calls them
‘elephant tusks’. So, it’s educational for us to know how our tusks taste!”
The funny overture was typical of his
signing in. Once he was on the scene, he was the show host of the herd’s forum
and the centre of everything.
There were enough giant bananas for each
one in the herd to try a couple or more. Everybody went for the novelty and was
full of praise for its unique aroma and taste, eaten unpeeled with its skin,
thick and green. Only Nuer and his two younger cousins showed no interest in
sampling the quaint fruit.
“This one is for you,’ his father brought
it to him. “I understand your mom is still breastfeeding you. Try it. After
this, you may not like your mother’s milk anymore.”
“No,” Nuer rejected. “I won’t eat an
elephant tusk!”
His reply caused the herd to burst out
laughing, especially as they saw the awkwardness of the tongue-tied Kenki.
His father sought to explain, “My son,
it’s not really a tusk. The stupid humans call it so. They should’ve called it a
‘tush’ which is smaller than a tusk…” The more he tried to explain the funnier
it became, which kept them laughing.
“Nuer,” Aunty Juu whispered in his ear,
“try the banana and ask him about his waterfall promise.”
Nuer obeyed. He ate the banana, which he
found agreeable to his taste buds.
“Great, good boy,” his father exclaimed in
relief, as if he had regained his paternal dignity in the eyes of the herd.
“Daddy,” Nuer said pleasingly.
“Yes, my son.”
“Remember you promised to take me to the
waterfall?”
“What waterfall?”
“Kenki, the last time you were here, you
told him and all of us that you would take us to the Punchat Waterfall,” Juu
joined in promptly.
The other adults also remembered it, but
they kept quiet to await the response. Kenki looked around coolly to gauge the
audience. They had the same eager look of expectation. He turned to Merba who
merely smiled to him, and he knew she meant, “You’re hooked!”
“Of course, we’re going to the waterfall!”
he proclaimed.
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