his great feet to brake himself, and drew to a sliding halt six feet beyond.
He did not know why. He was perfectly aware that this man was an enemy, jealous of his most-loved liberty. He knew perfectly it was the man’s intention to put him back into his bonds. He did not feel fear, either—because an elephant’s anger is too tremendous an emotion to leave room for any other impulse such as fear. It seemed to him that memories came thronging from long ago, so real and insistent that he could not think of charging.
He remembered his days in the elephant lines. These brown creatures had been his masters then. They had cut his grass for him in the jungle, and brought him bundles of sugar-cane. The hill people say that the elephant memory is the greatest single marvel in the jungle, and it was that memory that saved Khusru then. It wasn’t deliberate gratitude for the grass-cutting of long ago. It wasn’t any particular emotion that he could reach out his trunk and touch. It was simply an impulse—another one of the thousand mysteries that envelop, like a cloud, the mental processes of these largest of forest creatures.
These were the days when he lived apart from the herd. He did it from choice. He liked the silence, the solitary mud-baths, the constant watchfulness against danger.
One day a rhino charged him—without warning or reason. This is quite a common thing for a rhino to do. They have the worst tempers in the jungle, and they would just as soon charge a mountain if they didn’t like the look of it. Muztagh had awakened the great creature from his sleep, and he came bearing down like a tank over “no man’s land.”
Muztagh met him squarely, with the full shock of his tusks, and the battle ended promptly. Muztagh’s tusk, driven by five tons of might behind it, would have pierced a ship’s side, and the rhino limped away to let his hurt grow well and meditate revenge. Thereafter, for a full year, he looked carefully out of his bleary, drunken eyes and chose a smaller objective before he charged.
