No More Learning

Then he stood outside
the house, chuckling to himself and shaking all over with the fun of it,
as an elephant will.

"We'll thrash him," said the planter. "He shall have the finest
thrashing ever elephant received. Give Kala Nag and Nazim twelve foot of
chain apiece, and tell them to lay on twenty. "

Kala Nag--which means Black Snake--and Nazim were two of the biggest
elephants in the lines, and one of their duties was to administer the
graver punishment, since no man can beat an elephant properly.

They took the whipping-chains and rattled them in their trunks as they
sidled up to Moti Guj, meaning to hustle him between them. Moti Guj had
never, in all his life of thirty-nine years, been whipped, and he did
not intend to begin a new experience. So he waited, waving his head from
right to left, and measuring the precise spot in Kala Nag's fat side
where a blunt tusk could sink deepest. Kala Nag had no tusks; the chain
was the badge of his authority; but for all that, he swung wide of Moti
Guj at the last minute, and tried to appear as if he had brought the
chain out for amusement. Nazim turned round and went home early. He did
not feel fighting fit that morning, and so Moti Guj was left standing
alone with his ears cocked.

That decided the planter to argue no more, and Moti Guj rolled back to
his amateur inspection of the clearing. An elephant who will not work
and is not tied up is about as manageable as an eighty-one-ton gun loose
in a heavy seaway. He slapped old friends on the back and asked them if
the stumps were coming away easily; he talked nonsense concerning
labor and the inalienable rights of elephants to a long 'nooning'; and,
wandering to and fro, he thoroughly demoralized the garden till sundown,
when he returned to his picket for food.

"If you won't work, you sha'n't eat," said Chihun, angrily.
"You're a
wild elephant, and no educated animal at all. Go back to your jungle. "

Chihun's little brown baby was rolling on the floor of the hut, and
stretching out its fat arms to the huge shadow in the doorway. Moti Guj
knew well that it was the dearest thing on earth to Chihun. He swung out
his trunk with a fascinating crook at the end, and the brown baby threw
itself, shouting, upon it. Moti Guj made fast and pulled up till the
brown baby was crowing in the air twelve feet above his father's head.

"Great Lord! " said Chihun. "Flour cakes of the best, twelve in number,
two feet across and soaked in rum, shall be yours on the instant, and
two hundred pounds weight of fresh-cut young sugar-cane therewith. Deign
only to put down safely that insignificant brat who is my heart and my
life to me! "

Moti Guj tucked the brown baby comfortably between his forefeet, that
could have knocked into toothpicks all Chihun's hut, and waited for his
food. He ate it, and the brown baby crawled away. Moti Guj dozed and
thought of Deesa. One of many mysteries connected with the elephant is
that his huge body needs less sleep than anything else that lives. Four
or five hours in the night suffice--two just before midnight, lying down
on one side; two just after one o'clock, lying down on the other. The
rest of the silent hours are filled with eating and fidgeting, and long
grumbling soliloquies.