I have seen it . Kala Nag took me , and I saw . Also Kala Nag is very leg-weary ! '' Little Toomai lay back and slept all through the long afternoon and into the twilight , and while he slept Petersen Sahib and Machua Appa followed the track of the two elephants for fifteen miles across the hills . Petersen Sahib had spent eighteen years in catching elephants , and he had only once before found such a dance-place . Machua Appa had no need to look twice at the clearing to see what had been done there , or to scratch with his toe in the packed , rammed earth . `` The child speaks truth , '' said he . `` All this was done last night , and I have counted seventy tracks crossing the river . See , Sahib , where Pudmini 's leg-iron cut the bark of that tree ! Yes ; she was there too . '' They looked at one another and up and down , and they wondered . For the ways of elephants are beyond the wit of any man , black or white , to fathom . `` Forty years and five , '' said Machua Appa , `` have I followed my lord , the elephant , but never have I heard that any child of man had seen what this child has seen . By all the Gods of the Hills , it is -- what can we say ? '' and he shook his head . When they got back to camp it was time for the evening meal . Petersen Sahib ate alone in his tent , but he gave orders that the camp should have two sheep and some fowls , as well as a double ration of flour and rice and salt , for he knew that there would be a feast . Big Toomai had come up hotfoot from the camp in the plains to search for his son and his elephant , and now that he had found them he looked at them as though he were afraid of them both . And there was a feast by the blazing campfires in front of the lines of picketed elephants , and Little Toomai was the hero of it all . And the big brown elephant catchers , the trackers and drivers and ropers , and the men who know all the secrets of breaking the wildest elephants , passed him from one to the other , and they marked his forehead with blood from the breast of a newly killed jungle-cock , to show that he was a forester , initiated and free of all the jungles .
And at last , when the flames died down , and the red light of the logs made the XXXXX look as though they had been dipped in blood too , Machua Appa , the head of all the drivers of all the Keddahs -- Machua Appa , Petersen Sahib 's other self , who had never seen a made road in forty years : Machua Appa , who was so great that he had no other name than Machua Appa , -- leaped to his feet , with Little Toomai held high in the air above his head , and shouted : `` Listen , my brothers .
clearing elephant elephants feast lord orders plains river son tent