Ralph Helfer (20 page)

The day broke bright and sunny. Everybody cheered and surged ahead with renewed strength. The end of the pass was in sight.

It sounded like the droning of bees. They came out of the east. Several biplanes came up out of the valley, flying low. Each had a machine gun mounted on the wing.

“Ready the guns! Move! Move!”

The captain was his old self again. His men moved like well-oiled robots. It was too late to take the machine guns off the elephants’ backs, but guns were cocked and waiting until the planes were in range.

“Wait! Wait! Don’t shoot!” pleaded Bram. “We’re like sitting ducks out here. There is no cover! No place to go. Surrender!”

“You’re such a stupid man. We are fighters. We are here to fight to win. This is what it’s all about. To win.”

By the altitude of the planes, they were coming in to see the situation, not to fight.

“Shoot! Shoot!”

The machine guns opened up rapid fire. The elephants that had been sleeping woke with a start. Fire bursts filled the air. One plane caught fire and was going down. The others had veered off and were coming back…this time to check out things.

“Oh my God! The elephants! Sian, get on Mo!” yelled Bram. The trail had opened up at that point. Modoc was in the lead. Bram jumped to her. “Leg up, girl!” She raised her foot. Bram hopped to her shoulder. The man operating the machine gun never saw what hit him. Bram’s choon had found its mark. Sian hung on to Bram as he yelled, “Move up! Mo, move up!”

Mo moved with a vengeance. Her legs stretched out, trunk held high. She was running for her life!

The machine guns opened fire, as did the planes. Men fell from their positions. A few elephants were going down. The rest followed Modoc in a panic of trumpeting and screaming. They ran full out. Machine guns fell off their backs, men hung from the straps. Equipment was strewn everywhere.

The planes came back again, strafing everything that moved! The thud of bullets hitting flesh was heard…Modoc!

Two bullets had found their mark. They had gone straight into and through Mo’s head. Blood poured from their small but lethal openings. Her body crumpled; she went down on her front knees, twisting her head back and forth in agony, roaring her fury, her trunk uncontrolled, wallowing in the dirt. Bram started to dismount but Mo regained her feet and, wobbling sideways, trumpeting, blood gushing down her trunk, she careened into the protection of the trees and collapsed. Bram and Sian were thrown into the underbrush. Mo’s scream was that of a wild entity caught between two worlds. A maddened being, crying from the pain itself, the horror of seeing the yin and the yang in all its terror. Bram raced to her side baby-talking, caressing: “Mosie, Mosie girl, it’s okay. Easy now, lie down. That’s a girl.” He ran his hands over the two bullet wounds. They were up high on the forehead. One of them had ripped through the lower part of her ear. She lay gasping, blood still pouring from the wounds. Her breath held for too long, a scary period of time, then released in an explosion of air. Bram was covered in blood. His shirt, pants, the whole front of him. He didn’t give it notice until he realized that only his hands had touched Mo. He checked himself for wounds. None were of any significance. “Sian, honey, give me a hand!” yelled Bram, his voice shaking. “We have to stop the blood. Sian? SIAN…!”

He raced to her side. She was lying in a pool of blood, her own! Bram picked her up gently. He put her hand over his shoulder. It slid off.

“Honey, come on now, baby.” He checked her mouth, eyes, pushing, squeezing. “Sian, honey, look, we made it! We made it! We…Honey?…Honey? Talk to me, baby. Say something, please…please! Say something!” His tears burst in a gush, drenching his face. “Papa, help me! God, please…someone!” He was shaking uncontrollably. “Oh my God.” Bram hugged her to him. She hung limply in his arms, blood oozing from a number of bullet holes across her body. Her beautiful eyes were staring at the infinity, her hair strewn out across Bram’s shoulder.

“Sian, my Sian…my love…my baby.” Bram cried his anguish. Sian lay dead in Bram’s arms. Soft, warm. The life spirit was still leaving. Hesitantly, not quite sure. But the cold death spirit won out. The warmth left: the life that was in her hair, the sparkle in her eyes, the softness in her skin turned bland. The Death Spirit had taken her personally, her smile, her laughter, her future. It had taken her from Bram.

By this time, most of the elephants had found cover in a grove of trees. The planes circled overhead, coming in low, spraying the area with gunfire. Elephants were still coming in, some dragging a leg, others hopping. Bodies of men, both mahouts and soldiers, hung from their backs, some dead, some injured.

Captain Rajah Mohinder’s foot hung from the bottom of his howdah, bullets having ripped through him and into the elephant behind him. His body had been dragged and kicked by the elephants’ feet into an unrecognizable mass of blood and body parts.

The war was over. The suffering and pain of those around him was seen, heard, and felt. Bram covered Sian with a silk cloth the people from the slanted village had given him. For the next two hours he sat with Mo. She had righted herself into a sphinx position. Her head rested on the ground. The blood had stopped, the heavy breathing had subsided. Bram saw that the bullets had left her body on the side of her skull in the large bulbous area of her cranium. He washed the wounds with cool water from a nearby stream, hoping that they would not become infected. At first he had been amazed that Mo still lived until he remembered that the brain of an elephant is down low—in fact, behind the eyes. Many a hunter has been killed shooting into the large head of a charging elephant, not knowing that the bullets were only going into a mass of spongy tissue. There are no vital organs or large blood vessels there. Bram remembered his father telling him that if the head of an elephant was made of solid bone, the elephant couldn’t carry it. It would weigh too much. The spongy tissue made it lightweight.

By evening Modoc was standing. She had lost a lot of blood
and seemed to have a huge headache, but she walked. Slowly, unsteadily, but she walked.

The dead were buried. Elephants that were beyond help were put to rest. The guns and war equipment were left. The soldiers who were able, along with the remaining mahouts, followed Bram up the ravine heading for a town that he hoped was there.

And so it was, not far. Just over the ridge. He found a great old tree and it was there that he buried Sian, in the early morning, so she could see her way into the hereafter. He and Mo stayed with her until the sun went down.

He sat on the ground and wept openly. A hand clutched his shoulder. He looked but his tears blurred his vision. Slowly the figure came into focus.

“Mr. North!”

B
RAM’S MIND AWOKE
long before his body, to a slow-turning kaleidoscope of smells and noises. The smells became the scent of his surroundings, bringing a musty odor filled with old rags, dried blood, elephant stool—dead things. The noises became the sound of people yelling, commotion, screams of pain, the squeal, the trumpet of an elephant.

Modoc!

He sat up with a start, only to be racked with pain that sent him collapsing back on the bed. He was lying on what appeared to be an old ragged army cot. It was one of many, set out under a large palm-frond roof high above his head. There were no sides to the structure and he could see people bustling in and out in all directions, some carrying buckets of water, others with bandages and medical supplies.

Bodies lay everywhere. From one end to the other a maze of
arms and legs jutted out from under the covers, some bloody, some writhing in agony, others just stiff. Rigor mortis had already set in. They were mostly the members of the Peoples Liberation Army, but the mahouts had suffered as well.

He spotted some of his friends. Neither he nor they had the strength to do more than flash a faint smile of recognition. Women with Red Cross armbands scurried between the cots, helping the wounded. The day was hot, mucky, sticky. Flies availed themselves of the wounds on the bodies. Bram raised up on his elbow to see outside, around the edge of the canopy.

Old dilapidated trucks rumbled by, their tires kicking up a storm of dust that settled on everything, including the wounds of the injured. Two-wheeled carts, loaded with the wares of the day, were pushed or pulled by men and women alike. They were filled with melons, bananas, slabs of precut wood, rolls of burlap, tin pans banging together, jostled by the rutted dirt road. Unattended chickens, pigs, goats, an occasional Brahma scurried in all directions.

“How are you feeling?”

Bram turned to see Mr. North standing at his bedside. It was not difficult to notice the unconcerned way he asked. But then what could Bram expect after all that had occurred?

“Weak. Just weak and sore,” he answered. Bram tried to adjust himself but the pain shot up his body, forcing him to remain still. Mr. North raised Bram’s head and slipped a pillow in place. For a moment Bram thought he was going to suffocate him with it! Mr. North wore an impeccably clean pinstriped suit similar to the one he had worn the day he had bought the circus. He looked completely out of place compared to the others working in the area. He pulled up a chair next to Bram.

“You’ve slept a straight twenty-four hours. Those bullets just grazed you but they tore up your flesh quite a bit.”

Bram was unaware of any bullet wounds, but the soreness in his body told him he had sustained some injury. He tried to remember yesterday. The horrors were not hard to find. They were waiting like the Grim Reaper, there to bring back the pain, that deadly suf
fering of knowing that what once was, is gone, and can never be again.

“Let her go, son, and only then will peace come to you,” his father had said when Modoc was taken. But Bram questioned it then as he questioned it now. He felt inadequate; that form of thinking was for older, more intelligent people. He would have to grow into it. He remembered Mr. North standing over him at Sian’s burial place and then…waking up here. Mr. North saw the questioning look on Bram’s face.

“You never said a word after we first met. You got up, grabbed hold of Modoc’s tail, murmured to her to ‘move up’ or something like that, and she brought you here. The whole line of elephants followed. What an incredible sight that was! All those elephants, some near death, limping, bleeding, they all followed her!” Mr. North had found a rag and was cleaning his shoes. “Both you and Modoc were weak and…well, you almost fell a number of times, tripping and whatnot. Actually, you did one time. Fall, that is. I tried to help but Modoc wouldn’t let me. She picked you up, waited for a few moments until you could stand, then moved on slowly. She was staggering all over the place, poor beast, but she got you both back.”

“Is she…okay?” he asked hesitantly.

“Oh yes, doing fine,” said Mr. North. Then continuing his thought: “Those bullet holes…why I’ve never seen or heard of such a thing. I never knew…”

Mr. North talked on for a brief period before realizing that once Bram heard that Mo was all right he had dropped off into a deep sleep. Maybe it was from sheer exhaustion or from a need to escape the pain of thinking…knowing that Sian, his beloved, was dead. That she would never lie in his arms again. That she was alone back there like his father up on Grenchin Hill. Bram, too, was now alone. What would he do without her?

He fell into a deep sleep. Sleep, like time, can be the healer of all things. Bram found himself running down alleyways and dirt roads looking for Mo. He was sweating and out of breath when he ran full tilt into a man wearing a dark shroud.

“Please, sir, I am looking for an elephant, she is big and—and—”

“The one called Modoc?” the face inside the hood asked.

“Yes, that’s her! Where is she?”

He pointed a bony finger. “Some men came and hauled her away many days ago.”

“What? What?”

Bram awoke in a sweat. As he lay in his cot he had visions of Mr. North lying to him about Mo, when in fact he had already taken her.

Two days had passed since Bram had been brought to the village. His strength was returning and he was anxious to see Mo. He would see her tomorrow. His thoughts again turned to Sian. Early in their relationship he had had to leave for a few days to haul teak deep into the forest.

“Let’s try to meet each other in our dreams!” he had suggested.

She laughed her lighthearted giggle. “That is impossible!”

He told her that he had heard of people doing it, that it took a lot of practice but in the end…it worked if you believed!

“That way we will never be alone.”

“Then we will try,” she said.

“But first we need a meeting place,” said Bram.

They chose a beautiful small rise high in the forest as the place to meet in their dreams. They had met there many times in their waking hours. A large fig tree was growing old there and cast its branches in a huge arch around its base. They always called it their tree.

“This is where we will meet in our dreams! Under our tree!” And so they did. After many months of practice one could dream of their place and most often the other would be there! There the warm breezes blew, the flowers were sweet to smell, the simple things of life were best. There he could hold her hand, comb her hair, touch her face, kiss her lips at the time of a smile…He would
try to meet her again, in her after-death, to share their ethereal love as they once did in their dreams.

The morning sun had not yet cleared the mountain when Bram awoke from a restless sleep. A nurse, seeing his struggle to dress, helped him in his endeavors.

“You shouldn’t be leaving your bed just yet, Mr. Bram,” she cautioned, tracing her fingers across the deep purple slash of bruises that swept down his chest.

“I have to meet a lady,” he said. He thanked her for her concern, steadied himself, and headed out of the makeshift hospital. On his way, he stopped by a few beds, shaking hands and chatting with his mahout friends. They talked about the battle, about those who had died, both elephants and men. They were all concerned about being able to return to their homes and loved ones.

“I will speak to Mr. North. I am sure he will help. I have to see Mo now, but when the time is right…”

Bram had no idea how he would do this but looking into their faces he had to give them some hope. A wave goodbye, and he was out in the morning sun, heading in the direction he had been told Modoc and the other sick elephants were kept. He asked along the way. All pointed toward the end of town. As he approached the road’s end, a small valley surrounded by a series of modest hills began to open up. The smell of elephant permeated the air. But there was another. Maybe only for Bram—the smell of the war. He walked to a rise at the end of the road and looked into the valley below.

The door to Bram’s mind shut at what his eyes saw. It was best. Sometimes the mind does that. It hides things from its own eye. Not wanting to remember, to believe, to be hurt. To change the levels of compassion and understanding to pain and suffering. His breath was gone, his throat dry.

Scattered in the valley lay what appeared to be giant gray stones, rocks in transition; a passage of time between life and the cadaver. Elephants! Some already hard from rigor mortis, others
just barely breathing, waiting their turn to become stone. Still others wandered aimlessly, some hopping, others dragging their broken limbs, bumping into other elephants, tripping over the dead and dying. One stood on his trunk rocking back and forth, trying to figure out why he couldn’t move ahead. Another lay on his side trumpeting, feet thrashing out, running in sheer panic, his brain caught in the mindless mid-world of the war. He believed he was still on the field of battle, racing away in a world gone mad. Pools of blood broke into tiny tributaries and arched their way around the bodies. The mahouts who were able scrambled around doing whatever they could to help. Bram wept, drenching his throat with inner tears for their suffering. In a barely audible sound, a primal voice from the mind in anguish was heard: “
Dear God
.”

Bram looked over the field of death and pain. The carnage was awesome. Blood, flies, bees were everywhere. The bullets had done their damage. It was no different from the hospital he had just left. He walked among them, touching, speaking his concern to both the men and the elephants. He knelt down occasionally to caress the heads of those who couldn’t rise to say a few words of encouragement to the mahouts.

The mahouts, along with others from the village, were treating the elephants as best they could. Bram saw that the doctor who had been attending him and the others was now helping to save the elephants. Some were in great pain as he dug and poked trying to extract the bullets. The mahouts did everything in their power to stop the bleeding. They packed large wads of cotton and gauze into the wounds. A pile of bloody bullets lay on the ground.

At the far side of the area were five or six elephants in recovery. One was Mo. She lay on her side breathing heavily. A mahout was wrapping gauze around a thin stick, dipping it into an antiseptic, then running it into the tunnel the bullets had made in her head. The pain was excruciating. But she lay there seeming to know, to understand. Some of the holes had gone completely through her head. Other bullets, lodged deep inside the spongelike cartilage, had to be dug out.

A stream of cool mountain water ran directly through the middle of the grounds. At one place the stream formed a large pool. Many of the elephants lay in the cool water, letting it soothe and clean their wounds.

Modoc tried to rise when she saw Bram but he soothed her into staying, rubbing her trunk and hugging her. He took over for the mahout, thanking him for his help. For the remainder of the day Bram treated Mo, bringing her fresh water, carrying fresh-cut grass and dried mountain clover from the slopes. He had to be careful with the mix so as not to cause stomach problems. He spoke to her of all that had happened. Of the life and death of those they both knew and of his visit with Mr. North.

In the days that followed the bleeding subsided but the swelling and infection remained. It was evening before Mr. North arrived. Bram had been told by a local that he would be coming up. He knew he would. It was just a matter of time.

“And how is my girl doing?”

“Just fine. Still weak. But she’s eating better and the swelling seems to have gone down.”

A series of fires had been lit sporadically throughout the valley to keep the elephants warm as well as to give light. Bram had carried all the branches he could find and lit four small fires around Modoc. Soon they were ablaze and the warmth between them was like a huge blanket.

Mr. North took a seat in front of one of the fires on a large log that would eventually be sacrificed. He was faceless with the blazing fire at his back.

“Bram, it’s time we had a talk.”

Bram figured this was it. He knew the time had come. Mr. North lit a cigarette from one of the flaming branches.

“I don’t think in all my life I have ever disliked anyone as much as I dislike you,” he said. “No, I don’t mean dislike, hate is a better word!”

Two pointed spirals of fire flared behind Mr. North’s head. He blew smoke from his cigarette that mingled with rising smoke from
the warming fires around him. He surely looked like his Maker.

“Wh…?” Bram stuttered, not expecting this from him. He was unable to say anything, not that Mr. North allowed him to.

“You have cost me a fortune!” he continued, ignoring Bram’s words. “You have caused me and my people to chase all over the world for the both of you! You have lied, and cheated, and stolen from me!” His voice became louder. “Why, you damn near got my elephant killed!”

Mr. North stood and came close to Bram, almost too close. Bram could feel his muscles, sore as they were, begin to tighten. Mr. North was so close now, Bram could smell his breath. The veins on the man’s neck protruded with his growing anger.

“Modoc is mine—not yours!” He was yelling now. “I own her! I paid good money and bought her!” He calmed for a moment. “And now comes the hard part. What to do? I want to throw your ass in jail for more years than you could afford. But I understand Modoc won’t listen to anyone but you. If Jake was alive, he would beat some sense into her.”

North’s voice softened a bit. “I realize all that you have done. Many things were perhaps things of…bravery.” Then the pitch changed again. “But most of it is pure bullshit! Who do you think you’re kidding? Why, I have never heard so much crap in all my life! That stuff in the ocean, being attacked by thieves, and all the rest. Maybe the others believe it…not me!”

“But Mr. North, it did happen! Ask anyone who was there! They’ll tell you—it’s true!” Bram stated, standing. “She
did
save lives…”