ELEPHANT DRIVING IN INDIA.

Cromwell Argus, Volume XLI, Issue 2212, 12 September 1910, Page 7

ELEPHANT DRIVING IN INDIA.

A great elephant drive was arranged by the Maharajah of Mysore, in honour of the visit of the Viceroy of India to native State daring his ‘'‘cold-weather tour.” These hunts only take place at intervals of about three years, and are generally planned in honour of some distinguished personage. The hunt is graphically described by the special correspondent of the “Times of India.” The beat was carried out with marvellous skill. The elephants had been before the beaters for eight days, and were brought up gently by a line of something like a thousand men over several miles of country. They were within a mile of the river ford when the Maharajah arrived with his guests to see the crossing. The din of the beaters steadily came near. Enormous trumpets and shrill horns joined their hideous noises ; drums and bamboo clappers beat incessantly. Occasionally, blank cartridges banged off,, and now and then the voices of the thousand men joined in with a tremendous yell. Above it all the splitting trumpet note of a driven beast, momentarily angered, rent the air. As dusk advanced, rockets crackers, and coloured fires added their alarums to the barbarous ensemble. Every eye was strained to catch the first glimpse of the approaching herd, and what was really only a few minutes of waiting seemed an age. At last a dark clump of elephants emerged from the undergrowth, lumbered into the stream with a tremendous splash, and still crowding in a bunch, plodded slowly across. A number of shikar (hunting) elephants, their mahouts (drivers) carrying lights and burning flares, were posted up and down the_ river, to prevent the victims breaking away, but their services were hardly needed. The herd paused in midstream for a copious draught, and then continued their direct course across the ford. Many a time before they must have crossed here, and their lumbering, careless movements showed that even now no sense of being driven was in their minds. This is an essential feature of a keddah drive. The herd moves forward because the vile noises of human kind disgust them. They flee away from them in search of peace. Once let the herd know r they are actually being hunted, and they turn on their hunters without more ado, and the most diabolical combination of shouting and fireworks will not prevent their breaking hack through the beaters. Issuing from the ford at their familiar landing-place, the elephants at once entered the wide mouth of a funnel-shaped stockade strongly built with the stems of young trees, with brushwood interlaced to conceal the stratagem from the unwary animals. A minute later they entered a small palisaded enclosure at the end of the funnel, and a heavy gate immediately fell down and closed the entrance. The elephants were now in a circular stockade of only about 40ft. in diameter. There were fourteen of them and as the spectators mounted the platform erected on the outside of the palisade, a scene of wild interest met the eye. The poor, trapped beasts surged round the enclosure in a pushing, struggling, solid raoh. Fires and torches sent a terrifying glare through the apertures of the barricade, and the captives huddled together, and strove to hide their frightened eyes from the light, with j pitiful signs of fear and distress, j There was one large but not fullyi grown tusker and one huge female ; I the remaining eleven were mostly a size or two smaller, and three were almost babies, one of them standing no higher than a donkey, and ap- ! pearing to have but little chance of surviving the grinding crush. Most pathetic were the struggles of the little ones to keep under the protection of their mothers, and to the onlookers it was a constant source of wonder to see them emerge from the centre of the heaviest crush .unhurt. It is said that even the smallest baby among the elephants never gets crushed to death in the keddah. The big beasts instinctively protect them, and the littlcst fellows find safety by sheltering under their mothers’ huge bodies. The signs of affection between the mothers and their young arc a touching sight. It is related in this connection that at a large keddah, where a drive was made a few days before, a cow elephant found herself inside the stockade without her offspring. With a scream she rushed out of the gateway again and, finding the little one, jostled it back to the enclosure in front of her, thinking, no doubt, if an elephant can think, that she had conveyed it to a place of safety. When the big animals were finally tied up, the young are allowed to run loose, and their mothers then treat them with cruel violence, striving thus to drive them away into the jungles, so that they may escape their own fate.