y across the
hills. The air was full of all the night noises that, taken together,
make one big silence--the click of one bamboo stem against the other,
the rustle of something alive in the undergrowth, the scratch and squawk
of a half-waked bird (birds are awake in the night much more often than
we imagine), and the fall of water ever so far away. Little Toomai slept
for some time, and when he waked it was brilliant moonlight, and Kala
Nag was still standing up with his ears cocked. Little Toomai turned,
rustling in the fodder, and watched the curve of his big back against
half the stars in heaven, and while he watched he heard, so far away
that it sounded no more than a pinhole of noise pricked through the
stillness, the "hoot-toot" of a wild elephant.

All the elephants in the lines jumped up as if they had been shot, and
their grunts at last waked the sleeping mahouts, and they came out and
drove in the picket pegs with big mallets, and tightened this rope and
knotted that till all was quiet. One new elephant had nearly grubbed up
his picket, and Big Toomai took off Kala Nag's leg chain and shackled
that elephant fore-foot to hind-foot, but slipped a loop of grass string
round Kala Nag's leg, and told him to remember that he was tied fast. He
knew that he and his father and his grandfather had done the very same
thing hundreds of times before. Kala Nag did not answer to the order
by gurgling, as he usually did. He stood still, looking out across the
moonlight, his head a little raised and his ears spread like fans, up to
the great folds of the Garo hills.

"Tend to him if he grows restless in the night," said Big Toomai to
Little Toomai, and he went into the hut and slept. Little Toomai was
just going to sleep, too, when he heard the coir string snap with a
little "tang," and Kala Nag rolled out of his pickets as slowly and as
silently as a cloud rolls out of the mouth of a valley. Little Toomai
pattered after him, barefooted, down the road in the moonlight, calling
under his breath, "Kala Nag! Kala Nag! Take me with you, O Kala Nag!"
The elephant turned, without a sound, took three strides back to the
boy in the moonlight, put down his trunk, swung him up to his neck,
and almost before Little Toomai had settled his knees, slipped into the
forest.

There was one blast of furious trumpeting from the lines, and then the
silence shut down on everything, and Kala Nag began to move. Sometimes
a tuft of high grass wash