ant, as you
see, can do the work of a truck.

We had reached a stage in the history of the world when motor
engines did a large part of the work of the jungle. The elephants
would bring the lumber from the forest and deposit it near these
engines where it would be cut into proper lengths and then thrown
out again to be piled up by the elephants.

The mechanics who ran these engines ate meat and drank liquor. It is
very strange that when Western people come to the East, they do not
give up their expensive ways of living. Drinking wine and eating meat
is one thing in cold climates, where one has to keep warm, but in a
hot climate a man is sure to go to pieces if he eats and drinks much.
Kari had no objection to wine drinking, but he did not like
meat-eating men any more than he liked meat-eating tigers. He never
hated them or feared them, simply he somehow did not enjoy their
company. But these white engineers who came from afar did not know
that an elephant had a soul.

Kari always woke up at half past five and then went to work.
Toward noon I would bathe him and put him in his shed. Early in
the afternoon he would begin to work again. Later on he ate lots
of rice of which he was very fond. In the evening I would tie him
up in his shed while I went to sleep on a hammock outside.

One night, I heard a terrible trumpeting. I jumped down from my
hammock and went into Kari's shed, where I found two drunken
engineers lighting matches and throwing them at him. Kari, who
was afraid of fire, as all animals are, was trumpeting angrily. I
protested to the men, but they were so drunk that they only swore
at me and went on flinging matches. Seeing that there was nothing
else to do, I loosened all his chains except one, and let him
stay there tied to the ground by one foot only.

An elephant's chain is generally driven about five or six feet
into the ground and is then covered with cement and earth. An
elephant can rarely break this kind of chain, but I was afraid
that the matches might set the shed on fire, and I trusted Kari
more than drunken men. I knew that if the shed caught fire the
elephant could break one chain if he tried hard to escape. The
night passed without any further incident, however.

I must explain why animals are afraid of fire. Fire, you see, is
the one thing that they can never fight. They are not afraid of
water, as most of them can swim, but if they are caught in fire,
they are generally burned to dea