Flight by Elephant (9 page)

They pushed on, and looked down at the Noa Dehing river. It was wider here: 600 yards of water racing west. As they watched, an entire tree came rotating past them and other, smaller parts of trees, as the Noa Dehing raced to merge with the five-mile-wide Brahmaputra, which cuts laterally through the middle of Assam. Millar and Leyden needed to go west as well – not as far as the Noa Dehing’s confluence with the Brahmaputra, but about thirty miles in that general direction where habitation began. Thirty miles, two days’ march, might bring them to a proper village, with not only food, but shops – or at least a government rice dump – and the possibility of medical assistance. They watched the trees go swirling past; the river’s edge was strewn with further broken trees. What was a canoe but a hollowed-out tree? Millar suggested to Goal Miri that, since everything else had failed, they might push a log into the river, keep hold of it and see what happened. ‘It would wash us down to civilization quicker than we could ever hope to walk.’ But ‘Goal pointed to two rapids pouring down on either side of an island in the river – there were probably other rapids all the way down at intervals.’

Millar moved closer to the river’s edge for a better look at the rapids, and he saw a tree cut. It was new, and it indicated a path along the river’s edge, just inside the trees. They began following the path, which curved around to a wooded bulge in the riverbank. Here was another clearing, and this time only a single hut, smaller than the others had been. Millar called out in Assamese, asking, ‘Who made the tree cut?’ No reply. Only the river’s roar; the heat of the day bearing down on Millar. He smelt smoke; he looked about, and he saw, on the margin of the trees, a smouldering bamboo fire. Millar advanced. The bamboo door of the shack was closed; he pushed at it. Three men crouched inside – members of the Mishmi tribe. They stood upright and stepped into the clearing, where they faced Millar, who had now been joined by Goal Miri. Each of the Mishmis carried a long knife. Millar and Goal Miri bowed towards the Mishmis; the Mishmis bowed back, but Millar was watching their knives. They made Millar understand that they had seen him burn the two huts in the other clearing, and they took this to be an ‘expedition’ – that is, a British revenge raid. Revenge for what? In this case, they didn’t know, but the British were certainly not above burning the huts of the Mishmis, or of any of the thirty or so major tribes of Assam. The burning of huts – empty huts, the occupants having been ejected at gunpoint (and occasionally shot into the bargain) – was a standard tactic in any dispute. Fortunately for Millar, these particular Mishmis had not been abused in that way; in fact, he was the first white man they had ever seen close up, and they were now having a very good look.

Millar risked another glance over to the fire, which the Mishmis had tried to damp down. But why had they lit it in the first place? Breakfast. On top of the fire were many parcels made of banana leaves; inside them, fish were being smoked. Bowing again at the Mishmis, Millar – who was ‘ravenous’ – began inching towards the fire. The Mishmis, who had settlements along the Debang river, were known to be expert fishermen. They would divert the water on the margins of a river by building stone dams; a small pool would be created at the termination of these, and after a while there would be fish in that pool.

‘To cut a long story short,’ wrote Millar, ‘we made great friends – not by words but by signs.’ The rest of the party were brought into the enclosure, including Leyden on his stretcher. A breakfast of smoked fish was eaten – and fast. A deal was then made with the Mishmis, who had been very interested in Millar’s .450 rifle when it had been glimpsed protruding from one of the packs carried by a Kachin. The tribes of Assam could make most things they needed from jungle materials, but they couldn’t make guns, and who could deny the usefulness of this particular one? It had saved the life of the party when they’d come upon the herd of sambhur, and it would now save their lives again. Millar offered his rifle to the Mishmis if they would assist in the trek west. The Mishmis agreed, and so further parcels of dried fish were loaded into the packs and they set off. ‘What a joy,’ wrote Millar, ‘our whole party intact and saved – except for little Misa.’

In the late morning of that day – 2 June – they crossed the Noa Dehing in its lower reaches, Millar does not say how, but probably by boat, since they were now into inhabited territory. Thirty miles after leaving the Dapha confluence, they came to the mainly Buddhist village of Miao, which sat on the river’s left bank. They walked on, skirting the deep puddles of a rocky track. The jungle continued on either side, but it was sparser now, and flat, which was just as well since Leyden was still being carried on the stretcher. Looking left in gaps between the trees, they could see the misty outline of hills bristling with trees, through which the bigger evacuation route, the Hukawng Valley, ran. In the fading light of late afternoon on 4 June, they came to the tiny settlement known to the British – and only to the British – as Simon. (The locals called it Sangmo.) Here a small camp, and rice dump, had been established as a north-easterly outpost of the Hukawng Valley refugee relief effort, and, when they arrived here, Millar and Leyden finally knew they were safe.

They were met – and ‘given a great welcome’ – by a man called J. A. Masson, a tea planter who had volunteered to work on the refugee relief effort. If they were given the meal that usually met the British Burma refugees then they would have had sausages, fried potatoes and sweet milky tea – none of that foreign muck, in short – but the meal is not recorded.

Masson had heard rumours that people were trying to come through the Chaukan, and he told Millar and Leyden – which they already knew – that planes had been flying over to look for the Chaukan trekkers. Millar and Leyden told Masson of Sir John’s railway party, and the Rossiter party, of which two they were the advanced guard. Millar and Leyden said that a rescue effort had to be mounted immediately. Masson quite agreed, and what was more he knew just the man for the job.

His name was Gyles Mackrell.

Guy Millar knew Mackrell, too. He insisted that a runner be sent immediately to him.

Gyles Mackrell – the man whose name had caused such an upwelling of hope in Guy Millar – was working on the relief effort directed towards that major escape route, the Hukawng Valley, but he was rather out on a limb. He was at a spot called Namgoi Mukh, about eight miles south of the camp at Simon where Millar and Leyden had been greeted with sausages and tea. If Simon was obscure, Namgoi Mukh was more so, and the map at the front of this book is one of the few on which it has ever appeared. Before Mackrell had arrived there in early May there’d been nothing but a couple of broken bamboo houses built amid the trees. On arrival, he had written a letter to a friend, beginning, ‘I don’t know quite where “here” is, as we have no maps, but here I am anyway!’

Actually, Namgoi Mukh would have been a logical place for a village, because it stood at the confluence of two rivers. The first ran south from Simon, and its name fluctuates exasperatingly depending on who’s referring to it, but let’s call it the Namphuk. The other river, branching off to the south-west from the Namphuk, was called – by some – the Namgoi. If, in early June 1942, you’d taken a boat fifteen miles from the place called Namgoi Mukh along the Namgoi river, you would have arrived at a refugee relief camp called Nampong, which lay more or less in the middle of the Hukawng Valley evacuation route. But you would have been going against a strong current, since the river flowed north, which is why Gyles Mackrell was sending most of the supplies he was dispatching to the Nampong camp by porter or by elephant.

At Namgoi Mukh, Mackrell inhabited a humid, watery world, living amid the roar of the rain and the additional roar of the two rivers. The supplies – ‘rice, dall, potatoes, blankets etc’ – came in by boat from the camp at Simon. Mackrell paid the boatmen their fee of eight silver rupees per boatload, from government money labelled the Burma Refugee Fund. He then loaded the stuff onto elephants, for which he tended to use the Hindi word ‘hathis’ or ‘haths’, and of which he had thirty-one at his disposal. He spent all day unloading and loading, and slept on a camp bed in a basha, next to the main, tin-roofed godown, or warehouse, on a riverbank that was at all times a foot deep in reddish mud.

He was probably enjoying himself greatly, the only reservation being that he was not in the thick of the action. He was fifty-three, and it bothered him that this might preclude him from a more central role. Mackrell was a former fighter pilot turned supervisor of tea plantations and big-game hunter. He lived in a big house in Shillong, the capital of Assam, but was hardly ever there. He was a burly, kindly, avuncular looking man – bald, but you wouldn’t know it because he always wore (for reasons of practicality, not vanity) either a sola topee or a bush hat. He also always wore long shorts, and below these, and above his long socks, his large knees had the touching appearance of being on the wrong way round. He was somewhat elephantine, in fact, and he certainly had an affinity with elephants.

He had turned up at the Ledo camp in late April, volunteering for any work at all in the relief operations, whereupon he was given the nebulous title Indian Tea Association Liaison Officer. As he wrote in that letter to a friend, ‘It all seems most casual … Even now, I don’t know who or what I am.’ On 17 May, he reported for duty at Simon camp with, according to an official document, ‘four and a half elephants’ in tow – that is, four adults and one baby elephant. (A female elephant which has lately given birth will continue to work, but only if she has her baby by her side.) He was immediately dispatched to Namgoi Mukh, where a man called Bathgate was in charge. But Mackrell noticed that when he arrived with his four and a half elephants, Bathgate barely looked at them. You don’t look a gift
horse
in the mouth, but it seems you should do with an elephant. But Bathgate was depressed. He’d been a timber merchant in Burma and had lost his entire business; the rain and mud and general obscurity of Namgoi Mukh wouldn’t have helped. Bathgate wasn’t an elephant expert, and he couldn’t speak Assamese, the language of the mahouts. Mahouts had the reputation of being difficult. They not only rode the elephants, they had also captured and trained them – very difficult and dangerous work. They combined the independence of all taxi drivers with the unionized bolshiness of some train drivers. They also had a certain priestly status. Elephants are revered to some degree in most Eastern religions, and the mahouts held the key to their mysteries.

At Namgoi Mukh, Mackrell quickly accumulated eighty-four elephants. They were what Mackrell called ‘Kampti elephants’, native to the border of Burma and Assam, and schooled by the Buddhist Kampti people of eastern Assam – who originated in north-west Burma and had in fact migrated into India via the Chaukan Pass in the early nineteenth century. But Mackrell inhabited a very multicultural world, and although he designated his chief elephant man at Namgoi Mukh a ‘Kampti Raja’, the man was in fact a member of the Naga tribe. He habitually wore a turban, a light waistcoat and what looks like a long tartan skirt, and his name was Chaochali. The porters Mackrell worked with were from the Abor tribe: wiry men with long black hair and crosses tattooed on foreheads.

The runner from Simon reached Mackrell at five in the evening. He was working in the rain, unloading rations. On a normal evening, he would have knocked off work at about six, when pitch darkness rapidly descended on Namgoi Mukh. He would have had a hot soak in his portable canvas bath, then had dinner (tinned sausages, rice and dall). At 7.30, he and Chaochali, the Kampti Raja, would have listened to the news on Mackrell’s portable HMV radio; they would then have had a couple of glasses of whisky – Mackrell made a point of having ‘a peg’ every night no matter where he was – and talked shikar, that is, hunting, in either English or Assamese. Mackrell would then have gone to bed at 8.30 p.m., ready for a prompt start at dawn.

Having read the chit, however, Mackrell got into a boat ‘as quickly as possible’.

The boat was a canoe about twenty foot long and was punted with the current – and through the rain – by one of the Abors. Mackrell sat in the boat in his rain cape; he had an unopened bottle of whisky beside him. That was for Millar and Leyden. He would have recognized the name of Guy Millar, whose brother was a colleague of Mackrell’s in the tea business. As the banks of the Namphuk slid by – sodden paddy fields and jungle alternating in the gloom – Mackrell lit his pipe.

At Simon, Mackrell handed over the whisky to Millar and Leyden – ‘that did them good’, he noted in his diary, presumably unaware that his volunteer colleagues on the Hukawng Valley route had concluded ‘Alcohol could mean instant death in starvation cases’. He then settled down to hear Millar and Leyden’s story. We might picture the three – plus Goal Miri and Masson, the tea planter – in a bamboo hut, the rain falling all around (and trickling down the wall at one corner); a kerosene lamp on the collapsible table of the kind used for jumble sales in English village halls; Leyden wrapped in a blanket … the whisky going round. (Leyden was already on the mend, but as his health improved he became increasingly miserable about his dog.)

They discussed routes. There
were
known tracks, and Millar and Leyden had been somewhat assisted by a party of explorers not so far mentioned. These were Chinese, and they had hacked their way along the mule tracks between the riverside village of Miao and the Chaukan Pass in the cold weather season of late 1941, marking the route with tree cuts, the aim being to see if the Chaukan could form a communications lifeline for China. (It could not.)

Mackrell was amazed at the story of the Dapha crossing by means of human chain. He knew it to be so far ‘up’ at that time of year that a crossing even by elephant would be risky. It was obvious to all – as they listened to the teeming rain – that if the river had been ‘up’ when Millar and Leyden crossed over, it would be a lot further up by now, and Leyden made the point very firmly that Sir John Rowland and his party, groping their way through the jungle towards it, would most likely be starving already. Goal Miri said that, in view of the size of Sir John’s party, and their likely condition, twenty elephants would be needed.