style="font-size:15px;"> Again and again I seriously considered standing up in the howdah, and then throwing myself off into the water when we came to the next stream. I would pick my moment, decide where the water was at its deepest, and leap. I could do it. I could swim well enough – the best in my class at school, better than Charlie or Bart or Tonk. That wasn’t my worry. I had other anxieties. If I got it wrong, I could land badly on hidden rocks beneath the surface. I could break a leg, or even my neck. And I knew that rocks weren’t the only danger lurking beneath the surface. I was sure there were crocodiles in these rivers. I was sure because I’d caught a glimpse of one, half submerged. It had looked like a log, but if so, it was a log with a tail, and a tail that moved too.
And anyway, even if there were no crocodiles down there waiting for me, even if I had the best of landings, and had the long cold drink I was yearning for, and managed to fill up my water bottle, would Oona stand there and wait for me while I drank? Even if she did, how was I going to climb back up on to her again afterwards into the safety of the howdah? Getting on and off this elephant was something I just didn’t know how to do on my own. The last time I’d had to do it, days before now, the mahout had been there to help me up, but I could not remember for the life of me how he’d got me up there. All that seemed to have happened so long ago now, before the wave came. Mum had been there. Had she helped me up? I couldn’t remember. I didn’t want to remember.
My longing for food was becoming every bit as frustrating and urgent as my longing for water. It wasn’t as if there wasn’t fruit in abundance all around me in the jungle, but none of it was fruit I recognised, and anyway I couldn’t get at it. I was looking for bananas – I thought there must be bananas in a jungle – but so far as I could see there were none. There was a small pinky-red fruit, that was shaped something like a banana. But these were always tantalisingly out of reach as I passed by underneath. There were sometimes coconuts, orange, not brown, but anyway they were always growing far too high up. And those that had fallen on the forest floor were of course just as inaccessible to me.
There were plenty of other strange fruits I certainly would have tried, had I been able to get near enough, or quick enough to grab them. But Oona swayed on blithely by, quite oblivious, it seemed, to all my needs. And all this time she was adding insult to injury, because of course Oona could reach out her trunk whenever she felt like it, and with a tug at an overhanging branch, was able to pull it down and eat her fill on the move. Worse still she looked and sounded as if she was enjoying every moment of her feasting. I could only sit there and listen to her great jaws grinding away, to her almost constantly rumbling stomach. Elephant digestion, I was discovering, was noisy, and infuriating, punctuated as it was by rumbling groans of the deepest satisfaction.
In the end it all became too much for me to take. I bent down and bellowed into her ear. I knew it was pointless, but I did it all the same. “Food, Oona! I want food! I want water!” She flapped her ears at me then, as if she was batting away my words like irritant flies. But I kept on at her, whacking her as hard as I could on her neck, on her back, anywhere I could hit her, trying everything and anything to make her listen. “I want to eat, Oona!” I cried. “Fruit. I need fruit. And water, I’ve got to have water. Please, Oona, please. Can’t you understand, Oona? I’ll die if I don’t have a drink. I’ll die!”
In time I discovered that all the bellowing and the whacking and the slapping was hurting me a great deal more than it was hurting her. My hands ached with it. My throat was raw with it. Whatever I said or did, the elephant was not paying me any attention, that was for sure. She simply continued on her wandering way through the jungle, munching nonchalantly as she went, seemingly without a care in the world. I tried everything I knew over and over again. But even as I was doing it, I could see it was useless, that neither sweet-talking, cajoling, begging, whacking, or threatening was ever going to work. This elephant would do what she would do, and that was that. In the end I simply gave up trying.
Exhausted and angry, I lay down in the howdah, which I now thought of more as a cage than a throne, and sobbed. Into my head from nowhere came Dad’s old joke: “You’ve got to chill, Will.” I said it out loud then, as Dad would have said it. “You’ve got to chill, Will.” Repeating his words time and again was a comfort to me somehow. It was the rhythm of them maybe, or the familiarity. I longed for sleep, because I longed to put out of my mind everything that had happened, all the discomforts I was enduring. It was the only way to forget the gnawing hunger in my stomach, that my tongue was leathery dry, that my throat was parched and sore.
Once, when sleep came at last, I heard Dad’s words again in my dreams, and I saw him too. “You’ve got to chill, Will,” he was saying. “You’ve got to keep it going. You can do it, Will.” I was back in the sea at Weston when I was little. I was swimming towards Dad, who was holding his arms out towards me. I was kicking my legs frantically, trying all I could to keep my chin above water, trying to reach those outstretched hands before I sank, but the seawater kept coming into my mouth and was choking me. I woke then, suddenly, and sat up spluttering. For a few moments the sunlight blinded me.
The elephant had stopped. There was the sound of rushing water all around me. I sat up. Oona was standing in a river, the water washing over her back and up to her neck and her ears, so that the howdah was simply an island now, the river swirling all around. And somehow the howdah had worked itself loose. I could feel it shifting sideways off Oona’s back, so that some of the cushions were already waterlogged. The river was running fast, but I did not hesitate. This was the chance I’d been waiting for. The shore wasn’t that far away. I could make it. If there were crocodiles I did not care. I needed to have water. I had to drink.
I put a foot on the rail and leaped off. Before I knew it I was in the river, and swimming hard for the shore. Just a few strong strokes and I was there. I crouched at the river’s edge and drank till I could drink no more, filling myself to bursting. Breathless with drinking now, triumphant with it, I found myself laughing and whooping and slapping the water, filling the forest with my noise, sending thousands of screeching birds flying up out of the trees. “Look at them, Oona!” I cried. “Look!”
All I could see of Oona was her head and her trunk. She seemed to have drifted further down the river, and was right out in the middle now, where the flow was faster. I was quite confident I could swim that far. So without another thought I plunged in. But I found that the current was a great deal stronger out there than I had imagined, and I soon realised that I wasn’t going to make it. I just didn’t have the strength to sustain the effort. So I had to turn back again, and swim hard for the shore to get myself out of trouble. It was a long swim and I felt myself tiring fast, so it was a huge relief when I felt my feet touch the bottom, and I could clamber out of the river at last.
I looked round then to see where Oona was. She had vanished. Panic-stricken at finding myself suddenly alone, I began calling out for her, tentatively at first, then louder and louder as my fears multiplied. My first thought was that Oona must have gone off into the forest and abandoned me. I was sure of it. There could be no other explanation. With panic came hurt. I let her know just what I thought of her. “Go off and leave me then, you great lump, see if I care! I don’t need you, you hear me? I don’t need you!”
It was then that I caught sight of the howdah being swept away downriver towards the rocks, but there was still no sign of Oona. The howdah sank as I watched. All I could see of it now were its straps, and then my water bottle and a cushion from the howdah bobbing away into the distance. As I stood there I was thinking that the bottle was the last thing Mum had given to me, that and my hat and the sun cream, all of which must have been at the bottom of the river by now with the howdah. All I had left was what I stood up in: my shirt and my shorts.
That was when Oona erupted from under the water only a few metres from me, rising up to her full height with the water cascading from her, trunk flailing and splashing. When I got over my surprise, I found myself overwhelmed with sudden joy and relief, all
