I will go out until the day , until the morning break -- Out to the wind 's untainted kiss , the water 's clean caress ; I will forget my ankle-ring and snap my picket stake . I will revisit my lost loves , and playmates masterless ! Kala Nag , which means Black Snake , had served the Indian Government in every way that an elephant could serve it for forty-seven years , and as he was fully twenty years old when he was caught , that makes him nearly seventy -- a ripe age for an elephant . He remembered pushing , with a big leather pad on his forehead , at a gun stuck in deep mud , and that was before the Afghan War of 1842 , and he had not then come to his full strength . His mother Radha Pyari , -- Radha the darling , -- who had been caught in the same drive with Kala Nag , told him , before his little milk tusks had dropped out , that elephants who were afraid always got hurt . Kala Nag knew that that advice was good , for the first time that he saw a shell burst he backed , screaming , into a stand of piled rifles , and the bayonets pricked him in all his softest places . So , before he was twenty-five , he gave up being afraid , and so he was the best-loved and the best-looked-after elephant in the service of the Government of India . He had carried tents , twelve hundred pounds ' weight of tents , on the march in Upper India . He had been hoisted into a ship at the end of a steam crane and taken for days across the water , and made to carry a mortar on his back in a strange and rocky country very far from India , and had seen the Emperor Theodore lying dead in Magdala , and had come back again in the steamer entitled , so the soldiers said , to the Abyssinian War medal . He had seen his fellow elephants die of cold and epilepsy and starvation and sunstroke up at a place called Ali Musjid , ten years later ; and afterward he had been sent down thousands of miles south to haul and pile big balks of teak in the timberyards at Moulmein . There he had half killed an insubordinate young elephant who was shirking his fair share of work . After that he was taken off timber-hauling , and employed , with a few score other elephants who were trained to the business , in helping to catch wild elephants among the Garo hills . Elephants are very strictly preserved by the Indian Government . There is one whole department which does nothing else but hunt them , and catch them , and break them in , and send them up and down the country as they are needed for work . Kala Nag stood ten fair feet at the shoulders , and his tusks had been cut off short at five feet , and bound round the ends , to prevent them splitting , with bands of copper ; but he could do more with those stumps than any untrained elephant could do with the real sharpened ones . When , after weeks and weeks of cautious driving of scattered elephants across the hills , the forty or fifty wild monsters were driven into the last stockade , and the big drop gate , made of tree trunks lashed together , jarred down behind them , Kala Nag , at the word of command , would go into that flaring , trumpeting pandemonium -LRB- generally at night , when the flicker of the torches made it difficult to judge distances -RRB- , and , picking out the biggest and wildest tusker of the mob , would hammer him and hustle him into quiet while the men on the backs of the other elephants roped and tied the smaller ones . There was nothing in the way of fighting that Kala Nag , the old wise Black Snake , did not know , for he had stood up more than once in his time to the charge of the wounded tiger , and , curling up his soft trunk to be out of harm 's way , had knocked the springing brute sideways in mid-air with a quick sickle cut of his head , that he had invented all by himself ; had knocked him over , and kneeled upon him with his huge knees till the life went out with a gasp and a howl , and there was only a fluffy striped thing on the ground for Kala Nag to pull by the tail . `` Yes , '' said Big Toomai , his driver , the son of Black Toomai who had taken him to Abyssinia , and grandson of Toomai of the Elephants who had seen him caught , `` there is nothing that the Black Snake fears except me . He has seen three generations of us feed him and groom him , and he will live to see four . '' `` He is afraid of me also , '' said Little Toomai , standing up to his full height of four feet , with only one rag upon him .
He was ten years old , the eldest son of Big Toomai , and , according to custom , he would take his father 's place on Kala XXXXX 's neck when he grew up , and would handle the heavy iron ankus , the elephant goad , that had been worn smooth by his father , and his grandfather , and his great-grandfather .
Nag Pyari days first morning pandemonium pounds sickle sunstroke tusker