The Elephant God

The Elephant God, by Gordon
Casserly

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Title: The Elephant God
Author: Gordon Casserly
Release Date: November 17, 2004 [EBook #14076]
Language: English
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THE ELEPHANT GOD
BY GORDON GASSERLY

NEW YORK 1921

TO A CERTAIN ROGUE ELEPHANT RESIDENT IN THE TERAI
FOREST
THE SLAYER OF DIVERS MEN AND WOMEN
THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED BY THE AUTHOR IN GRATEFUL
ACKNOWLEDGMENT OF MUCH INSTRUCTION AND IN THE
HOPE THAT SOME DAY IN THE HAPPY HUNTING GROUNDS
THEY MAY MEET AGAIN AND DECIDE THE ISSUE

FOREWORD TO AMERICAN EDITION
Twenty years ago I dedicated my first book, The Land of the Boxers; or
China Under the Allies, to the American officers and soldiers of the
expeditionary forces then fighting in the Celestial Empire--as well as to
their British comrades. And when, some years afterwards, I was
visiting their country, right glad I was that I had thus offered my slight
tribute to the valour of the United States Army. For from the Pacific to
the Atlantic I met with a hospitality and a kindness that no other land
could excel and few could equal. And ever since then, I have felt deep
in debt to all Americans and have tried in many parts of our Empire to
repay to those who serve under the Star Spangled Banner a little of
what I owe to their fellow-countrymen.
Only those who have experienced that sympathetic American kindness
can realise what it is. It is all that gives me courage to face the reading
public as a writer of fiction and attempt to depict to it the fascinating
world of an Indian jungle, the weird beasts that people it, and the
stranger humans that battle with them in it. The magic pen of a Kipling
alone could do justice to that wonderful realm of mountain and forest
that is called the Terai--that fantastic region of woodland that stretches
for hundreds of miles along the foot of the Himalayas, that harbours in

its dim recesses the monsters of the animal kingdom, quaint survivals
of a vanished race--the rhinoceros, the elephant, the bison, and the
hamadryad, that great and terrible snake which can, and does, pursue
and overtake a mounted man, and which with a touch of its poisoned
fang can slay the most powerful brute. The huge Himalayan bear roams
under the giant trees, feeding on fruit and honey, yet ready to shatter
unprovoked the skull of a poor woodcutter. Those savage striped and
spotted cats, the tiger and the panther, steal through it on velvet paw
and take toll of its harmless denizens.
But, if I cannot describe it as I would, at least I have lived the life of the
wild in the spacious realm of the Terai. I would that I had the power to
make others feel what I have felt, the thrill that comes when facing the
onrush of the bloodthirstiest of all fierce brutes, a rogue elephant, or the
joy of seeing a charging tiger check and crumple up at the arresting
blow of a heavy bullet.
I have followed day after day from dawn to dark and fought again and
again a fierce outlaw tusker elephant that from sheer lust of slaughter
had killed men, women, and children and carried on for years a career
of crime unbelievable.
No one that knows the jungle well will refuse to credit the strangest
story of what wild animals will do. Of all the swarming herds of wild
elephants in the Terai, the Mysore, or the Ceylon jungles no man, white
or black, has ever seen one that had died a natural death. Yet many
have watched them climbing up the great mountain rampart of the
Himalayas towards regions where human foot never followed. The
Death Place of the Elephants is a legend in which all jungle races
firmly believe, but no man has ever found it. The mammoths live a
century and a half--but the time comes when each of them must die.
Yet no human eye watches its death agony.
Those who know elephants best will most readily credit the strangest
tales of their doings. And there are men--white men--whose power over
wild beasts and wilder fellow men outstrips the novelist's imagination,
the true tale of whose doings no resident in a civilised land would
believe.

GORDON