he towmen could not pull the ropes
hard enough to make progress against the current. All that they
could do was to stand still without getting ahead at all. So word
was sent on to us and we three went to help out. I harnessed Kari
with the tow rope. It was very amusing, as he had never pulled a
weight in his life. At first he pulled very hard. The rope almost
broke and the barge swayed in the water, almost toppled, and
then drifted to its previous position. The swift current was
going against it and the people in the barge were shaking their
hands and swearing at us as they were afraid that the vessel
would capsize.

Kari did not care. After he had pulled the barge about two
hundred yards he stopped; the rope slackened and then the current
pulled against us. The rope became taut again and the men
shrieked from the barge. When you tug a boat, you must not jerk
at the rope but pull it gently, so I urged Kari to pull it
smoothly. In the course of an hour, he had actually drawn the
boat in, and at the end of our journey he had learned to pull
evenly.

After that we went on playing on the river bank. Kopee jumped off
the elephant's back and ran along the shore. I urged Kari to
follow him, and as we kept on going, I lost all sense of
direction and trusted to the intelligence of the animals. The
monkey, however, had led us into a trap. We had run into
quick-sand and Kari began to sink. Every time he tried to lift
his feet he seemed to go deeper into the mud and he was so
frightened that he tried to take hold of the monkey with his
trunk and step on him as something solid, but Kopee chattered and
rushed up a tree.

Then Kari swung his trunk around, pulled down the mattress from
his back, and putting it on the ground tried to step on it. That
did not help, so he curled up his trunk behind to try to get me
to step on. Each time he made an effort like that, however, he
sank deeper into the mud. I saw the trunk curling back and
creeping up to me like a python crawling up a hillside to coil
around its prey. There was no more trumpeting or calling from the
elephant, but a sinister silence through which he was trying to
reach me. He had come to the end of his unselfishness. In order
to save himself, he was willing to step on me.

The monkey screamed from the tree-top and I, jumping off the
elephant's back, fell on the ground and ran. Kari kept on
trumpeting and calling for help, and by this time he was chest
deep in the mud.