Flight by Elephant by Andrew Martin

to make a stretcher. Leyden would be carried. It took them an hour to make the stretcher. At four o’clock in the morning, they set off in the direction of the footprints.
    At nine o’clock in the morning they arrived at the place towards which the makers of the footprints had been heading: two bamboo and palm huts in a red-mud clearing, the Noa Dehing singing beyond the trees, otherwise all quite silent and deserted. And then things were not silent. Leyden, lying on his stretcher, opened his eyes. A plane was approaching. It came over fairly low; then another came, equally low and loud. Millar did not believe they were Japanese planes; they had come from the west, from central Assam, and civilization. Surely they were rescue planes. They might come back; a signal must be sent. The sun was now shining, and while the ground in the clearing might be muddy, the huts were dry. Millar struck a Lion Safety Match and put it in the palm-leaf roof of the first hut. The hut began to smoke, then to burn furiously, sending up a thick column of black smoke … just as the sound of the aeroplane engines faded from earshot entirely.
    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