Question

Summary of elephants: Ma Kyaw ?

Answer 1

Answer:

ELEPHANT BILL (250 pp.)—Lieut. Colonel J. H. Williams—Doubleday ($3).

Burma is full of elephants that never forget. Back in the '20s and '30s, when J. H. ("Elephant Bill") Williams was working as elephant manager for the Bombay Burma Trading Corp., he traveled from camp to camp, inspecting the jumbos whose job was pushing & pulling four-ton teak logs down from the hills.

On such visits, Williams often had to syringe the sinuses of his charges, inoculate them against anthrax, and doctor them generally. He once spent three weeks treating an elephant called Ma Kyaw ("Miss Smooth") for some tiger-claw gouges on her back....

Answer 2

Summary of elephants: Ma Kyaw

• Lieutenant Colonel James Howard Williams, OBE, is Elephant Bill.
• He served in the British Camel Corps during the First World War and, after his discharge, got a job in Burma.
• He spent the next twenty years supervising the elephant teams that haul giant teak trees down to river’s edge.
• The logs are lashed into rafts and floated down to sawmills in Rangoon or Mandalay.
• It takes a teak raft one year to make the thousand-mile downriver trip to Rangoon – if the elephants and their oozies (riders) have done a good job, placing the logs so that the river takes them when monsoon spate arrives.

• When the Second World War came, Elephant Bill stayed in Burma to organize an Elephant Corps, which built bridges by the hundreds sturdy enough to take trucks and tanks. (Trucks did not fare well in Burma, especially during the monsoon season; the key to getting any stuck truck out of the mud was a helpful elephant.)

• The best part of this superb book is the opening chapters where Bill describes his first encounters with elephants and the Bombay Burma Trading Company.
• The man assigned to train him, a snarly and mistrustful Englishman called Willie, immediately awarded four elephants to his care and told him to push off into the jungle for a few months: “You can do what you damned well like – including suicide if you’re lonely – but I won’t have you back here until you can speak some Burmese.”

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