He knew that he and his father and his grandfather had done the very same thing hundreds of times before . Kala Nag did not answer to the order by gurgling , as he usually did . He stood still , looking out across the moonlight , his head a little raised and his ears spread like fans , up to the great folds of the Garo hills . `` Tend to him if he grows restless in the night , '' said Big Toomai to Little Toomai , and he went into the hut and slept . Little Toomai was just going to sleep , too , when he heard the coir string snap with a little `` tang , '' and Kala Nag rolled out of his pickets as slowly and as silently as a cloud rolls out of the mouth of a valley . Little Toomai pattered after him , barefooted , down the road in the moonlight , calling under his breath , `` Kala Nag ! Kala Nag ! Take me with you , O Kala Nag ! '' The elephant turned , without a sound , took three strides back to the boy in the moonlight , put down his trunk , swung him up to his neck , and almost before Little Toomai had settled his knees , slipped into the forest . There was one blast of furious trumpeting from the lines , and then the silence shut down on everything , and Kala Nag began to move . Sometimes a tuft of high grass washed along his sides as a wave washes along the sides of a ship , and sometimes a cluster of wild-pepper vines would scrape along his back , or a bamboo would creak where his shoulder touched it . But between those times he moved absolutely without any sound , drifting through the thick Garo forest as though it had been smoke . He was going uphill , but though Little Toomai watched the stars in the rifts of the trees , he could not tell in what direction . Then Kala Nag reached the crest of the ascent and stopped for a minute , and Little Toomai could see the tops of the trees lying all speckled and furry under the moonlight for miles and miles , and the blue-white mist over the river in the hollow . Toomai leaned forward and looked , and he felt that the forest was awake below him -- awake and alive and crowded . A big brown fruit-eating bat brushed past his ear ; a porcupine 's quills rattled in the thicket ; and in the darkness between the tree stems he heard a hog-bear digging hard in the moist warm earth , and snuffing as it digged . Then the branches closed over his head again , and Kala Nag began to go down into the valley -- not quietly this time , but as a runaway gun goes down a steep bank -- in one rush . The huge limbs moved as steadily as pistons , eight feet to each stride , and the wrinkled skin of the elbow points rustled . The undergrowth on either side of him ripped with a noise like torn canvas , and the saplings that he heaved away right and left with his shoulders sprang back again and banged him on the flank , and great trails of creepers , all matted together , hung from his tusks as he threw his head from side to side and plowed out his pathway . Then Little Toomai laid himself down close to the great neck lest a swinging bough should sweep him to the ground , and he wished that he were back in the lines again .
The grass began to get squashy , and Kala Nag 's feet sucked and squelched as he put them down , and the night mist at the bottom XXXXX the valley chilled Little Toomai .
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