Tell me his nest and his name . Rikki , the valiant , the true , Tikki , with eyeballs of flame , Rikk-tikki-tikki , the ivory-fanged , the hunter with eyeballs of flame ! Give him the Thanks of the Birds , Bowing with tail feathers spread ! Praise him with nightingale words -- Nay , I will praise him instead . Hear ! I will sing you the praise of the bottle-tailed Rikki , with eyeballs of red ! -LRB- Here Rikki-tikki interrupted , and the rest of the song is lost . -RRB- Toomai of the Elephants I will remember what I was , I am sick of rope and chain -- I will remember my old strength and all my forest affairs . I will not sell my back to man for a bundle of sugar-cane : I will go out to my own kind , and the wood-folk in their lairs . I will go out until the day , until the morning break -- Out to the wind 's untainted kiss , the water 's clean caress ; I will forget my ankle-ring and snap my picket stake . I will revisit my lost loves , and playmates masterless ! Kala Nag , which means Black Snake , had served the Indian Government in every way that an elephant could serve it for forty-seven years , and as he was fully twenty years old when he was caught , that makes him nearly seventy -- a ripe age for an elephant . He remembered pushing , with a big leather pad on his forehead , at a gun stuck in deep mud , and that was before the Afghan War of 1842 , and he had not then come to his full strength . His mother Radha Pyari , -- Radha the darling , -- who had been caught in the same drive with Kala Nag , told him , before his little milk tusks had dropped out , that elephants who were afraid always got hurt . Kala Nag knew that that advice was good , for the first time that he saw a shell burst he backed , screaming , into a stand of piled rifles , and the bayonets pricked him in all his softest places . So , before he was twenty-five , he gave up being afraid , and so he was the best-loved and the best-looked-after elephant in the service of the Government of India . He had carried tents , twelve hundred pounds ' weight of tents , on the march in Upper India . He had been hoisted into a ship at the end of a steam crane and taken for days across the water , and made to carry a mortar on his back in a strange and rocky country very far from India , and had seen the Emperor Theodore lying dead in Magdala , and had come back again in the steamer entitled , so the soldiers said , to the Abyssinian War medal . He had seen his fellow elephants die of cold and epilepsy and starvation and sunstroke up at a place called Ali Musjid , ten years later ; and afterward he had been sent down thousands of miles south to haul and pile big balks of teak in the timberyards at Moulmein . There he had half killed an insubordinate young elephant who was shirking his fair share of work .
After that he was taken off timber-hauling , and employed , with a few score other elephants who were trained XXXXX the business , in helping to catch wild elephants among the Garo hills .
as at before for in into of to until with