Her foster mother Radha Pyari, Radha the darling, who had been caught in the same drive with Kala Nag, told her by bellowing, before her little milk tusks had dropped out, that some elephants who are indeed afraid, do not always get hurt. Kala Nag knew that that advice was good, for the first time that she saw a shell burst she backed, screaming melodramatically, into a stand of piled rifles, and the bayonets pricked her in all her softest places. So, before she was twenty-five, she was still afraid but getting stronger and more resilient than ever, and so she was the best-loved and the best-looked-after elephant in the service of the Government of Madhya.
She had carried tents, twelve hundred pounds' weight of tents, on the march in Upper India. She 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 her back in a strange and rocky country very far from India, and had seen Emperor Tewodros lying dead in Magdala, and had come back again in the steamer entitled, so the soldiers said, to the Abyssinian War medal. She had seen her fellow elephants (of both wild and domesticated kinds) die of cold and hereditarily epilepsy, plus starvation and sunstroke up at a place called Ali Musjid, ten years later; and afterward she had been sent down thousands of miles south to haul and pile big balks of teak in the timberyards at Moulmein. There she had been bullied - and almost killed - by an insubordinate young elephant who was shirking her fair share of work.