Elephant Run

Nick listens to the goings-on of the house for weeks after his escape. The Colonel is vigilant, insisting they will find the missing children. It shocks everyone, even Hilltop, how long he searches for them. Later, Bukong and Magwe sit at a table, discussing which mahouts will move to the railroad. Magwe is defiant, wondering how his brother can remain loyal to the Japanese after their enslavement of the Burmese people. Bukong stays firm. Soon after, an officer reports a soldier gored by an elephant. Witnesses claim it happened on purpose and that Magwe instructed the elephant to attack. When he is called in, Magwe is defiant once more: “I should not be treated differently than the other mahouts” (192). That night at dinner, Nick hears an officer talk about his father, who is so ill he has been put on light duty. He doesn't seem likely to recover from a recent illness. Nick is devastated and throws the listening cone, but he must keep himself together when he notices Bukong watching the wall where he stands, waiting for another sound to clue him in to the whereabouts of the children. 

Nick waits for Mya to return from eavesdropping on the kitchen staff and reveals what he learned about his father. He asks Mya how far his father is on elephant-back—Mya isn't sure the location, so the pair make a daring move and go into the library, where Nick shows Mya on the wall map of Burma. Mya feels uncomfortable in the library, thinking: “The room had always been a place of power, a place where fates were decided under the British and now under the Japanese” (199). While in the library, Nick makes an impulsive decision to look for more information about his father on the Colonel's desk and in the safe. Inside the old cigar box where he kept his toy soldiers, Nick finds letters from his mother from the past ten months. He returns to the secret passageway to read them and begins to cry reading her pleas to find him. He learns she has been moved to an embassy in Calcutta with Bernard. Nick feels a renewed sense of courage at the thoughts of his mother and memories of his father: “[H]e remembered what his father had said on Freestone Island about the Sergeant Major's heart beating in their chests. Nick could feel it” (205).