A Chant to Soothe Wild Elephants by Jaed Coffin

Author:Jaed Coffin [JAED COFFIN]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hachette Books
Published: 2011-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

I’d been asleep for a few hours when I woke up to pins of pain all over my chest and shoulders. I bolted upright. The pain was striking me from everywhere at once. I lit my candle and brought the light to my body. There were ants all over my chest. I slapped at them, but there were too many. I brought the light to the floor. There were thousands of ants attacking crumbs of food that had gotten stuck in my robes from the morning meal. I leapt outside, naked, and swatted my skin until I thought the ants were gone. They kept biting. I shook out my robes, beat them against trees, stumbled over roots, and rolled in the leaves.

It took me an hour to get rid of the ants. The only thing that worked was the one thing I knew I shouldn’t do: in solemn candlelight, I dumped a whole jug of drinking water across the floor of my hut and watched thousands of ants drowning. Even though I’d vowed not to kill anything, I still didn’t fully believe in the causality of karma. But now, staring into the night, naked and shivering, I had to wonder if this was my punishment.

The next morning after breakfast, Narong told Aeg that we planned to venture off along the river to the various villages whose fires we’d seen the night before. Aeg listened carefully and then turned to me and smiled. “What do you wish to find?” he asked. I shrugged, as though the question had never crossed my mind. He nodded, calmly, and said an English phrase that most Thais have picked up: “Good job,” he said—it sounded like “goose chop”—and gave me a thumbs up.

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