He was big enough to
travel by himself now, though of course he did not want to leave his
mother, nor the herd, which was like home to him. He was one of a big
family of elephants, some being his sisters, his brothers or his
cousins.
All around him, through the forest, Umboo could hear the other
elephants crashing about in the wet. They were looking for good things
to eat, and none of them went very far away from the others. They
wanted to be near where they could hear Tusker sound his trumpet call
of danger, if he had to do so.
But Umboo being young, and perhaps rather foolish, thought he could go
off as far as he pleased into the jungle.
"I can find my way back again, after I have knocked over a big tree,"
he thought to himself. "It will be easy."
The elephant boy saw several trees with bunches of palm nuts on them,
but none was large enough for him. He wanted to pick out an extra
large one; not as big, of course, as his mother or father or Tusker
could have butted over, but still one bigger than the other trees he
had been used to knocking down.
At last, when he had tramped on quite a distance through the mud and
water of the jungle, Umboo saw before him a fine, large palm tree.
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