Weekend Argus (Saturday Edition)
Just so you know how the elephant got a trunk
Just So Stories, by Rudyard Kipling (Puffin/ Penguin) Illustrated by Alex Latimer IF YOU’VE ever been to a game park, or just paged through an animal picture book, you’ll have noticed how different animals are.
Compare a giraffe, tall and thin and spotted, with an endangered rhino, big and round and grey. Or a skinny, slithery snake with a bouncing kangaroo.
Why are they all so different? Some people would say it’s evolution and some people would say it’s God, but the author Rudyard Kipling has his own ideas.
More than 100 years ago he wrote a book about this very question, called the Just So Stories, and it’s just been published again with lots of pictures.
Kipling tells us how the camel got its hump, how the elephant got its trunk, and how the leopard got its spots. He also writes about the butterfly that stamped, and the beginning of armadillos.
He says that in the High and Far-Off Time the elephant had no trunk, just a blackish, bulgy nose as big as a boot that he could wiggle. One day Elephant’s Child drove everyone mad with his questions, and he was sent off to the great, grey-green Limpopo River, which is in the north of our country, to ask the Crocodile what he had for dinner.
When Elephant’s Child finally found the Crocodile, the Crocodile, who was feeling hungry, grabbed Elephant’s Child’s nose with his strong sharp teeth, and pulled and pulled. And Elephant’s Child, who did not want to be pulled into the river or become the Crocodile’s dinner, pulled back.
And his nose stretched and stretched.
It hurt a lot, but eventually Elephant’s Child, with the help of the Bi-Coloured Python-Rock-Snake, pulled harder than the Crocodile, and the Crocodile let go.
Elephant’s Child was worried that his nose was badly out of shape, but the Bi-Coloured-Python- Rock-Snake pointed out that a long twitchy nose was very handy indeed. And that is why, says Mr Kipling, the elephant has a trunk to this day.