Once again I returned home, hot, sweaty, and tired. My skin caked with the orange dust that I have to walk through every day. My stomach craving anything to eat, whether it be a piece of corn or a banana. The sun beat down as my colleagues and I as we were lead back to our temporary shelter by our bosses. Chang Mai, my hometown, is where I have lived all my life. I have had no family that I can recall, and the only conversations that I have with my colleagues is debating what it’s like beyond the trees of our workplace. I often yearn to see the outside world, when I’m resting from work I often gaze up at the sky or through the forest. We have heard many tales of life beyond our workplace. Tales of a great paradise where everyone lives free, with no rules and no one to follow. Many have heard and told this tale, but none of us can neither confirm nor deny whether it be true or not.

Everyday at work is the same routine. We wake up, are given a small ration of food, and are lead of to work. We pull along logs all day long. With the food that we’re rationed to, even the leaves that we know to be poisonous appear tasty. Our bosses get a lunch break, yet they’re constantly watching us, giving us even less food and making us continue working. The only rest we get is at night, until the dreaded sunrise the next morning.

Every night however, we keep talking about revolting. Our lives are so miserable, so unfair, that we’re not only driven to exhaustion, but near to insanity. In spite of this, we continue working for those ungrateful men that give us little food and treat us inhumanely. One day though, our chief, our worker who keeps us together and makes sure that we’re ok, passes on. Our bosses kept beating him when he didn’t cooperate, and he’d been hiding his wounds from us. We all grieved for the rest of the day, yet none of us wanted to end up like him, so we continued working for those who killed one of our kind.

That night, as we were all sharing our favourite memories of our chief, we spotted our men braking off his spears. This completely outraged us; to us our spears were our pride. A symbol of who we were. When we were young they often broke the end of our spear off to prevent us harming them, but taking them away from a dead colleague was unbelievable. We knew our spear were worth a lot to the men in a monetary fashion, just as they were a symbol of who we were to us. At that moment we finally rallied up the courage together to take the men out and to run free. We were after all, bigger and greater in number than they were. We all ran forth and attacked the men, striking them down with our spears. It took them a while to realise what was happening. They all grabbed their own spears and sticks and tried to intimidate us into running back to our shelter or giving up. But we had had enough of it. We had run out of tolerance for the pain and suffering they had put us through. After enough of them had fallen, those left finally retreated into the forest to wherever they had come from. We all were overjoyed. The best part about it was that no more of us had died during a short skirmish. Some of those who we thought we had felled in time rose and ran away in shock of being left behind by his comrades to us.

As the sun rose soon after the conflict, we gathered up what we had and set of through the forest. Just before we left I had a brainwave. I rushed back to the shelter and gathered up our chief’s spears. When we finally exited the forest we saw what awaited us. It seemed those tales we had heard countless times were true. We had arrived at a haven for us. There was no one else here. No one to make rules or commands that you had to follow constantly. The grass was greener than anything we had seen before; the crystal clear water was as blue as the sky at the peak of the day. Food and water was plentiful, it truly was a paradise.
After we had all settled into our own territories I headed down to the riverside and chose the greenest patch of grass I could find. I lay down our chief’s spears and started digging a pit with my own. When I could no longer reach the bottom, I lay the chief’s spears on the bottom of the pit and buried them, so that his spirit would live with us, guard us, and watch over us in this dream paradise. All of my friends, no longer work colleagues, had gathered around the pit to pay their respects.
And so began our new lives. Our time of grief and suffering had ended, but our life of happiness and fortune had begun. As the life of all us elephants commenced once more I realised…I am not the tool of man.