The “trip” To The Elephant Graveyard takes the reader on a wild ride through a region of northeastern India. Tarquin Hall is a British journalist based in New Delhi India, who thinks he’s following a juicy story about corrupt government officials permitting elephants to be hunted and shot legally in India. However, that isn’t the story that he finds when he travels to a remote corner of India to follow the elephant hunter on the trail of a rogue elephant. What he finds are fascinating individuals with a variety of motives, cultures and backgrounds, most of them claiming some degree of reverence for the elephant. Yet, almost all of these men are in some sort of conflict with the elephants.

I found myself laughing aloud and feeling the need to share paragraphs from this book with companions, but it is the sense of adventure as the killer is tracked that draws the reader on through the story. Along the way the reader is treated to glimpses of cultures so foreign, both to the British author and the American reader, as to be truly astonishing. The author’s curiosity draws him (and the reader) into places from which he draws the interesting background details that make this book such a fascinating view of this remote section of India.

Befriended by the head mahout, or elephant trainer, Mr. Hall is permitted to ride along with the Elephant Squad – a team of mahouts and their elephants who patrol the edge of the forested area helping to drive the wild elephants back into the forest during the farmer’s harvest which the wild elephants like to raid. He encounters the regional revolutionaries who seem less concerned with overthrowing the government than with making money through extortion and kidnapping. He meets and photographs Park Officials who have made a name for themselves by living up to their claim that for each white rhino shot by a poacher they will shoot 3 poachers. He also finds time to meet with people as diverse as an English plantation owner and a Hindu monk committed to ridding the region of its western influences. All of these people help to paint a picture of the complexity of the cultures that interact in the Assam state India. But the book focuses not just on the people, but on the elephants. Through Hall’s eyes we see the endearing and surprisingly intelligent domesticated elephants that the Elephant Squad ride and the beauty of the wild elephants that they try to protect. No doubt, there are many books that go into these topics in much greater depth, and indeed he cites many, but I doubt that many of them are as much fun to read.

To the Elephant Graveyard is the second book by this British journalist about his adventures. His first book was entitled Mercenaries, Missionaries and Misfits: Adventures of an Underaged Journalist.