The Beasts as Heroes

BANDOOLA (256 pp.) -- J. H. Williams --Doubleday ($3.50).

COORINNA (181 pp.) -- Erie Wilson --Random House ($2.75).

Modern literature is well-stocked with humans who act like beasts; two new books feature beasts who act almost human. Bandoola stars a Burmese elephant, Coorinna a Tasmanian wolf. Both are good company, but Bandoola has the edge since it tells the engaging true story of the most notable work elephant in modern Burmese history, as pieced together and witnessed by James H. (Elephant Bill] Williams. Bandoola's onetime overseer.

Author Williams introduces his hero right in the maternity ward. A calving elephant has an "auntie" or sister elephant who helps pick a lying-in spot: Bandoola's mother and auntie picked a site near a river bend with a giant tree for shade and seven-foot elephant grass for fodder. The night before Bandoola was born, the two elephants trampled the grass round the tree till they flattened an area the size of a circus ring.

The next day's sun rose on a miserable little newcomer to the animal kingdom. Baby Bandoola's trunk was a stunted snout that he could barely move, his forehead and back were matted with long wavy hair, and his skin was a loud purple. Within 48 hours he got a grim hint of the deadliest fact of a young elephant's life, a tiger in attack. Clawed and trumpeting, his auntie bolted, but his torn and bleeding mother sheltered him like a slab of concrete till the "oozies" came.

Pioneering Po Toke. Oozies are the natives who train, ride and care for working elephants. Bandoola's oozie was called Po Toke. At first Po Toke had little to do. Elephants mature slowly, take five years to be weaned, another eleven before they can begin to pull and haul heavy teak logs from the hills to the rivers. Author Williams gives Po Toke credit for two pioneering firsts that changed the course of elephant training: 1) Bandoola was the first Burmese work elephant reared from birth in captivity; 2) he was trained with kindness. Previous trainers captured grown elephants and tamed them to their tasks by breaking their spirits. Once past his prankish teens, Bandoola began racking up work records that made him famed in the Burma of the '20s, '30s and '40s. In one season, he extracted 300 tons of teak and pushed and dragged it an average distance of two miles from stump to floating stream.

Like all Burmese work elephants, Bandoola was mobilized in World War II and helped build the Burma Road. His end came suddenly and mysteriously. One day in 1945, Author Williams found him dead, with a 30-caliber bullet through his brain. To this day, he does not know Bandoola's killer, but he suspects that Po Toke, aged, ailing and unwilling to trust his beloved Bandoola to another oozie, fired the fatal shot.

Winning Devil. Coorinna, unlike Bandoola, poses as a novel, but is really a straight bit of nature reporting by Erie Wilson, a "volunteer ranger under the New South Wales Fauna Protection Panel." His hero, Coorinna, is a rare breed of marsupial wolf, now nearly extinct. The life and times of Coorinna are largely a matter of fighting to eat and eating to fight. A sly and winning devil, Coorinna meets a violent end, but not before Author Wilson can treat him and the reader to such exotic Australian fauna and flora as striped bandicoots, ti trees and brush-tongued lorikeets.

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