Part 5

Perhaps the only man in the town who had a gun and did not hunt that tiger was the Sergeant-Instructor, a solitary representative of the British army, stationed in Shwegyin to drill the volunteers. And the reason why he did not go a-hunting, as everybody knew, was that Mrs Sergeant-Instructor had announced that she would go with him.

She meant it too. "Another lady" in the station had sat up with her husband. Why should she not do likewise? If a tiger fight had been the kind of thing she supposed, such as might be shown in a circus or a tournament, she would have made a magnificent second to her gallant husband, and so he admitted. If only the tiger would come openly to their door in daylight, "instead of skulking in the dark round about, like a coward," as I believe she said, Mrs Sergeant-Instructor would have done her duty, and probably a good deal more. And she undoubtedly was disgusted with "the man's poor spirit." But every man in the station knew better. As an officer whispered to me: "What would be the use of the man sitting up with Mrs Sergeant-Instructor? She could not hold her tongue five minutes, not to speak of hours."

Nevertheless, there was chaff enough at first, which it was hard for him to bear until, in time, the continual failures of experienced hunters, magistrates and foresters, policemen and soldiers and others, became a consolation.

"Ah, the target is easier to see than a tiger," he would murmur, when scoring at the range.

The range was a clearing in the forest on low ground, upon the municipal boundary, a clearing of about 100 yards wide and 600 long.

One morning the Sergeant-Instructor went to it alone, with a rifle in his hand and two or three cartridges in his pocket. "As a kind of object for the morning's walk," he explained, "I meant to fire a shot at the range, to make sure I had got the rifle springs right. It was a bit stiff last Sunday. I had been working at it, to diminish the pull-off."

As you descend to the range from the main road, you first arrive at the 600 yards' station, the butts being at the farthest end; and this morning, "seeing all clear," said he, "I just lay down at 600 yards, and decided to take the shot from there, without going any farther.

"So I shifted about as usual, till I was lying comfortably, and adjusted my sights, and took aim; and then, just before pulling the trigger, I cast my eyes to windward, to the left as it happened, to see what the trees were like, and whether my allowance for the breeze was right. As I was looking at the trees on my left, I saw the tiger come out and walk across the range, to go between me and the target. I was glad there was nobody there. There was no time to talk. It did not hurry, so to speak, but went fast over the ground, fast and straight, like a man going to catch a train, with no time to lose, but too big a bug to run--you know the kind of thing."

"Like a man going over a level-crossing?"

"You might say that, but he did not look up and down. He stared straight in front of him, and I am sure he did not see me at all, or look to see anything on either side."

"Like the ideal Christian pilgrim, not looking right or left?"

The Sergeant seemed puzzled. He had not noticed anything pious about it. So I tried again.

"Like a dog after game? Perhaps he was after something?"

"That's it, that's it. I'm sure he had sport in sight."

"Preoccupied, so to speak?"

"Very much so. You know there are always cattle grazing on the far side of the range. He was hard at them. I just had time to shoot and no more. I noticed he would cross at 300 yards, and, doing everything as fast as I could, I lowered my sights, and aimed, and fired. He dropped, and never moved, and ... here he is...."

It had been a fine tiger, in the prime of life; and, as doctors say after a post-mortem, the corpse had all the appearance of having been extremely well nourished. Death was the result of a sudden failure of the heart's action, due to violence.

The Sergeant-Instructor had scored a bull's-eye.

XI

A LESSON FROM THE WATER BUFFALO

1. THE BUFFALO AND THE SKUNK

When the Philippinos tell you now of the swagger of the Spaniards, which was the sorest of the sorrows that drove them into revolt, they often mention that the Spaniards called them "water buffaloes."

"To call you geese would have been kind in comparison?"

"Oh, quite polite!"

Indeed the water buffalo known to us in Burma, also, is not smart at all. Slow, heavy and dull, amphibious in his habits, he moves like a very fat pig, with almost less agility. Slipping through the muddy slush, in the sleekness of his prime, he looks almost "like a whale?" Yes, round enough for that, and almost like a little whale, except for his awkwardness, for his legs are not yet atrophied or sea-changed, and he has only his legs to move by; and also except--a big exception--his huge horns. These are extended like the arms of a gesticulating orator or other creature that flings his arms wide and turns up his hands; but never were arms flung out so gracefully as those horns, with a sweep like that of a scythe or scimitar, symmetrical and pointed. They lie on the back, when the owner lifts its nose to sniff the wind, harmless and out of the way, like a sword in its sheath. There is nothing ornamental about them, any more than about the Forth Bridge; and yet so beautiful is fitness that perhaps no bovine head has finer ornaments.

It always surprises one to see how cool the beast remains with these exclamatory horns. But it is these very horns that let him remain cool and at leisure in the haunted woods. From tigers down, all possible enemies are afraid of them. So the Burman water buffalo never needs to hasten; and, like a gentleman of independent means, not needing to exert himself, grows slow. His gait is dignified. His mind is dull.

This is not rhetorical conjecture, but natural history. Every healthy, living organism is harmonious, meaning all of a piece, such as men try to make their pictures and songs, and everything else they want to make well; and this particular collocation of cause and effect might be illustrated and proved by many modern instances.

Not to be offensive to our fellow-men, who in every country exhibit the same tendency; averting our gaze from all who are happy in "having something else than their brains to depend upon"; avoiding politics, which is a legitimate field of natural history, but obscured by vapours which make observation difficult, let us take the skunk--not meaning any kind of men, who are really miscalled skunks, for they have none of the beast's qualities but one, and in general have the nimbleness of rats--let us come among the animals and candidly consider the four-legged skunk.

He is a little beast, no bigger than a house cat, and lives, as puss would do in the woods, on worms and insects and mice and birds and such small game. But he is not nimble, like the cat, or fox, or any other hunting and hunted creature. He is as leisurely as the water buffalo, and as careless of observation in the wildest country as a dog in a farmer's yard. However hungry, the bigger beasts of prey, whose natural food he might seem to be, prefer to leave him alone. The fact is that he can make himself be smelt in a sickening way for nearly a mile off; and so "the skunk," according to an observer, "goes leisurely along, holding up his white tail as a danger-flag, for none to come within range of his nauseous artillery."

"Call me a skunk?" a man might say, "I wish I were, sometimes." There is perhaps no kind of life that is not worth living; so we need not wonder that there is something to envy in the skunk. The water buffalo is a perfect gentleman, compared to him; but the same security against enemies has produced in both the same leisurely habits. The horns protect the buffalo, and are at once his weapon and his danger-flag.

2. HUNTING THE BUFFALO

On the last day of 1908, in a morning walk at Myaungmya, Lower Burma, I met two acquaintances, Messrs Dunn and M'Kenzie, riding home. They had elected to enjoy their Christmas holidays a-hunting, and been away for several days.

"Hunting what?"

"Buffalo."

"I believe the buffalo is a dangerous beast to tackle."

They looked at each other in a way that showed they had an adventure to tell. They had gone with another European and a crowd of followers to a muddy island in the delta, where a wild bull buffalo lived. They had failed to find him, and were all walking carelessly away, when he accidentally met them. The sight of a mob where he had lived alone, like Robinson Crusoe, startled the old bull, and he charged. Then magistrates, policemen and followers stampeded in many directions. With the instinct inherited from our forgotten arboreal ancestors, the fugitives sought refuge in the trees; but the trees were too small to lift them above the reach of the horns, and one or more would have been killed if Mr Dunn had not stumbled and fallen in the mud. This stopped the buffalo, which tried to pick him up, but could not do it, as he had the sense to lie flat. So it passed on; and Dunn then crawled to where his servant had dropped his gun, and recovered it, and shot the buffalo.

3. TAMING THE BUFFALO

This adventure shows how easily lives might be lost in hunting the wild buffalo, about which the herdsmen who know him best have told me what should, perhaps, be better known, were it only to prevent misunderstandings. There is not the slightest need for war between buffaloes and us. They are not natural enemies, like the tiger. They are not even troublesome to tame, like the deer.

"Though terrible to kill, they are easy to catch," say the herdsmen familiar with their haunts. "You have only to decoy them into a pen, and once there they can sell for a price at once, like those born in the village. They are more valuable," said one herdsman.

"But the taming?"

"That's nothing. Let them starve till they are weak. Then feed them up, slowly. Make them feel they are being fed by men."

"They can see that."

"No, for you generally bandage their eyes. You have to speak to them and not leave them to eat as if they found the food themselves. Let them know they owe it to you."

"You don't think of that at all," said another man. "Neither do they. This is what happens. There's generally a lot of them, like a herd. Some would be dead, before others were weak. If you just flung the food in anyhow, the weaklings would be the last to get it. You keep an eye on them, so as not to lose any; and whenever you see that one is weak, you feed that one."

"It comes to the same thing," rejoined the man who spoke first. "They learn that men are their friends, and then they'll do anything you want."

"Do they work willingly?"

"Who ever did? They do what they have to, like other people. A buffalo is so mighty that he hardly needs to make an effort to pull the plough. The one new caught and tamed does as well as the rest."

"Why is he worth more?"

"He isn't," said the other man, quoting figures. An argument followed, and in the end they agreed. A newly-tamed herd might sell for less per head than village-born cattle, if the wild ones caught included more old animals and calves. Compare contemporaries, and the wild one is the better.

"Why?"

Various reasons were suggested, including one that was oddly expressed. "The wild animal is the more vigorous, because he has never been spoiled by working. Think how different I would have been if I had never had to work for my living!"

This was absurd. Till we came here, with our commercial creed that money makes the man, education in Burma was universal and free to the poor, and, however it be in England, where factory workers breed in slums and breathe polluted air, in Burma the working man lives mostly in the fields, and is sturdier, and often more sensible, than the idler. The herdsmen reluctantly admitted this; and it led to a digression.

In a Socratic way, I explained the gospel of work, with half-and-half acceptance as long as I quoted only Chinese maxims and examples; but, happening to hint that the English also had that to teach the East, I spoiled the lesson. There was a general laugh. "When do the English work?" Then one asked the other: "Did you ever see an Englishman working?" They said to each other that the only Englishmen who worked were one or two, whom the others did not speak to, but treated like the Pagoda-slaves of native Burma. We returned to the buffaloes.

"Why is the wild one the better?"

"He is stronger, and fresher, and quieter."

"Quieter?"

"Yes. He thinks of men, women and children as his feeders, and will never hurt anybody, and a little child can lead him."

"A child can drive the village cattle."

"The wild ones tamed are safest of all." (It should be noted that the domestic buffalo is dangerous occasionally, and people are sometimes hurt or killed by them.)

"Don't they notice that men caught them?"

"They're not clever enough for that."

"Don't they try to escape?"

"Never. Why should they? They have all they want. It is our business to keep them contented, and it's easy."

"Their calves are at times obstreperous," a man added, after a pause, and the others agreed, but said, "All you need do, at the worst, is to cut their horns, that is, cut off the tips."

"Why not do that to all the calves? There's somebody killed or hurt by buffaloes every year in Burma."

"The glory of a buffalo is his horns. It would be wrong, because it would not be natural to blunt them. We would never do it unless we could not help it, when a particular beast is bad."

"It's too much bother, I suppose."

"No, it's easy. But it does not look natural. The buffalo with his horns blunted is disfigured, and seems to feel it."

"No, no, it's not natural at all," said one after the other, with emphasis.

"How do you hunt the buffalo?"

"We never hunt the buffalo. No Burman ever did. At any rate, none ever does now. It is much safer and easier to catch and tame them; and it pays better."

A buffalo went by as our talk was ending; and on its withers was sitting a little boy of six or seven years of age, drumming merrily on its broad neck with his heels. At sight of us, he signified to it, by slaps and shouts, to move aside, so as not to splash us; and the big buffalo gently obeyed.

XII

THE BUFFALO AND THE CROCODILE

When the rains have all run off, and the snows of Central Asia have not begun to melt, about the middle of the dry weather, the Irrawaddy, our Burman Mississippi, runs its lowest; and in such places as Magwe, a district on the road to Mandalay, the sandbanks are conspicuous. In 1894 there was, as there often is, a sandbank in Magwe district that, starting from the eastern bank, like a dam, athwart the current, bent down the stream, like a breakwater at sea, enclosing a natural harbour between it and the bank. This little harbour was shoaled at its southern or open end by the silting sands in the water eddying there; but for most of its length it was deep enough to be as comfortable for the cattle as if the whole enclosure had been made for their convenience.

It was all a big buffalo-wallow one afternoon that year (1894). One after another, scores of long-horned buffaloes had subsided into it, like submarines, leaving little but their nostrils on the surface. Men and women stood about on the bank, and children were bathing at the water's edge. Suddenly a splashing drew all eyes. It takes much to excite a buffalo. Even their manner of fighting is more than elephantine. I stood and watched a duel among them lately (1908), but never will again. It was perhaps the most leisurely battle that human being could endure to watch. But there, in 1894, men stared in wonder at a huge cow-buffalo splashing distractedly southwards from the extreme upper end of the pool. They soon saw she was chasing a crocodile that was carrying off her calf. Finding herself distanced in the water, she took to the shore, and galloped like a cart-horse in a hurry.

"I don't know," said an onlooker, "whether we could have reached the shoal in time to be of any use, but when we saw the old cow going like that, we thought it best to stand aside."

This was wise. The buffalo is enormous, and might easily kill a man by inadvertence, and a big crocodile, such as they said this was, though not so overwhelming, is otherwise dangerous. It does not seem to have been ascertained how old a crocodile can be. It seems to live to a great age, once it passes safely through the dangers of adolescence, and to continue growing bigger the longer it lives, like a tree. In Arakan I had seen some Indian coins that had ceased to be current for about a century, and were then, in 1893, recovered from the stomach of a patriarchal crocodile. The likeliest guess was that he had got this trouble in his stomach--for such it probably was to him--by eating one of the corpses that furnished such plenteous feeding to his tribe in the wars in Arakan, more than a century before. There was nothing certain, of course, except the age of the coins and the fact that they were found in his stomach, and he might have eaten another beast that had eaten the corpse, or he might have recently dined upon an Arakanese archæologist, but it is at least as likely that he had been suffering--if he suffered--a hundred years, for the headlong gluttony of youth.

A Sanskrit proverb runs:

When lion and striped tiger fight a bout, It's best to leave these two to fight it out.

So the Burmans felt as they watched the march of events:

When buffalo and crocodile debate, The thing for man to do is--stand and wait.

They had not to wait long.

"It was the nicest thing I ever saw in my life," said a man to me, his voice almost trembling with enthusiasm months afterwards. "I never heard tell of a thing like it. She went along the bank like a dog, in spite of her size. We ran to see better. Some say she made for the water, when she came abreast of the crocodile, but seeing the crocodile go by, drew back and galloped on again. I did not see that. We all saw the finish. She took the water at the shoal and stood waiting, like a cat. Of course the cattle knew the place, but fancy the old cow reflecting that the crocodile would need to cross the shoal to reach deep water.

"At first, while she stood waiting, we thought she was too late, as the enemy had gone below the surface, but soon we saw the stiff-necked crocodile, not looking round, slowly dragging the calf and itself over the sand, in front of the old cow. Ha, ha! She waited for the right moment, just like a cat; then charged, like a buffalo; and then we saw the great crocodile wriggling high in the air, spitted and tossed as easily as if it had been only a puppy. The horns both went clean through the middle of its body, and came out again."

I forget the fate of the calf, but they told me the taste of the crocodile's flesh. The nicest bits were near the tail. So I know that the crocodile died.

XIII

A NEST OF CROCODILES

In 1893 and 1894 I was Deputy Commissioner of Kyaukpyu district, which means the islands of Ramri and Cheduba, and smaller isles adjoining, and an adjacent strip of the malarious coast of Arakan. The headquarters was in the north of Ramri, and, sitting in my house there, one evening early in 1894, I heard an unusual clamour at the door. There was audibly somebody having an altercation with my servants.

I went to see and hear. It was a fisherman from a far-off corner of the district. Till shortly before then the Government had paid rewards for the destruction of crocodiles and their eggs; and so this man, on finding a nest of crocodile's eggs, put them in a bushel basket and started with it for headquarters. He was nearly there before he heard that these eggs were no more paid for. Loath to lose his labour, he finished his journey and tried to sell them in the bazaar. There was a sensation. He had to run.

The people cried to him that he must not sleep in the town till he got rid of them. "Fling them into the sea," they said; but he was most unwilling. "Hope springs eternal in the human breast." Perhaps it was a lie that rewards were no longer paid? One never can tell what to believe. He decided to try to speak to the Deputy Commissioner before flinging the eggs away.

I heard his story, and told him it was true that rewards were paid no more; but I pitied the man and bought the nest from him, basket and all, paying him liberally. It is needful to mention the liberality of the payment to explain what followed.

"Take it upstairs."

The servants were men, of course, not women; yet they shuddered and drew back, each pushing another forward.

"I'll carry it for you!" cried the happy fisherman; "is it into the bedroom you want me to take it?"

"Put it on the front verandah."

The servants surveyed it from a distance. The eggs were in colour like hen's eggs, and about twice the size. They were longer, but hardly at all thicker, and peculiar only in being of the same size at both ends. Some scores of them were embedded in mud, with roots of reeds and grass; but there is no reason to suppose, as has been done, that the crocodile which laid the eggs had mixed the grasses with the mud. How could she, stiff-necked as she is, and unhandy? The mud so mixed would be the readiest available where the eggs were laid, between wind and water in a shallow tidal creek. That was where the fisherman said that he found them. The heat of the sun is what hatches them. Part of the day they lie bare to it or almost bare, and for the rest of the time they are covered by water which the sun has warmed. In such an incubator the heat of the rotting grass would matter no more than a lucifer match in a furnace. Of course, all life does hang upon the sun, but the unhatched crocodiles depend on it directly, and might make out a better title to celestial parentage than anyone I know, not even excepting the Emperor of Japan.

The servants remained alarmed. It was probably at their instigation that a carpenter came to see if he was not wanted to make a wooden wall to screen the verandah where the eggs were from the rest of the house. When bidden make anything he liked, if willing to be paid for it by two or three young crocodiles, he hastily retreated. The beasts have a bad name in Arakan. There, as in Egypt, they do eat people occasionally, but there is nothing else against them.

Another device of the servants was to keep the dogs beside the nest and feed them there. "To give us warning when the crocodiles come out," they said, "so that we may let you know." There was no doubt that the little dears were on their way--too far on their way to let me blow any of the eggs successfully. I did blow one or two, but the holes made by the departing contents were too big. The shells were not worth keeping.

The dogs were not needed after all. A number of visitors were sitting and standing around the nest on the morning when the great moment came, and the eggs atop began to open like popcorns. From every opening shell there leapt a baby crocodile, span-long but perfect, as nimble as a rat and desperately hungry. No wonder! Think of the food they needed to swell them to the size of their mighty parent.

It was difficult to study them. Whatever noise they made was drowned in the clamour of the visitors and servants; and they themselves, to the number of about half a dozen, were soon drowned in whisky, as the best substitute for the spirits of wine which had not arrived. Their little corpses may still be seen in Glasgow Museum, I suppose. At least, I sent them to it for a sepulchre. The rest, and all their unhatched brethren, found a more common grave in a hole that was ready for them in the garden.