Part 20

But the elephant must still hold the first place as a beast of burden. His normal load is eight hundred pounds, so that in India he is reckoned equal to eight ponies, to five pack-mules or stout bullocks, and to three and one-third of a camel. Next to the elephant in general usefulness we should be inclined to place the “trotting ox” of India. “All Indian oxen can be trained to trot,” says Mr. Lockwood Kipling. “The sloping quarter and straight hock may possibly account for something in their more horselike gait. One of the first things to strike a stranger is the hurrying ox. The rekla, a light two-wheeled cart drawn by a pair of oxen, cheap, speedy, and convenient, is the hansom cab of the natives of Bombay. All through the Mahratta country the ox is the common draught-animal, differing in speed and size according to the work for which he is required. Cattle of the Nagore breed, used by rich men to draw their state carriages, used to be kept near Delhi for carrying despatches. Mr. Youatt was informed that they would travel with a soldier on their back fifteen or sixteen miles in the day, at the rate of six miles an hour. The Nagore cattle have none of the awkward swinging motion of the legs of the English cow. They bring their hind-legs under them in as straight a line as the horse. “They are very active,” continues Mr. Youatt, “and can clear a five-barred gate with the greatest ease.” One owner possessed a calf which would jump an iron railing higher than a gate, and a bull which would leap the same railing to go to water, and having drunk, leap back again.

Napoleon borrowed his idea of bullock transport for the first stages of his Russian campaign from the Indian army. But the Indian bullocks are shod, Napoleon’s were not, and the bullock transport was ruined before the frontier of Poland was reached. But even if this important detail had received attention, it may be doubted whether a large experiment in the use of a new beast of burden ever succeeds in an old country. Natural selection never proceeds faster than when controlled by human necessity, and though the dog may be reinstated in the tradesman’s carts, the ox continues to disappear from the dwindling area of arable land in this country.

THE SOLDIER’S CAMEL.

“BACTRIAN camels,” says Major A. Leonard in his work on the _Camel, its Uses and Management_,[14] “or those from Afghanistan, or any such cold climate, would thrive just as well in a re-mount depôt in England as they do at the Zoo. What in the world is to prevent their introduction into this country, and the formation of camel and mule transports? Nothing, that I can see.”

Footnote 14:

Longmans, Green and Co., London. 1874.

Major Leonard speaks with the authority of one who has spent sixteen years as a transport officer, and if the suggestion which he makes, based as it is on the observation of the good health and long lives enjoyed by the northern camels at the Zoological Gardens, be adopted by the War Office, the original intention of the founders of the Society, to make their Gardens an example of what was possible in the way of acclimatization, would be fulfilled in an unexpected quarter.

The reason for Major Leonard’s suggestion is to be found in the failure in the management of our camel transport in war-time. The natural liking of Englishmen for domestic animals of all kinds is quite equalled by the skill they usually show in their management. Yet the sufferings of our transport animals in war are such as at any other time would cause a pang to the national conscience. It is a fact that the feeling of humanity, which will not tolerate the overcrowding of a cattle-ship, is scarcely shocked when, as in the Afghan War, twenty-thousand camels perish, mainly from mismanagement, or when a transport officer can write of the fate of those creatures in the Nile Expedition—“Seeing, as I have done, hundreds and thousands of camels die from sheer exhaustion, brought on by neglect and ill-treatment, arising from down-right stupidity, obstinacy, and ignorance, is enough to make one ashamed of having had any connection with the business.” The push across the Bayuda Desert was a race against time; yet it hardly seems consonant with the usual fairness of Englishmen to their “mounts,” that of the thousand camels used, probably not one survived the treatment it received; and Count Gleichen, writing after service with the Camel Corps throughout the war, says, “I am afraid we looked upon them as mere machines for carrying, and hardly thought of their sufferings from hunger and thirst as long as they could be whacked along.” This was after the battle of Metemmeh. Of the same example of cruel and disastrous mismanagement Sir C. Rivers Wilson says—“The camels had been without water for from six to seven days, having been accustomed to water every second or third day. They were on one-third rations, which they did not always get. For thirty-seven hours they were tied down so tightly in the zeribah before Abu Klea, that they could not move a limb, and I doubt if they were fed at all during that time. Then for sixteen hours they were on the march, and tied down for another twenty-four hours without any food. The result almost justified the saying, that we thought we had found in the camel an animal which required neither food, drink, nor rest; we certainly acted as if the camel were a piece of machinery.” Except during the time of battle, all this cruelty to the animals and waste of mobility in the force was unnecessary. The so-called “desert” was full of food and well supplied with water. On the day before the retreat from Metemmeh, a camel convoy of the friendly Kababish came in across the desert in perfect condition. “It made my mouth water,” writes an officer, “to see these magnificent, well-fed brutes swinging along, each with its load balanced on its hump.” His own beast had holes in its skin into which you could have put a cocoa-nut. Read in the light of these facts, the inimitable ballad in which Mr. Rudyard Kipling sums up the miseries of the commissariat-camel, and the incompetence of the uninstructed British private to manage it, is an invitation to substitute common-sense and kindness for ignorance and cruelty in the treatment of the four-footed army which helps to fight our battles.

Major Leonard has been engaged in this service in Afghanistan, South Africa, India, and the Soudan. That is in itself a credential for his book; for no one not possessed of an equable and reflective temper could have gone through his experiences and yet be enthusiastic over his branch of the profession, and, above all, over what he justly calls that “little-known and strangely unsympathetic animal,” the camel. Yet Major Leonard’s practical experience leads him to the conclusion that, of all transport animals, it is the best for military use in the East. Incidentally, he gives us an historical note on Mr. Rudyard Kipling’s immortal ballad on the Commissariat Camel—

“The driver question in Afghanistan was enough to appal the heart of the stoutest transport officer. They deserted, and soldiers had to be told off to act as drivers. On December 20, 1878, I had to leave 161 bags of Commissariat stores on the ground, many of the drivers having deserted, and taken their camels with them. This is a common trick of the Sind drivers. They go back by a circuitous route, and in many cases—it is said—are re-engaged by the Commissariat.”

The place assigned to the camel in this estimate need not raise any bright ideal of the creature as a travelling companion. Mr. R. Kipling’s remark, that you might as well lavish your affections on a luggage-van as on a camel, still holds good. But there is a balance in favour of the camel when compared with other Oriental beasts of burden. The experiences of a single march, noted by Major Leonard, gives a glimpse of the comparative “cussedness” of different transport animals, which is as fresh as it is amusing. The occasion was the advance of the Candahar force from Quetta in the last Afghan War. At the crossing of the river Lora, at the foot of the Kojak-Amran range, the camels were swallowed up wholesale in the quicksands, owing entirely to their extraordinary stupidity. We quote this incident first, because the one serious drawback to the use of the camel consists precisely in this strange insensibility to danger—

“The river was not very broad, and not more than two feet deep in any part of the stream; but the bed was full of quicksands, in whose treacherous depths many an unfortunate camel perished. It is only natural to suppose, that by sheer force of example an ordinarily intelligent animal would have learnt to avoid the danger, by seeing those which preceded it sinking deeper and deeper out of sight. Yet these camels plodded steadily on into the quicksands, though those which had preceded them were disappearing so fast that in many cases only their necks and heads were visible.”

Not a single horse, elephant, or mule, was lost in this way in crossing the ford, and they one and all displayed a marked and consistent caution which was clearly the result of reason—

“One elephant, which the officer commanding the 6-11 Battery of the Royal Artillery lent to assist in extricating some camels which were being engulfed in the quicksands, showed an amount of sagacity which was positively marvellous. It was with the utmost difficulty that we could get him to go near enough to attach a drag-rope to one camel I wanted to rescue. In spite of our being about fifty yards from the bank of the river, he evinced the greatest anxiety, while his movements were made with extreme caution. Despite coaxing, persuasive remonstrance, and at last a shower of heavy blows dealt upon his head by the exasperated mahout, this elephant stubbornly refused to go where he was wanted, but, with his trunk shoved out in front of him, kept feeling his way with his ponderous feet, placing them before him slowly, deliberately, and methodically, treading all the while with the velvety softness of a cat, and taking only one step at a time. Then suddenly he would break out into a suppressed kind of shriek, and retreat backwards in great haste. When the animal had nearly completed a circuit of the ground with the same caution and deliberation, he advanced to within ten yards of the poor camel, but not another inch would he move, though several men were walking between him and the camel without any signs of the ground giving way.”

But if the camel is too mechanical, the elephant is too soft for the hardships of the baggage train or rough country. He requires good roads, a temperate climate, and meals not only “regular,” but luxurious. Ten elephants out of eleven reached Candahar safely in 1878, on a diet of chapatties, rice, sugar, and two bottles of rum apiece after their supper. No wonder “the faces of the men, and their remarks, as they looked on with watering mouths and overpowering envy, were worthy of a camp-ballad by Rudyard Kipling.” Yet this is, we submit, an error on the right side, both in economy and efficiency. Which cost most, the elephants’ comforts on the road to Candahar, or the ninety-two camels which dropped from exhaustion and hunger on the first day’s march back from Metemmeh, where the day before 50,000 lbs. weight of stores had been flung into the Nile? The “patient ox” combines the cunning of the mule with a spirit of revenge which is generally attributed to the camel, though Count Gleichen states, that only one case of camel-bite was reported to him during the Nile expedition. A leading bullock on the Candahar march lay down six times, and when it was at last reluctantly agreed that the creature must be dying from exhaustion, it “rushed at a private and tossed him ten feet in the air, then on to the next man and sent him flying, and lastly at its own driver, whom it tumbled over like a ninepin, while the rest took refuge behind the wagons.” The creature would not move in harness, and finally had to be unyoked and driven into camp. The mule is the handiest and hardiest, the donkey the least trouble, and the pony the pleasantest of all pack animals, according to Major Leonard’s experience, the Spanish donkeys and Sicilian mules being perhaps the finest and most useful of their respective kinds. But though military opinion is, on the whole, in favour of the mule, he gives facts and figures to show that the camel, unmanaged as it is, is a still more economical and effective beast for military service. Its power of enduring hunger and thirst is greater, it carries double the load of two mules, needs fewer drivers, is never shod, and costs less to buy and less to keep; for food and water have to be carried for miles in desert country, while the camel browses on almost any shrub, and can make the ordinary caravan march from well to well.

This opinion must not rest on general considerations, for the good working example of the comparative efficiency of the two animals in a campaign is obtainable. Lord Roberts, on his march from Cabul to Candahar, covered a daily average of fourteen and a half miles for nineteen days. This was done with mules and ponies, the camels belonging to the regiments being exchanged for the former. In the Bayuda Desert the camels travelled thirty-four miles daily in the first march; and allowing for the two days’ rest and two of fighting, nearly thirty miles a day in the second march of two hundred miles. But in this case the camels were starved, and worked to death. The difference between the careful treatment of the cavalry horse—Marbot’s reminiscences of his life as a cavalry officer must have opened the eyes of many readers to the practical anxieties of that profession—and the ignorant neglect of the camel suggests a doubt whether the Englishman is really so adaptable as we are pleased to think. The two hundred pages which Major Leonard devotes to instruction in feeding, watering, loading, doctoring, equipping, and purchasing camels, contain so many “glimpses of the obvious” that the reference as to our general neglect of this indispensable animal for Asiatic warfare is irresistible.

The two great breeding grounds of the camel are the whole central zone of Asia north of the Himalayas, and the centre and northern fringe of the African Soudan. With the latter we are in touch through the frontier tribes of Egypt, and there is little doubt that we could make Egypt the nucleus of a camel transport unrivalled in the history of the world. But unless our officers and men have some training in their management, the suffering camels will continue to cause, as they have hitherto in our frontier wars, an embarrassed strategy, neglected sick, and an ill-supported soldiery. A permanent camel transport service in Egypt and on the north-west frontier of India would probably save in our next considerable war, millions of money and hundreds of soldiers’ lives.

THE CANADIAN BEAVER.

INDIAN tradition ascribes the rescue of the world from its aqueous ages to the industry and intelligence of the beaver, the animal which first learnt to control and turn to account the opposing elements of land and water. The beavers were of gigantic size, before the Great Spirit smoothed them down to their present dimensions, after they had completed his work on the unfinished earth; and they, with their fellow-workers, the musquash and the otter, dived and brought up the mud, and with it made mountains and lakes, caves and cataracts, dividing the land from the waters, while the envious spirits of evil pelted the Titan beavers with gigantic rocks, which still strew the plains and valleys with monstrous boulders of misshapen stone. If the legend needed any justification beyond its picturesqueness and simplicity, a study of Mr. Martin’s work on _The History and Traditions of the Canadian Beaver_[15] would almost bear out the Indian belief, that the intelligence and mechanical skill of the beaver were prior and superior to that of man in the development of the New World. The exaggerated descriptions of the beaver-lodges and engineering feats given by the early French Canadians, hardly deserve the author’s condemnation; the works themselves are so complete and so ingenious, that the symmetrical additions of early explorers add but little to the facts which their incomplete observations only partially grasped. That a creature whose engineering structures were based, consciously or unconsciously, on principles only known to highly civilized man, should embellish them with conveniences known to half-civilized man, was a natural inference; and to credit the beaver with a wish to insert windows in the walls of his lodge was no great flight of fancy to men who had seen with their own eyes that the same animal could construct a dyke a mile long, with the precise section which human experience has determined to be that best adapted to resist the forces of pent-up water. Mr. Martin has so well fulfilled the promise of his title-page, to present an “exhaustive monograph popularly written” on the life and history of the beaver, that an attempt to follow the varied commercial, historical, and palæontological references in which the story of the beaver abounds, would be impossible. It will, perhaps, be sufficient to consider the main questions of the extraordinary intelligence exhibited by the animal, and the possibility of its preservation from the total destruction with which the species is now threatened. So far as the most careful modern observation shows, there is but one claim which has been seriously made for the beaver’s sagacity which is matter for doubt. It has been asserted that the animal always cuts the trees it selects, so that they may fall towards the water. There is evidence that this is not _always_ the case. But trees growing near the water naturally tend to lean towards the stream, and naturally extend the heaviest growth of branches over the water, where light and space are greatest, and the greater number of those cut by the beavers would probably fall in that direction without any special provision. But the inseparable features of a beaver-colony, the dyke or “dam,” and the less famous but almost equally wonderful “canal,” suggests an estimate of brain-power or inherited instinct for mechanics which an exhaustive examination of the facts heightens rather than diminishes.

Footnote 15:

Edward Stanford: London.

The object of the dam is to supply a temporary want, not a permanent necessity always present to the beaver-mind. In summer, the beavers wander up the streams, finding food without difficulty. In winter, they require a permanent supply of water at a certain level, in which they can swim beneath the ice, store their supply of branches for food so as to be accessible without exposing themselves, and keep a “moat” round their lodges. Left to itself, the stream would run low in winter, when the freezing of the snow and earth stops the water-supply. Hence the necessity for the dam to maintain it at a constant level. Such a train of arguments supposes a number of “concepts” in the beaver’s brain which would occur to no other animal. To carry it out efficiently would puzzle most human beings not acquainted with engineering. Moreover, the work must be done with the material at hand, so that beaver-dams are found built of branches and mud, of grass, of sand, and of mud only. To get the wood to the water-side, the beaver clears paths, or “rolling-ways,” cuts a water-channel to meet and assist in the transportation of the wood, and in some cases actually makes a long canal for water-carriage and safe travelling. “Though the beaver-canal is not so popularly known,” writes Mr. Martin, “and is more easily reconciled with instinct, it must not be supposed that it is a minor feature in the performances of this animal; it is almost incredible that a work, so apparently artificial, could have remained unnoticed till 1868, when Mr. Morgan published his valuable notes, so amply illustrating the works of the American beaver. When the colony has been settled quietly for many years, and has cut all the desirable trees close at hand, and further supplies are sometimes hundreds of yards away, the necessity for clear rolling-ways and good canals is obvious.” No doubt the necessity is obvious, but that does not explain the wonder that a small rodent animal should anticipate civilized man, and make a road to bring commodities to its city, instead of shifting to a fresh encampment like the Red Indian himself when supplies are exhausted. Our estimate of the _individual_ intelligence of beavers must greatly depend on the power of adaptation shown by them in special cases. Mr. Martin seems to lean to the opinion that the creature is controlled by a dominant instinct, which makes its action almost automatic, and alleges this want of adaptability as an insurmountable obstacle to its domestication. The instances given of its behaviour in captivity hardly justify such a conclusion. A tame beaver, kept as a pet in a trapper’s hut, “used to lie before the fire as contentedly as a dog. It was not till winter set in that it became a nuisance. Poor old Bill McHugh’s house was well ventilated, an open chink between the logs being thought very little of by himself and his family; but the beaver was very impatient of such negligence, and used to work all night at making things air-tight and comfortable, without much discrimination as to the materials it employed. If Bill or his guests went to bed leaving their moccasins and tichigans drying before the fire, they were certain to be found in the morning stowed away in some chink or cranny; and stray blankets and articles of clothing were found torn up for the same purpose.” That was contrary to our notions of housekeeping, but the beaver’s wish to keep out the cold was not more “instinctive” than that of any squatter’s wife on a Surrey heath. The preparations made to meet the severe cold of the winter of 1890 by the beavers at the “Zoo” in Regent’s Park were an odd mixture of cleverness and what seems too like the stupidity of “instinct.” Their “lodge” was partly their own building, and partly “subsidized” by the authorities. That is, it had a roof of corrugated iron supported by strong posts at the corners. The sides were carefully built up with branches set on end by the beavers themselves, and well plastered with mud, which they push in with their fore-paws and pat down hard. They not only carried the plaster up to the “eaves” of the house, but patted a quantity of mud down on the iron roof, a quite unnecessary labour, except on the assumption that there were joints in it which require filling. The whole was crowned with a pile of branches, which served no useful purpose. Last year these beavers dug a canal from the stone-rimmed pond to one of the burrows running under their house. We were not able to see whether it actually joined the pond, or whether the rim of stone which divided it from the pool at the surface was continued downwards. In any case, they had managed to fill the canal with water, and had a clear waterway from the house to the edge of the pool. They were also busy cutting through a poplar stem; the largest chip of wood lying at its foot measured 3½ in. Another stump was being carefully gnawed into fine sawdust, which was probably intended for bedding.