Part 18

“I spent nearly a week ... in the destruction of a famous man-eater, that had completely closed several roads, and was estimated to have devoured over a hundred human beings. One of these roads was the main outlet from the Bétúl teak forests, towards the railway under construction in the Harbadá valley; and the work of the sleeper-contractors was completely at a stand-still, owing to the ravages of this brute. He occupied regularly a large triangle of country between the rivers Móran and Ganjál; occasionally making a tour of destruction much further to the east and west, and striking terror into a breadth of not less than thirty or forty miles. It was therefore supposed that the devastation was caused by more than one animal; and we thought we had disposed of one of these early in April, when we killed a very cunning old tiger of evil repute after several days’ severe hunting. But I am now certain that the one I destroyed subsequently was the real malefactor, since killing again commenced after we had left, and all loss of human life did not cease till the day I finally disposed of him.

“He had not been heard of for a week or two when I came into his country, and pitched my camp in a splendid mango grove near the large village of Lokartalae, on the Móran River.

“A few days of lazy existence in this microcosm of a grove passed not unpleasantly.... In the mean time I was regaled with stories of the man-eater--of his fearful size and appearance, with belly pendent to the ground, and white moon on the top of his forehead; his pork-butcher-like method of detaining a party of travellers while he rolled himself in the sand, and at last came up and inspected them all round, selecting the fattest; his power of transforming himself into an innocent-looking woodcutter, and calling or whistling through the jungle till an unsuspecting victim approached; how the spirits of all his victims rode with him upon his head, warning him of every danger, and guiding him to the fatal ambush where a traveller would shortly pass. All the best shikáris of the country-side were collected in my camp, and the land-holders and many of the people besieged my tent morning and evening. The infant of a woman who had been carried away while drawing water at a well was brought and held up before me, and every offer of assistance in destroying the monster made. No useful help was, however, to be expected from a terror-stricken population like this. They lived in barricaded houses, and only stirred out, when necessity compelled, in large bodies, covered by armed men, and beating drums and shouting as they passed along the roads. Many villages had been utterly deserted, and the country was being slowly depopulated by a single animal. So far as I could learn, he had been killing alone for about a year--another tiger that had assisted him in his fell occupation having been shot the previous hot weather. Bétúl has always been unusually afflicted with man-eaters, the cause apparently being the great numbers of cattle that come for a limited season to graze in that country, and a scarcity of other prey at the time when these are absent, combined with the unusually convenient cover for tigers alongside of most of the roads. The man-eaters of the Central Provinces rarely confine themselves _solely_ to human food, though some have almost done so to my own knowledge.

“As soon as I could ride in the howdah [Captain Forsyth was suffering from an accident at this time], and long before I was able to do more than hobble on foot, I marched to a place called Chárkhérá, where the last kill had been reported. My usually straggling following was now compressed into a close body, preceded errand followed by baggage-elephants, and protected by a guard of police with muskets, peons with my spare guns, and a whole posse of matchlock shikáris. Two deserted villages were passed on the road, and heaps of stones at intervals showed where some traveller had been struck down. A better hunting-ground for a man-eater certainly could not be found. Thick, scrubby teak jungle closed in the road on both sides; and alongside of it for a great part of the way wound a narrow, deep watercourse, overshadowed by jámare bushes, and with here and there a small pool of water still left. I hunted along this nálá the whole way, and found many old tracks of a very large male tiger, which the shikáris declared to be those of the man-eater. There were none more recent, however, than several days. Chárkhérá was also deserted on account of the tiger, and there was no shade to speak of; but it was the most central place within reach of the usual haunts of the brute, so I encamped there, and sent the baggage-elephants back to fetch provisions. In the evening I was startled by a messenger from a place called Lá, on the Móran River, nearly in the direction I had come from, who said that one of a party of pilgrims who had been travelling unsuspectingly by a jungle road, had been carried off by the tiger close to that place. Early next morning I started off with two elephants, and arrived at the spot about eight o’clock. The man had been struck down where a small ravine leading to the Móran crosses a lonely pathway a few miles east of Lá. The shoulder-stick with its pendant baskets, in which the holy water from his place of pilgrimage had been carried by the hapless man, was lying on the ground in a dried-up pool of blood, and shreds of his clothes adhered to the bushes where he had been dragged down into the bed of the nálá.

“We tracked the man-eater and his prey into a very thick grass cover, alive with spotted deer, where he had broken up and devoured the greater part of the body. Some bones and shreds of flesh, and the skull, hands, and feet were all that remained. This tiger never returned to his victim a second time, so it was useless to found any scheme for killing him on that expectation. We took up his tracks, however, from the body, and carried them patiently down through very dense jungle to the banks of the Móran,--the trackers working in fear and trembling under the trunk of my elephant, and covered by my rifle at full cock. At the river the pugs [footprints] went out to a long spit of sand that projected into the water, where the man-eater had drunk, and then returned to a great mass of piled-up rocks at the bottom of a precipitous bank, full of caverns and recesses. This we searched with stones and some fireworks I had in the howdah, but put out nothing but a scraggy hyena, which was, of course, allowed to escape. We searched about here all day in vain, and it was not till nearly sunset that I turned and made for camp.

“It was almost dusk, when we were a few miles from home, passing along the road we had marched by the former day, and the same by which we had come out in the morning, when one of the men who was walking behind the elephant started and called a halt. He had seen the footprint of a tiger. The elephant’s tread had partly obliterated it, but further on where we had not yet gone it was plain enough,--the great square pug of the man-eater we had been looking for all day! He was on before us, and must have passed since we came out in the morning, for his track had covered that of the elephants as they came. It was too late to hope to find him that evening, and we could only proceed slowly along on the track, which held to the pathway, keeping a bright lookout. The Lállá [Forsyth’s famous tiger-hunting shikári] indeed proposed that he should go on a little ahead as a bait for the tiger, while I covered him from the elephant with my rifle. But he wound up by expressing a doubt whether his skinny corporation would be a sufficient attraction, and suggested that a plump young policeman, who had taken advantage of our protection to make his official visit to the scene of the last kill, should be substituted--whereat there was a general but not very hearty grin. The subject was too sore a one in that neighborhood just then. About a mile from the camp the track turned off into a deep nálá that bordered the road. It was now almost dark, so we went on to camp, and fortified it by posting the three elephants on different sides, and lighting roaring fires between. Once during the night an elephant started out of its deep sleep and trumpeted shrilly, but in the morning we could find no tracks of the tiger near us. I went out early next morning to beat up the nálá, for a man-eater is not like common tigers, and must be sought for morning, noon, and night. But I found no tracks save in the one place where he had crossed the ravine the evening before, and gone off into thick jungle.

“On my return to camp, just as I was sitting down to breakfast, some Banjárás [carriers, and probably gypsies] from a place called Déckná--about a mile and a half from our camp--came running in to say that one of their companions had been taken out of the middle of their drove of bullocks by the tiger, just as they were starting from their night’s encampment. The elephant had not been unharnessed, and securing some food and a bottle of claret, I was not two minutes in getting under way again. The edge of a low savanna, covered with long grass and intersected by a nálá, was the scene of this last assassination, and a broad trail of crushed-down grass showed where the body had been dragged down to the nálá. No tracking was required. It was all horribly plain, and the trail did not lead quite into the ravine, which had steep sides, but turned and went alongside of it into some very long grass reaching nearly up to the howdah. Here Sarjú Parshád, a large government mukna [tuskless male elephant] I was then riding, kicked violently at the ground and trumpeted, and immediately the long grass began to wave ahead. We pushed on at full speed, stepping as we went over the ghastly half-eaten body of the Banjárá. But the cover was dreadfully thick, and though I caught a glimpse of a yellow object as it jumped down into the nálá, it was not in time to fire. It was some little time before we could get the elephant down the bank and follow the broad plain footsteps of the monster, now evidently going at a swinging trot. He kept on in the nálá for about a mile, and then took to the grass again; but it was not so long here, and we could make out the trail from the howdah. Presently, however, it led into rough, stony ground, and the tracking became more difficult. He was evidently full of go, and would carry us far; so I sent back for more trackers, and orders to send a small tent across to a hamlet on the banks of the Ganjál, towards which he seemed to be making. All that day we followed the trail through an exceedingly difficult country, patiently working out print by print, but without having been gratified by a sight of his brindled hide. Several of the local shikáris were admirable trackers, and we carried the line down to within about a mile of the river, where a dense, thorny cover began, through which no one could follow a tiger.

“We slept that night at the little village, and early next morning made a long cast ahead, proceeding at once to the river, where we soon hit upon the track leading straight down its sandy bed. There were some strong covers reported in the river-bed some miles ahead, near the large village of Bhádúgaon, so I sent back to order the tent over there. The track was crossed in this river by several others, but was easily distinguished from all by its superior size. It had also a peculiar drag of the toe of one hind foot, which the people knew and attributed to a wound he had received some months before from a shikári’s matchlock. There was thus no doubt that we were behind the man-eater; and I determined to follow him while I could hold out, and we could keep the trail. It led right into a very dense cover of jáman and tamarisk in the bed and on the banks of the river, a few miles above Bhádúgaon. Having been hard pushed the previous day, we hoped that he might lie up here; and, indeed, there was no other place he could well go to for water and shade. So we circled round the outside of the cover, and finding no track leading outside, considered him fairly ringed. We then went over to the village for breakfast, intending to return in the heat of the day.

“About eleven o’clock we again faced the scorching hot wind, and made silently for the cover where the man-eater lay. I surrounded it with scouts on trees, and posted a pad-elephant at the only point where he could easily get up the high bank and make off, and then pushed old Sarjú slowly and carefully through the cover. Peafowl rose in numbers from every bush as we advanced, and a few hares and other small animals bolted out at the edges--such thick green covers being the midday resort of all the life in the neighborhood in the hot weather. About its centre the jungle was extremely thick, and the bottom was cut up into a number of parallel water-channels among the strong roots and overhanging branches of the tamarisk.

“Here the elephant paused and began to kick the earth, and to utter the low tremulous sound by which some of these animals denote the close presence of a tiger. We peered all about with beatings of the heart; and at last the mahout, who was lower down on the elephant’s neck, said he saw him lying beneath a thick Jáman bush. We had some stones in the howdah, and I made the Lállá, who was behind me in the back seat, pitch one into the bush. Instantly the tiger started up with a short roar and galloped off through the jungle. I gave him right and left at once, which told loudly; but he went on till he saw the pad-elephant blocking the road he meant to escape by, and then he turned and charged back at me with horrible roars. It was very difficult to see him among the crashing bushes, and he was within twenty yards before I fired again. This dropped him into one of the channels, but he picked himself up, and came on as savagely, though more slowly, than before. I was now in the act of covering him with the large shell rifle, when suddenly Sarjú spun round, and I found myself looking the opposite way, while a worrying sound behind me, and the frantic movements of the elephant, told me I had a fellow-passenger on board I might well have dispensed with. All I could do in the way of holding on barely sufficed to prevent myself and guns from being pitched out; and it was some time before Sarjú, finding he could not kick him off, paused to think what he would do next. I seized that placid interval to lean over behind and put the muzzle of my rifle to the tiger’s head, blowing it into fifty pieces with the large shell.”

In Assam and other parts of Indo-China, and in the interior of Malacca, the natives are treated by tigers much after the same manner as those of India were in the days before modern inventions had modified the views of these brutes upon mankind.

A pit is an effectual device for taking tigers, but most descriptions of the way in which it is arranged are evidently incorrect. Malays, however, procure most of the animals they export by means of pits, which are constructed after the manner of those _oubliettes_ or “dungeons of the forgotten,” where in the good old times captives were placed who had no hope of release.

What is the tiger’s temper? Conventionally, and according to common misapprehension, he is the furious and insatiable savage that Buffon paints--“_sa ferocité n’est comparable à rien_.” He is full of base wickedness and inappeasable cruelty, loves blood and carnage for their own sake, and longs continually to fly at unfortunate creatures with that _tremendæ velocitatis_ of which Pliny speaks.

“What immortal hand or eye, Framed thy matchless symmetry? In what distant deeps or skies, Burned that fire within thine eyes?”

writes William Blake, and then he asks, “Did He who made the lamb make thee?” The French naturalist and English poet looked at the subject from the same standpoint. It was not necessarily seen wrongly on that account, but it happened that the view taken by both was an imperfect one. Deeper insight or more profound research would have resolved uncertainty in the one case, and checked extravagance in the other. Had they read the runes of nature aright, the answer to such questionings, the rebuke to such exaggerations, would have been found stamped upon the organization of everything that lives. Physical constitution is never an accident or a mistake; it is at once the consequence of special modes of existence, and the cause of their continuance. Bodily conformation and its correlates in mental structure are to brutes absolutely determinative.

“Most carnivorous of the carnivora,” writes W. N. Lockington (“Riverside Natural History”), “formed to devour, with every offensive weapon specialized to the utmost, the _Felidæ_, whether large or small, are relatively to their size the fiercest, strongest, and most terrible of beasts.” The tiger stands at their head. He must needs appreciate his destructive power and feel the desire to exercise it. Inherited tendencies and the pressure of necessity put his capabilities into action. Their exercise, transmitted traits, and those experiences implied in habit, make him what he is,--audacious, treacherous, wary, cunning, ferocious. These characteristics answer to the anatomical specialties by which his frame is distinguished,--his convoluted and back-reaching forebrain, protective coloring, differentiated and perfectly innervated muscles, his simple digestive tract, formidable armature, and padded feet.

THE PUMA

What is true with regard to the present geographical distribution of the cats, has been true always; throughout their fossil history the greater and more formidable _Felidæ_ have been confined to the Eastern Hemisphere. A number of American species exist, however, ranging from among the smallest and most beautiful forms contained in this family, up to animals that in destructive power, only give place to their great African and Asiatic allies. The puma and jaguar have not filled so large a space in zoölogical literature as the lion and tiger; they have not attracted so much general attention, and are less known. But this is, to a considerable degree, the result of accident. For the most part, those who encountered them were men of a different stamp from the famous hunters whose adventures in Asia and Africa have made the animals of their forests and plains familiar and full of interest to so large a portion of the public in civilized lands.

It is seldom that the throngs that pass before cages in which wild beasts are confined, contain a spectator who knows how perfect a creature a cat is. As a class these forms are adjusted to their place in nature better than other creatures, and also much better than the human race. Their distinctive characteristics are all strongly marked, and have persisted from a period so incalculably remote, that the _Felidæ_ may in this respect be said to stand by themselves. “We have as yet,” remarks A. R. Wallace (“Geographical Distribution of Animals”), “made little approach towards discovering ‘their origin,’ since the oldest forms yet found are typical and highly specialized representatives of a group which is itself the most specialized of the carnivora.” No one acquainted with the evidence upon which this statement rests is likely to gainsay it, and its meaning is not obscure. The fact carries with it a necessary implication that animals of the species referred to, having followed a definite way of life longer than the rest, are more fit in every way to meet its requirements.

Perhaps the most striking illustration that could be given of the reality of what has been said, is the small difference actually existing between wild and domesticated cats. Domestication is so great and radical a change from the feral state, that the entire constitution of an animal is affected,--mind and body, temper, intelligence, form, color, fertility and physical capacity, are all modified. But it is not thorough enough to do away with the traits engendered in the _Felidæ_, and therefore it happens that after thousands of years, the house cat varies from the wild one so little in important and distinctive characteristics. Cattle and sheep were domesticated before the dispersion of the Aryan tribes; linguistic evidence places that fact beyond question. Cats, however, though introduced into Europe from Asia, as was the case also with the horse, ass, and goat, were no doubt first reclaimed from savage life in Egypt. On the Lower Nile domestic cats were sacred to Pasht, whom the Greeks called Bubastis, and identified with Artemis. She was represented with the head of a cat or lioness, as was Sechet also, a divinity equivalent to the Phœnician Astarte.

These personifications were not meaningless. Bast or Sechet was the patroness of the baser passions and more destructive vices. It was her part, likewise, to torture the condemned in the lower world. Naturalists (Pastophori) belonging to the faculties established at “the hall of the ancients” in Heliopolis, and “the house of Seti” in Thebes, knew much more, and also much less, about zoölogy and its allied sciences than is popularly supposed.

_Felis concolor_, the puma, cougar, panther, mountain lion, etc., is more correctly called by the last of these names than by that of panther, under which he is commonly known throughout the northern part of this continent. In its habits the puma is said, but not with any great degree of appropriateness, to resemble the leopard more closely than any feline species. Buffon called it the American lion, but he knew very little about this animal, and his opinion upon its character is of no special importance. E. F. im Thurn (“Among the Indians of Guiana”) remarks that in the southern part of America, and particularly in Guiana, all varieties of feral cats take their titles from the kind of game upon which they principally subsist. Thus _Felis concolor_ is called “the deer tiger,” _Felis nigra_ the “tapir tiger,” and _Felis macnera_ the “peccary tiger.” Such may be the case when aborigines are forced to particularize; but in common parlance one hears only the sobriquet “_león_” bestowed by all classes of people on the puma.

There is but one true species found in America, and this is distributed in all parts of the continent. The average length from tip to tip may be given at about six and a half feet. In maturity the skin is of a uniform tawny hue on the back and sides, with some deepening of shade in the case of individuals. Cubs are born with dark stripes upon the body, and spots on the neck and shoulders. Garcilasso de la Vega (“Royal Commentaries”) speaking of this beast as the tutelar of certain noble Peruvian families, and probably their eponymous ancestor, says: “A Spaniard whom I knew killed a large lioness (female puma) in the country of the Antis, near Cuzco. She had climbed into a high tree, and was slain by four thrusts of a lance. There were two whelps in her body _which were sons of a tiger_ (jaguar), for their skins were marked with the sire’s spots.”

Like all _Felidæ_ except the cheeta or hunting leopard, the limbs have little free play; they are not adapted to continued rapid locomotion, being short and massive, very powerful, but somewhat limited in variety of action, and more capable of extreme and spasmodic efforts than of persistent use. The animal is very arboreal in its habits, and its climbing powers and general dexterity are not surpassed by any species belonging to this family.