Part 19
Like true panthers, these cougars, carcajous, catamounts or pumas (the native title is _sassu-arana_ or false deer) are, according to H. W. Bates (“The Naturalist on the River Amazon”), accustomed to live in cliffs and caves, and they seem able to do without the constant supply of water that some others among the _Felidæ_ require.
It is said that here, as in India, the representatives of the tiger and lion do not live together. While this may be true in a general way, there is not the same separateness of range as in Asia; and the author, in common with other explorers, has found them in similar localities on several occasions. No accounts have been given, so far as the present writer is aware, of actual conflicts occurring between the puma and jaguar, and, in fact, there could be little hope for the former in such a contest, as his adversary would be much heavier and more powerful, equally active, and better armed. With respect to the grizzly bear, there is little doubt that common report among frontiersmen, to the effect that he is often assailed by the puma and frequently worsted, has some foundation in fact. From two to four young are born together, and by the end of the first year these whelps lose their spots and stripes. They are lively and playful during infancy, and although in them, as in all animals so highly organized, a decided individuality displays itself from the first, personal experience has convinced the author that they possess a great degree of intelligence, are easily taught those things which their faculties enable them to acquire; and, so far as their own interest and convenience influence conduct, that they exhibit ludicrously strong preferences and dislikes.
Great strength and activity are combined in the puma, its armature is formidable, the brute is habitually silent, stealthy in the highest degree, and full of the so-called treachery of its race. Besides this, it is very enterprising when occasion warrants a display of audacity, as well as extremely ferocious and blood-thirsty. More frequently, perhaps, than any of the great cats, it kills for the mere gratification of its cruel impulses. Dr. Merriman (“Mammals of the Adirondacks”) states that on level ground “a single spring of twenty feet is not uncommon for a cougar,” and Sheppard records the measurement of a distance twice as great when the leap was made downward from a ledge of rock upon a deer.
Padre José de Acosta (“Historia natural y moral de las Indias”) says that neither the puma nor the jaguar “is so fierce as he appears to be in pictures,” though both will kill men. There are, however, many places where the puma has been so cowed by ill success in his attacks upon human beings, that he avoids them as much as possible. Cieza de Leon and Garcilasso de la Vega express themselves to the same effect. Humboldt found whole villages abandoned by their helpless inhabitants in consequence of the ravages of the two great American cats, but Emmanuel Liais (“Climats, Géologie, Faune, etc. du Brésil”) asserts that both “_l’une et d’autre fuient l’homme et les chiens; même un enfant à cheval leur fait peur_.” This is a mere repetition of what has been asserted without qualification, proper inquiry, or adequate experience with the larger _Felidæ_ in Asia and Africa.
There is no need to argue the question whether or not pumas can or will kill men; that has been affirmatively settled by facts. This creature’s personal courage is a different matter. It is only a brute; yet if any one studies what has been said with regard to this trait, it will appear that most denunciations of the animal’s cowardice rest upon circumstances under which it did not conduct itself like a gentleman. A cougar’s padded foot, its short massive limbs, which prevent it from chasing prey, the brute’s great powers of concealing itself, and perfect physical adjustment to sudden and violent attacks, are recapitulated as though they had no necessary connection with its behavior, and were not inseparably associated with corresponding peculiarities of character and habit.
A beast of prey passes the active portion of its existence in projecting or executing acts of violence. Habitual success means life, and failure death. Under such circumstances, under the influence of an experience in which by far the larger part of those enterprises undertaken resulted favorably, a self-confidence, incompatible with cowardice, will ensue.
At the same time there seems to be some general preconception with respect to the character of wild beasts, such as converts every manifestation of prudence into poltroonery. The clash of opinions expressed about all the more imposing animals witnesses to the crude and arbitrary manner in which they have been formed. With respect to this one, not the tiger himself has been the subject of more irreconcilable statements.
Stories of puma hunting and of the animal’s exploits depend, so far as their style is concerned, upon the place where they are told, and the experiences of the narrator. No hunter of large game thinks it anything of a feat to shoot a cougar, yet the author has known these brutes to fight desperately when brought to bay, and in two instances their resistance was sufficiently formidable to cause, in the one case loss of life, and in the other injuries from which men never entirely recovered. Many such examples might be gathered, but they are nevertheless exceptional. A puma is not difficult to kill, and if it is seen in time, a properly armed man must either be very unfortunate or very unfit for the position in which he finds himself, if the result is not favorable. What is said of the panther and leopard, however, by Captain Forsyth (“The Highlands of Central India”) and by Sir Samuel Baker (“Wild Beasts and their Ways”) is peculiarly applicable to this animal: it is almost always met with unexpectedly, and no mortal can say beforehand what it will do. If taken at advantage and by surprise, as commonly happens, a single man would not usually have much chance at close quarters. The writer has, however, known them to be killed with knives, though not without severe injury to the victor.
The average native of tropical America, while fully appreciating how much more dangerous is the beast he calls a tiger, is quite enough impressed with the prowess of its smaller, though sometimes equally ferocious ally, to have his mind saturated with superstitions concerning pumas. Tapuyo or Mameluco guides will sit by a camp fire and talk in a way to put Acuna or Artieda in the background. Almost equally with the jaguar this creature has supernatural and diabolic connections. When its rarely heard cry or scream, as any one may choose to call a sound so difficult to describe and which varies so greatly, floats through the forest, these natives never know whether they hear a prowling cougar, or the voice of that god from whom its race descended. Botos, a demon of woodland lakes, guides the beast to his prey; the basilisk worm Minhocao is somehow connected with it in its designs against human beings, and the deadly man-like Cæpora shrieks in concert with pumas as they roam through the darkness. W. A. Parry (“The Cougar”) says that its cry “can only be likened to a scream of demoniac laughter,” and that the female’s answer to her mate’s call resembles “the wail of a child in terrible pain.”
James Orton and Prince Maximilian of Nieuwied have severally settled it that cougars are all abject cowards. Speaking from personal recollection, the author feels no hesitation in saying that it required great singleness of mind to come to this conclusion, and much dexterity to go where they did and avoid seeing things which might have modified this conclusion.
It does not follow, for reasons which have been explained at length, that because a puma attacks a grizzly bear he must be dangerous to a man; or because numbers of men have undoubtedly been killed in some places, that it should be formidable to human beings everywhere.
“When hungry,” says Theodore Roosevelt (“Hunting Trips of a Ranchman”), “a cougar will attack anything it can master.” Audubon, however, supposes that it never ventures to assail such large animals as cows or steers. William B. Stevenson (“Twenty Years in South America”) tells us how destructive this creature is to horses, and also how the more than half-wild cattle of the pampas form into rings to defend themselves. Captain Flack (“A Hunter’s Experience in the Southern States of America”) relates an incident in which his horse was stalked by a cougar. S. S. Hill (“Travels in Peru and Mexico”) informs us that “this animal always flies at the sight of man.” G. W. Webber (“The Hunter Naturalist”) declares that he “knows hundreds of well-authenticated instances in which the cougar or panther attacked the early hunters--springing suddenly upon them from an ambush.” Many writers affirm that calves, colts, sheep, goats, swine, are the only domestic animals ever preyed upon, and a deer the largest wild creature which is destroyed. But a traveller like Charles Darwin was certain to observe that, although in La Plata “cougars seldom assault cattle or horses, and most rarely man,” living principally on ostriches, deer, bizcacha, etc., in Chile, they killed all those animals they are said never to touch, including man.
Moreover, we read dogmatic assertions to the effect that pumas always leap on their victims from behind, and break their necks by bending back the head. Another authority decides that this is so far from being the case that death commonly arises from dislocation caused by a blow with the paw; still another insists that the vertebræ are not disjointed at all, but bitten through, which is again denied by those who are convinced that cougars invariably kill their prey by cutting the throat. Much the same statements are made about everything the beast does or is said to do, and the conclusion, which one familiar with this kind of literature comes to, is that these conflicting statements are not all false, but in a restricted sense all true. That is to say, the several ways of destruction mentioned are practised as occasion requires or suggests.
One point at least with regard to the puma’s disposition in certain directions is more clearly set forth than has been the case in respect to other beasts of prey, and this is the fact that the creature’s temper has been greatly changed by contact with mankind. The same thing has happened everywhere with all game hunted successfully for a long period; but this fact is ignored, and brutes whose natures are different in some minor traits from what they once were, are discussed as if the special features now exhibited had been always the same.
C. Barrington Brown (“Canoe and Camp Life in British Guiana”) relates an incident which occurred while he was exploring the upper courses of the Cutari and Aramatau rivers. “One evening, while returning to camp along the portage path that we were cutting at Wonobobo Falls, I walked faster than the men, and got some two hundred yards in advance of them. As I rose the slope of an uneven piece of ground, I saw a large puma (_Felis concolor_) advancing towards me, along the other side of the rise, with its nose close to the ground. The moment I saw it I stopped, and at the same instant it tossed up its head, and seeing me also, came to a stand. With its body half-crouched, its head erect, and its eyes round and black from the expansion of their pupils in the dusky light, it was at once a noble and appalling sight. I glanced back along our wide path to see if any of the men were coming, as at that moment I felt that it was not well to be alone without some weapon of defence, and I knew that one of them had a gun; but nothing could be seen. As long as I did not move the puma remained motionless also; and thus we stood, some fifteen yards apart, eyeing each other curiously. I had heard that the human voice was potent in scaring most wild beasts, and feeling that the time had arrived for doing something desperate, I waved my arms in the air and shouted loudly. The effect on the animal was electrical; it turned quickly to one side, and in two bounds was lost in the forest.”
Now why did this brute thus behave? The narrative gives not the least explanation of its conduct. Brown thought it was frightened by his gestures, because a few days before he had come upon a jaguar basking on a rock by the river, whose serenity was not at all disturbed by the voices of a boat full of men. But that was merely a guess. Very probably this animal had never seen a man previously, and almost certainly not a white man in civilized costume. There was then the profound impressiveness of absolute strangeness in the sight, and this alone would have been more likely to alarm a human being or intelligent brute than any other cause we know of. Perhaps the puma had just devoured a peccary and was gorged; or possibly its keen senses revealed the approach of Brown’s party, who in fact appeared almost immediately. One may see in a narrative like this, which is a fair specimen of those relations from which most dogmatic conclusions upon the character of wild beasts have been drawn, how arbitrary and unjustifiable they generally are.
Roosevelt states that a slave on his father’s plantation in Florida was passing through a swamp one night, when he was attacked by a puma. The negro was “a man of colossal size and fierce and determined temper.” Moreover, he carried one of the heavy knives that are used in cutting cane. Both parties were killed after a long and desperate struggle, whose traces were plainly impressed upon the spot. But here it appears that a man was assailed, and that the beast continued its attempts to kill him after discovering that he was armed, and persisted in its attack as long as life lasted.
One evening as the author was riding towards a hacienda in Sinaloa, and was about half a league distant from it, a girl rushed to the edge of a thicket and began to scream for help. Galloping up, it appeared she had just discovered the body of her father, killed apparently by a puma, who lay dead beside him. Life was not extinct, however, although he was very badly wounded. He said that while passing, the bellowing of an ox, mingled with the cries of some kind of beast, induced him to make his way to the scene of action. There he found a large lion, as he called it, engaged in a fight with a steer, whom he had injured severely, and who was rapidly losing blood. As soon as the man appeared, the beast left the ox and made at him. There was scant time to roll his _serape_ around his left arm, and draw the long knife which every ranchero wears in the _bota_ on his right leg, before he found himself in deadly conflict.
In these three anecdotes we have a very clear refutation by facts of several points with regard to this brute’s character, which have been generally accepted as settled.
Wariness and an entire absence of all the sentiments that produce recklessness in man, are as distinctly marked characters among the _Felidæ_ as their peculiar dentition or retractile claws; yet the author was informed by Colonel W. H. Harness that last summer (1893) a very large panther, as the animal is called in West Virginia, walked into an extensive logging camp near the town of Davis at midday; traversed one wing of the long building in which the men employed slept, and without making any demonstration of hostility towards those who fled before him, entered their dining-room and helped himself to the meat on the table; after which he quietly passed out of a side door, and was shot from a window. If this beast had been broken down with age or disabled by accident so that it could not hunt, or if the season and weather had been such as to banish game from the vicinity, its conduct might be comprehensible. This happened with an animal in perfect physical condition, and at a season when the mountains were full of game. The brute also must necessarily have connected all the men it knew anything about with death-dealing firearms, and that it then should have walked into a crowd, and lost its life in this act of seemingly idiotic bravado, simply sets at naught everything that is known of the creature’s character and habits.
Pumas, like Asiatic panthers, are easily caught in traps, but independently of this form of incapacity, they are far from being wanting in sagacity. Cougars are most accomplished hunters, and it has been explained how much that means. One of them, for example, will sometimes trail a human being for a day’s journey without finding what it considers to be a suitable opportunity for making an attack.
The best and most intimate acquaintance with the character of a wild beast comes from those associations involved in domestication. When you have brought up an animal and been with it constantly day by day, the chances of finding out what it is like are better than they could be under any other conditions whatever. Prince Maximilian of Nieuwied, states that the puma is “peculiarly susceptible of domestication.” It does not appear, however, that he made any experiments in this direction, and it may be suspected that if he had, certain reasons for modifying his views upon the animal’s character would have suggested themselves during their course. A cougar is a cat, and in virtue of that fact is, as has been said, of all animals the least susceptible of radical change. Sanderson and Barras make a wide distinction between feline species, considered as amenable or refractory to such influences; and nothing is offered in the way of disparagement to their opinions, provided it be admitted that a young tiger may be a much more amiable and interesting infant than a panther cub, and, according to Gérard, a lion whelp attaches all hearts by its good qualities. But there soon comes a time at which traits inherent in them all are developed, and when they become strikingly alike in all their essential characteristics.
The writer bears in affectionate remembrance a pet “panther” who, from earliest life until his complete and splendid maturity, lived with him upon terms of the closest companionship. Every one who seriously studies anecdotes of brute intelligence and character must necessarily distrust them. Their authors always, either directly or by implication, put inference in the place of observation, or they start with a hypothesis, the tendency of which is to assimilate evidence, and often, no doubt unconsciously, fit facts to their own preconceptions. It is hoped that the records of daily observation here made use of for the purpose of sketching traits of character, may not prove to be without some interest and value, and that their fragmentary and incomplete form will witness to the fact that nothing is given which seemed to be either speculative or unauthentic.
One sultry morning as the author sat at ease in his sala, an Indian entered and said he had heard that the Señor delighted in wild beasts, so that having by the help of God, some saints, and several friends, slain the mother of this little lion in the Golden Mountains, he had brought it there as a mark of respect, and would like to have seven Spanish dollars. Here he unrolled his _serape_ and deposited a ball of indistinctly striped and spotted fur upon the floor. In that manner this puma of pumas came into the keeping of his guardian.
The latter impressed with a sense of the responsibilities attaching to the position in which he was placed, at once sprinkled the cub with red wine and called it Gato,--a procedure it resented as if the spirit of Constantine Capronymus himself had entered into its sinful little body. The rage of infancy, however, does not endure, and Gato shortly “serened himself,” to use the idiom of the country, where these things took place. He inspected his new acquaintance, rubbed up against him, had his head scratched with much complacency, and graciously ate as much as he could hold. Thus we made friends, and the compact was ever after kept by both parties, each in his own way.
The panther’s way was a very simple one. It consisted in looking to the being he had come in contact with for everything he wanted, and resolutely refusing to enter into intimate communications with any one else. Nobody who knew him could say that the least feeling of affection ever warmed his heart, but it was plain enough that while he contemned the human race, one man was tolerated, and a distinction made between him and all others. Some individuals he detested at first sight, and resented the slightest approach to familiarity. For the remainder he entertained a quiet contempt; but as for fearing them, nothing was further from his thoughts. So far as that went, it is very doubtful whether he ever felt any real dread of his guardian. Some feeling akin to respect may have existed in his mind. His powers of observation were keen and quick, he saw that this particular person differed in appearance from those about him, acted differently, and was somehow or other not the same as they. If he got into difficulties, and was likely to suffer the consequences of misconduct, hostilities against him ceased when his friend appeared upon the scene; he understood this perfectly, and took refuge with him when danger threatened. As was said, Gato had no affectionate impulses so far as could be certainly known. When he wanted to be stroked, or was hungry, or wished to play, or felt insecure, he came to his guardian, followed him about, and lay beside him. Moreover, the little savage was jealous. If he beheld a dog it always put him in a passion to see it coming towards his master to be caressed. He would fly to get ahead, dance about, jump on his knee, and growl and show his teeth with every sign of anger against the intruder upon his rights.
Colonel Julius Barras (“India and Tiger Hunting”) speaks of the jealousy shown by tiger cubs in his possession, but whereas he was satisfied that this was an expression of tenderness towards himself, the writer thinks it more likely to have been an exhibition of selfishness. Gato manifested at a very early age an appreciation of his own possessions, and a determination to do things after his own fashion. So far from checking this by force, his guardian encouraged it, and after having come to a clear understanding with him on the subject of biting and clawing, left him alone to follow his own devices. He was a very sagacious personage, and there was not a drop of cowardly blood in his whole body. When he was a baby there was little to distinguish him, while at rest, from some domestic cats, but he no sooner began to move about than his free wild air, the unmistakable style of savagery that stamped every action, showed him in another way. It may be added that, being left free to exhibit his individuality, and not having his family and personal characteristics marred or masked by enforced restraint until the creature grew dull, apathetic, and half imbecile, he was as pretty a specimen of feline peculiarity as any one could expect to see. Nothing was clearer to him than that the many-colored rug he was accustomed to lie on was his own. He had favorite places in which to sleep, meditate, and make observations. It would have been disagreeable indeed for any servant about the establishment to take off his bright silver collar after he grew to any size, and when he captured anything and put it away, that article became his private property, and he had no notion of giving it up.