No country is so favorable for his exploits as India. The endless divisions of its people into castes or professions is destructive to unanimity of feeling and combined action. The “gentle Hindu,” who is one of the most callous and unsympathetic of mankind, folds his hands when one of his co-religionists has been carried off, and says that Kali probably sent the tiger for that especial purpose, so what has he to do with it? His Mussulman acquaintance twists his mustache, and mutters,Ul-humd-ul-illa, praise be to God, this man was only an infidel, and it was his destiny! They cannot act together, and formerly matters were worse than they are now.
Nothing could suit the prowling tiger better than these isolated settlements with their careless, nearly defenceless inhabitants, the by-ways and wastes that separate them. When he has once killed a man, and has discovered the creature’s feebleness, those horrors so often recorded follow as matters of course. Henceforth, nobody is safe beyond the walls of his town or dwelling. Occasionally not even there, for the man-eater combines the extremes of conduct,—excessive wariness and desperate audacity.
There is no necessity to multiply references as to the fact that these tigers are audacious,—that is generally known to be the case; but it is well to remember in connection with their relations to mankind, that they are apt to become panic-stricken at anything which appears strange and unaccountable. Colonel Pollok preserves an incident (“Sport in British Burmah”) which illustrates their enterprise,and yet shows how they become confused, incapable, and appalled by whatever is beyond comprehension,—a feature in the animal’s character, by the way, which is much more creditable to its intellect than derogatory to its courage.
Hill, the officer to whom the adventure happened, relates his own experiences. He was out with a body of native troops after some Shan mutineers at the time, and in a country that Crawfurd, Colonel Yule, Hallett, Colquhoun, etc., speak of as much infested by tigers. At Yonzaleem a report was brought to him that a scourge of this kind was in the neighborhood, and that fifteen men had been killed in a month; but duty called, and there was no time in which to go hunting. “We were travelling along a mountain pathway fringed with bamboo-like grass,” Hill says, “and I was leading the way about thirty paces, perhaps, in front of the party, followed at a little distance by my lugelay, or Burmese boy, carrying my loaded gun. I had nothing in my hand but my oak stick, but you know what a shillelah it is, and what a thundering blow can be given with it. It was still early, and as I was trudging along carelessly, the men behind me jabbering and talking, I heard a slight noise on the edge of the pathway to my right; for a second I paid no attention to it, but thinking it might be a jungle-fowl or a pheasant, I beckoned to the boy to give me my gun. He had loitered behind, and before he could reach me, by slow degrees out came the head of an enormous tiger, close to me, almost within hitting distance. Unfortunately my lad, and the Burmese escort, saw it too, andhalted, calling out ‘The tiger! the tiger! he will be killed! he will be killed!’ meaning me. I did not take my eyes off the tiger’s, but put my hand behind my back, saying in Burmese to the boy, ‘Give me my gun;’ but he and the others only kept jabbering, ‘He will be killed! he will be killed!’ Not a man stirred, though they were all armed and loaded. So there we were, the tiger and I, face to face. At last, thinking to frighten it away, I lifted the stick and pretended to hit it a back-handed blow, at the same time making a sort of yelling noise. The stick was over my left shoulder, but so far from being intimidated, the tiger rushed at me, and I caught him a blow on the side of the head and floored him.
“Seeing him pick himself up with his back towards me, I thought he was going to bolt, and for the first time turned round, and said, ‘Now give me my gun.’ Before the words were well out of my mouth, my stick was sent flying, my right hand pinned to my side by one of his hind claws, and one of his fore-paws on my shoulder and back, and he stood over me growling in a most diabolical manner. I bent my back, stuck out my legs, and with my left arm struck towards my right shoulder at the brute’s face, which was towering over me, snarling and growling like the very devil. Suddenly, with an infernal roar, he struck me on the neck, and down I went as if I had been shot, the tiger turning a somersault over me, and falling on his back. In a second, in my endeavors to get up, I was on my hands and knees, the blood pouring over my face, beard and chest, giving me, I have no doubt, a most satanic appearance. As the tiger recoveredwe met face to face. He looked at me, seemed to think that by some strange metamorphosis, from a two-legged man, whom he despised, I had become some kind of a four-legged monster like himself, put his tail between his legs, and bolted for his life.”
This is a very disconcerting account for those who assert that the tiger is always dazed by daylight, and a coward at all times; that he shrinks from the sight and scent of human beings, flies from the sound of the human voice, and quails before the glance of a man’s eye.
Colonel Pollok (“Natural History Notes”) says he “never heard of a black tiger,” but that he has “seen the skins of three white ones; two entirely white and the other faintly marked with yellow stripes.” These came from the mountains of Indo-China. In the Himalayas they have been shot at an elevation of eight thousand feet above the sea, and, besides being what is called white, were maned. J. W. Atkinson (“Travels on the Upper and Lower Amoor”) tells of a young Kirghis who, while carrying off his bride, camped on this river and lost her there by a tiger’s attack. He threw away his own life in following this animal, dagger in hand, into the reeds. This does not always happen so by any means. Asiatics do what Europeans cannot attempt. It is well known that the Ghoorkas kill tigers with their celebrated knives; but we do not hear how many of them are destroyed in such combats. Captain Basil Hall (“Travels in India”) saw a Hindu (using one of these weapons) meet a tiger at a Rajah’s court, evade his spring, hamstring him as he passed, and cut through his neck into the spinal cordwhen the brute turned. In ancient times that class of gladiators calledBestiarii, encountered tigers in the Roman arena; and if one may judge from notices that are rather vague, they were pretty generally expended. The Brinjarries, says Forsyth, sometimes, assisted by their dogs, assail them with lances; and they were certainly killed by arrows at one period, but in what proportion to those whom they slew is unknown.
Certain traits are common to all the race; and as a summary of the foregoing, the appended remarks and illustrations will not be out of place. Wherever the tiger is found, water, despite Colonel Barras’ solitary voice to the contrary, must be near. He drinks much and often, and cannot live in arid places. Therefore it is that the time to hunt him in India is during the hot season. Those spots where he resorts for water, and what is equally necessary to him, shade, are well known in all parts where he is to be found; and it is there that buffaloes—young ones, for an ordinarily fastidious tiger will not touch an old, tough animal—are tied up. When taken, his trail is followed to the spot where he makes his lair.
There is one exception, however, to all rules that usually govern the pursuit of tigers. When a man-eater is the object, the trailing must go on all day and every day until this monster is run down. No better example of what is to be done under these circumstances can be given than Captain Forsyth’s narrative of his own exploit in the Bétúl jungle.
“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 oftransforming 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 themselvessolelyto 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 atthe 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 formerday, 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 likecommon 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 footstepsof 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 avery 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 theanimals they export by means of pits, which are constructed after the manner of thoseoubliettesor “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 thattremendæ velocitatisof which Pliny speaks.
“What immortal hand or eye,Framed thy matchless symmetry?In what distant deeps or skies,Burned that fire within thine eyes?”
“What immortal hand or eye,Framed thy matchless symmetry?In what distant deeps or skies,Burned that fire within thine eyes?”
“What immortal hand or eye,Framed thy matchless symmetry?In what distant deeps or skies,Burned that fire within thine eyes?”
“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 conformationand 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, theFelidæ, 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.