ANECDOTES OF BIG CATS AND OTHER BEASTS[1]

I
THREE MEN TOGETHER

The ideal hunter, like the ideal soldier or mountaineer, seaman or worker of any kind, “leaves nothing to chance”; yet in anticipating events he realises the limits of human foresight and remains continually wide-awake. Wellington has quoted Marshal Wrede’s report of Napoleon’s way of doing—to do from day to day what the circumstances require, but never have any general plan of campaign. That was how to rule circumstances by obeying them, as a seaman steering through the storm may be said to rule the waves. There are some occupations that allow more room for somnolence than others. Like the seaman afloat and the soldier in war, the man who is hunting big cats can ill afford to be caught napping. The consequences are apt [2] to be sudden. It is a terrible thing to wake up from a nap with nothing to do but die.

Whether you are hunting thieves or tigers, you proceed by good guessing based on knowledge. There is no real difference between what is pompously called scientific reasoning and plain common-sense, as Huxley has elaborately shown. Thieves and tigers have their habits, like all living things, and need to eat to live. One of the commonest successful ways of coming to close quarters with “MrStripes” is to go to where he has been killing lately, and lie in ambush. If you persevere in doing that in the usual way, you are sure to meet the tiger in the long run; and perhaps, as happened to this writer in Burma, you may enjoy the pleasure of making his acquaintance with startling suddenness the very first time you try. So it is well to be ready for anything, lest you have a disagreeable experience, like three men in the Assam forests, whose adventure is worth telling, as a warning to beginners. The present writer heard it from Major Shaw (6thGurkhas), in whom he has complete confidence. Of course it was in Assam that Major Shaw heard of it. For obvious reasons, no other names than his are given; and no superfluous details.

[3] There is a public rest-house in the Assam woods, which was visited by a hungry tiger not many years ago. The caretaker (or “dirwan”) was there at the time, but nobody else. The tiger took him away, and ate him.

Exactly how it was done remained unknown, as is usual in such cases. The men who are eaten by beasts of prey are generally like the crews of ships that never arrive, but remain for ever “missing.” Not once in a thousand times can even the bones be found, and nothing was discovered in this instance, but nobody doubted what had happened. Nevertheless, a successor was soon installed in the dead man’s place. The tiger called again; and once more the post became vacant, and a public servant was mysteriously “missing.”

The caretaker of a rest-house, like the humble postman, is one of the few officials who appear to the non-official world to justify their existence. If it had been a forester or a policeman, a judge or a soldier, people would have shrugged their shoulders and said, “So much the worse for him.” In the glad excitement of filling the vacancy, his colleagues would have forgotten him, and only his relatives, perhaps, if they had cause, lamented. But the caretakers of rest-houses are [4] not luxuries but necessaries; and when either a second or a third man (Major Shaw could not recollect whether three caretakers or only two) had in this way disappeared into the hideous darkness that dimly veiled a hungry tiger, and there was a likelihood that travellers might be inconvenienced by the post remaining vacant, three men of public spirit arose and took their rifles, and went together to spend a night in the tiger-haunted bungalow, and give MrStripes a warm reception when he next came to call.

The oddest detail in the account of their preparations is that they fixed bayonets. The veranda was level with the floor of the building, apparently, and not far above the ground. It was reached from outside by a flight of steps, and ran along the front, with the doors of the rooms opening upon it. That was where the three men placed themselves, when they had finished dinner and arranged everything, fixed bayonets and all. They closed the doors, and supposed they were invisible, for the gleam of the lamplight was then restricted to the back and the side-windows. In front was only darkness visible. As they lay in wait there, the one in the middle would be where the caretaker was accustomed to lie, opposite the top of the stairs.

[5] It must be remembered that the men perhaps expected to have to sit up several nights. They soon found what they had not expected, that it is very hard to keep awake, especially in a horizontal position, at the hour when you are usually asleep. Experienced hunters would have taken turns to lie in the middle wide-awake, and let the other men, on right and left, be at liberty to snooze. But these three men had been too excited to apprehend in advance the possibility of closing their eyes while waiting. They conversed in low whispers, and peered into the dark. Instead of coffee to keep them awake, as the night wore on, they drank whisky-and-soda.

The sound of a tropical forest is like London’s noise, which never altogether stops, but what reached their ears was unexciting. The quadrupeds a-hunting were unseen, and flitted about as noiselessly as the clouds.

The three men slept. The man in the middle was suddenly jerked to his feet by the tight clasp of the tiger’s jaws upon his forearm; and he staggered as it led him away, as if he had been a child. He was out of reach of his rifle before he was sufficiently awake to realise what was happening. It was afterwards conjectured that the tiger had been waiting below, and listening [6] to their whispering, till the change of noises indicated sleep.

While the tiger, taking its man by the arm, was stepping downstairs, the man was thinking only, “I hope the bullet won’t hit me.” He never doubted that one of his companions was preparing to fire. But the other two men, awakened, and aware that the tiger had come, had taken refuge in a room, and supposed that he had done the same.

There was nothing very remarkable in the tiger pulling away the man in this way. That was probably how he had treated the caretakers. In their many millenniums of battle with mankind, and civilised mankind, not ill-armed negroes, such as make the lions bold, the tigers of the old world seem to have learned that the arms are the dangerous members of a man, like the poison fangs of a serpent, so that to seize them is to master him. There are many cases of a man being saved alive from a tiger by other men, when it was pulling him away by the arm; but I have never heard of any man so situated being able to deliver himself. In general, of course, it is easier to break a man’s neck at once; but if you were a tiger, and your man were on a veranda, and had to be brought downstairs to [7] be eaten comfortably, could you think of a better way than to pull him by the arm, and make him descend the stairs on his own legs? The tiger is a specialist in killing, and knows its business. It is not killing men that bothers the tiger, but catching them unawares.

So the tiger and the man together reached the bottom of the stairs without anything happening, and thence the tiger led towards the adjoining forest; but on the way the victim turned his face to the house as well as he could, and cried: “Are you fellows not going to help me?”

This was the first intimation of his fate to the other two. One of them came out and ran after the retreating figures of the tiger and the man disappearing down the pathway, going towards the woods, and overtook them in the nick of time. The shout had somehow affected the tiger too. He opened his jaws, and the mangled arm fell free; but a great paw was on the man’s shoulder; and on the other shoulder another paw was now deliberately laid, and the tiger breathed in his face a deep, long exhalation—warm breath of a peculiar odour, that seemed to penetrate him.

Just then the pursuer arrived, and thrust his [8] bayonet between the tiger’s ribs, and pushed it in, and pulled the trigger. Then leaving the rifle there, feeling instinctively what DrJohnson noticed in himself with surprise, when travelling in the Highlands, how willingly, in the dark, a man becomes “content to leave behind him everything but himself,” he shouted “Follow me!” and ran back into the bungalow. The startled tiger had indeed let go its prey for the moment, but, seeing him run after the other man, it followed both; and, bounding up the stairs once more, it overtook at the top the man with the mangled arm, but only in time to give him a “smack on the back,” which sent him flying through the doorway into the room where the others were. Then it died.

They washed the badly-bitten arm with whisky, having no medicaments of any kind. It would have been strange if they had had any, for men are so seldom hurt in tiger-shooting that nobody anticipates injury. They had nothing but whisky. So they poured it on, and “it nipped,” at any-rate, which was, somehow, a comfort.

When the wounded man beheld himself in the looking-glass in the morning, he saw that his hair had suddenly grown grey in that one night. The third man, it is said, was delirious, with shame [9] and remorse, because he had faltered. Meanwhile the tiger, growing stiff, lay dead on the veranda, just outside the door of the room, with a gaping wound in its side, like Thorwaldsen’s lion at Lucerne.

When Major Shaw saw the injured man he had quite recovered. There was a scar on the arm, and a stiffness in two of the fingers, nothing else; but “for the rest of my life I could smell a tiger at fifty yards,” said he. “I’ll never forget the smell that went through me as he breathed upon me—never, as long as I live.”

II [10]
THE WONDERFUL ESCAPE OF “TIGER-HILL”

I am sorry to say it is more than twenty years since I began to listen to stories of tigers and leopards in Burma; and even more since I first made acquaintance with the beasts myself. I do not expect to see any more now, except in a Zoo. So perhaps it is time to note what has been learned, to re-tell the best of what I have heard, and in short do for others what others in days gone by have done for me. I have always considered that the man who keeps a good story fresh is the greatest of public benefactors.

What made me think of this in connection with cats was the recent discovery of the truth of a story, which I have heard many times without believing it. It was first told to me in 1891 by Burmans in the locality where it happened. Then, and as often afterwards as it was told, I questioned the speaker about how he knew, and never was quite satisfied. Even the version of [11] it in Colonel Pollok’s Wild Sports of Burma and Assam (p.65 of the 1900 edition), read like hearsay and seemed unconvincing. At last, in 1908, Colonel Dobbs told it to me in Coonoor, and when he was questioned he was able to delight me with the news that he had seen the thing. So here it is.

The time was 1859. The scene was the forest-covered hilly ground about seventy miles north of Maulmain, in what is now Bilin township of Thaton district, Burma, between the Sittang and Salween rivers. A detachment of the 32nd Madras Native Infantry, under Captain Manley, was marching on business there, going in single file along a footpath, preceded by the civil officer with them, a MrCharles Hill.

Hill was a big man, “over six feet and of great strength,” and strode ahead with a big stick in his hand, while two orderlies or servants followed at a careless distance behind him, with his weapons. This Chinese way of making war or hunting is almost a custom in Burma among Europeans; and a very natural custom too, in a hot, moist climate.

Suddenly Hill came upon a tiger lying full length on the footpath, apparently asleep. He looked round and called for his gun. It was for the moment out of reach.

[12] Perhaps it may be worth while to try to make the ordinary stay-at-home Englishman, who does not know how lucky he is to be able to stay at home, and knows a great deal less than he supposes, realise how and why the sensations of Mr Hill were different from what his own would have been. The first point is that Hill knew what a Londoner would never suspect, that there was no particular cause to be afraid. If afraid, he had only to go back a few yards, and shout, and bang the trees with his stick. The monstrous cat would take the hint and silently slip away. Not even a tiger in the prime of life would seek a fight. He feels, what politicians are only beginning to realise in another sphere, that fighting is bad business.

We must remember that the tiger has no medicaments, no surgical help, no hospitals, no friends, no companions. When he crawls away to lick his wounds, he is as solitary in a hostile world as a poor man “out of a job,” on a wet wintry night on the Thames Embankment, and suffers and dies unaided and alone. This is not conducive to courage. So even a tiger that has taken to eating men does not openly attack humanity, but lies in wait for it, to take it by surprise without fighting, seeking nothing but to get his dinner in the easiest way. Our common criminals, and [13] many wholesale thieves of superficial respectability, are more dangerous than tigers because of their extra cunning, but not different in spirit. What difference there is, is in favour of the tiger. He is never malevolent or cruel. Like Jonathan Wild, he never hurts anybody, except to benefit himself.

The Englishman at home will perhaps now be ready to understand the next point that will surprise him, that the retiring habits of the tiger make him a rare sight, even in countries where he is at home. I have known many people who had often suffered from the depredations of tigers, but had never seen one, just as a man’s house may be burgled more than once without his seeing any of the burglars. The tiger is like a burglar, who comes and goes in the dark.

It is true that a globe-trotter visiting Rangoon to-day (1909) may buy on the Pagoda steps a picture of a tiger upon the Pagoda, and be truly told that it was seen there. Some years ago a tiger did go up the gentle slope of the spire; and once arrived there, he stood bewildered, as if paralysed; conspicuous, like a weather-cock upon a steeple, looking helplessly down upon a large port like Plymouth, a big animated and terrified target, while the soldiers shot at him till they killed him. But though Englishmen, who knew there were tigers [14] always near, might think this natural, and only wonder that it did not happen oftener, and wish it would, yet to the people of the country, who knew the habits of tigers, it seemed portentous. Long afterwards old men might be seen on the Pagoda platform shaking their heads knowingly, and if you listened and understood them, you could hear them discussing what the miracle meant. It was certainly very odd. The poor animal must somehow have lost his reckoning. To use an old-fashioned phrase, he was never intended for a town life, and assuredly he never intended to try it. The Pagoda stands on the skirts of the town, on the last bluff of the Pegu hills, and he was probably going up it before he knew he had left the woods.

An incident that took place near the scene of MrHill’s adventure may be mentioned to illustrate the normal ways of the tiger. Three officers united to assist the villagers there against a tiger that was thinning their herds. Each of them had killed big cats before; and one was locally famous as a hunter. His house was full of trophies, including scores of tiger skins, of which he was as proud as ever Red Indian was of scalps. About a hundred villagers who knew the ground well co-operated zealously. No mistakes were made, and everybody did his best for several days; and yet not one of [15] the large party ever even saw the beast they were seeking. He had not gone away. He was lying low; and he resumed his cattle killing as soon as they stopped hunting. The widest “beat” in woods like these is like a net flung at random into the sea. A hunter is lucky if he averages a single glimpse of such game for half-a-dozen days or nights out of bed. Experienced hunters seldom go out there after tiger except to spend a night in a tree over a “kill,” which is generally a bullock killed and left half eaten, to which the tiger may return.

So it is easy to understand why Hill was unwilling to lose sight of this fellow, especially if Colonel Pollok is rightly informed that it was a man-eater; for in that part of Burma the occasional man-eater is not only a public affliction, he is also more often than not old and decrepit. I saw one in the Sittang valley, which had killed three men in one week, and yet was a meagre creature, with shrunken shanks and bald, bare hide, which made him look mangy, and with only a single whole tooth in his jaws, and two broken ones. So if Hill had heard the rumour which Colonel Pollok believed and took this for a man-eater, he might reasonably suppose he could take liberties. The canny Dutch themselves have a proverb, that the hares can pull the lion’s beard when the lion has grown old.

[16] It is a witty exaggeration, of course, as proverbs often are. In reality, neither hares nor horses nor deer of any kind would risk going near a lion or a tiger, however old. They shrink in horror from the like of a tiger. I have felt a brave horse shudder at one although he was dead, for even in death he seemed terrible. But his carcass does not cumber long the ground. White ants have a horror of nothing, and maggots and microbes, safe in their insignificance, are equally impartial. Vultures, too, may serve the tiger for undertakers, as they serve the Parsis, or the wild dogs may anticipate them. Sometimes it has been credibly reported that the dogs begin the tiger’s funeral before he is dead, so that if only the Dutch had said “dogs” instead of “hares” their proverb would have been not wit but natural history.

Even if Hill had never heard about this tiger being a stiff old man-eater, he might have suspected it was one, because it was there, upon the footpath, as if it had fallen asleep while watching for some benighted traveller who might be caught unawares. The few seconds Hill stood waiting for a gun would seem as many minutes, or more. In short, it is easy to imagine how, as he watched the big beast, perhaps stretching itself and yawning, seeming likely to step aside soon, before a gun [17] arrived, into a wood wherein a few steps would make it safe from pursuit, the big strong man lost patience, and lifting his stick with both hands he hit the tiger on the head between the eyes.

This completed the wakening process. Hill said he only saw it disappear among the bushes at the side of the path. Meanwhile Lieutenant Dobbs (he was young Dobbs then and on duty under Captain Manley) happened to be nearest to the front after Hill, and he and some sepoys hurried forward. In jungle fighting you run to the shouting, just as in ordinary war the rule used to be to march towards the sound of the cannon. So Dobbs, running forward in this way, was in time to see what followed. It was all over in a few seconds, and the reproaches of the troops in some histories of the event are without foundation. The tiger leapt out of the bush towards Hill’s back, and with a paw on each of his shoulders was seen to be biting at the back of his neck, as if trying to get a grip. Then Hill, who had been flung forward into a stooping posture, but kept his foothold, straightened himself with a jerk, whirled round and thrust out his arms in front of him, with open palms, as if pushing. “That, at least, is what it seemed like to me,” said the accurate veteran, Colonel Dobbs, and that was how Hill [18] described it. Then the tiger fell backwards, rolled on his back, regained his balance with a soft, silent celerity, and disappeared again among the bushes “almost like lightning,” and was seen no more.

Hill came staggering towards Dobbs, and fell on his face in a dead faint. He was bleeding freely from the neck, but the bleeding was soon stopped. “Only the upper fangs penetrated the neck,” writes Colonel Pollok. What Dobbs was sure of was only that in a short time Hill was going about as usual, “though he complained of stiff neck for about two years afterwards.”

In 1891 the Burmans thereabouts were still speaking of him as “Kya-ma-naing,” meaning “The man that the tiger did not beat.” He was honourably known to his countrymen in Burma for the rest of his life as “Tiger-Hill”; and the many and various versions of his adventure might furnish texts for a book on mythology as long as Fraser’s three big volumes on the Golden Bough. But as nearly all the reflections hitherto made upon it are refuted by this mere statement of the details, the present writer will take warning from the mistakes of his predecessors and leave readers, now in possession of the truth, to evolve their own reflections.

III [19]
SHERLOCK HOLMES IN A WOOD

On 20th April 1895, being engaged in Forest Settlement work among the low hills abutting on the south the mountain barrier between Burma and Assam, I was aroused, as I sat reading in a tent in the afternoon, by a signal. It meant that my colleague, MrBruce, the Deputy Conservator of Forests, who had gone out to shoot pigeons for dinner, either was or expected soon to be in contact with tiger, and wished me to join him—which I did, at a run. He was near the camp. The tigers thereabouts are more plentiful than elsewhere in Burma. We had seen and heard abundant evidence of their proximity for weeks past, and were both anxious for a closer acquaintance.

A fat and full-grown deer was lying dead upon the stones in a stream-bed. The first guess was that a tiger, having killed, was about to eat it, but withdrew for a moment out of sight [20] at the sound of the pigeon-shooting. On this hypothesis we diligently searched in all likely directions, and made sure there was no tiger near. Then we gathered round the deer. A faint, faint smell, perceptible as we closed upon it, showed that the venison was tending to that disintegration which awaits all flesh when life departs, and answered those who were beginning to doubt if it was dead, because it lay as if it might have been asleep, and there was no sign to show how it had died.

“Twelve to twenty-four hours dead, and not killed by any tiger,” was the first unanimous conclusion, after minute inspection and confabulation; and “still fresh enough to be eaten” was the next decision, all but equally unanimous.

This satisfied most of the men; but Bruce stood silent, while they knelt round it and began to ply their knives. I stayed to await developments. Casting perplexed looks up and down the stream, Bruce ejaculated, more than once, “I would give anything to know how that beast died.” “It’s too soft to roast, but will make splendid curry,” said the cook, inspecting a joint cut from the carcass.

When the men had cut off about three times as much as would suffice to “abate their desire [21] of food,” they began obligingly to discuss what was puzzling Bruce, and in a short time, so lively are the Burmese wits, every man seemed to be as interested as himself in the apparently insoluble problem. A mystery attracts men, as a light does the moths; or, as Cicero explains it in his Offices (i.4)—“The peculiarity of man is to seek and follow after truth. So, as soon as we are relaxed from our necessary cares and concerns, what we covet is to see, to hear, and to learn something; and the knowledge of things obscure or wonderful quickly appears to us to be indispensable for our comfort and happiness.”

Wild dogs were as likely as a tiger to have killed that deer; but equally certain not to leave the dead uneaten. The wild dogs and the tigers alike are real professional hunters, who kill in order to be able to eat and live. They are not sportsmen, who kill for amusement, that is to say, for want of occupation. Besides, there were no marks discoverable of either a tiger or dogs.

The partition of the venison served the purpose of a post-mortem. When it was seen that the neck was broken, we looked at the steep ground on the northern bank and saw how the deer could have tumbled down; and “killed by a fall” was the first step to a final verdict.

[22] But why did it fall? It was useless to suggest, as one did, “committed suicide in a temporary state of insanity.” He was gravely assured on every hand that the deer, however worried, do not commit suicide.

It would be long to tell the other guesses. Nobody could find a scratch on the carcass. That alone disposed of many theories.

Bruce had for some time spoken only in interjections. His mind was working. Suddenly he cried, with the abrupt inspiration of a seer, “I have it! I have it! I see what it was. This stag and another fought for a hind on that high bank, and this was the one pushed over.”

We agreed. Some of us would have agreed to anything, being tired of the subject. But we really were convinced; and when Bruce had finished describing the probable (what a blessed word probable is, to be sure!—the probable) antlers of the victor, contrasting them with the poor young brow of the dead, there were some among us who would in a little time have been capable of describing in a witness-box the aforesaid victorious antlers as things seen and handled. It was a doubter who said, “If you’re right the tracks of the fighters must be visible yet. It cannot have been before [23] last night. The ground seems soft up there, and there has been no rain.”

As soon as the words were spoken, as if by one consent, the men tore up the steep, Bruce shouting something that sounded like, “Right you are, for once!” On hands and knees went some; and they distributed themselves, to miss nothing, panting, puffing, all climbing as if a golden fleece awaited their joint efforts, and earnestly scanning the ground as they went. They did not compete though they vied with each other, each helping his neighbour, in a genial way; and, joyfully working together, they unconsciously illustrated the solidarity of humanity in real life.

Soon they were rejoicing and jubilating as loudly as if a heap of golden fleeces had been found, for they saw the tracks they went to seek. The duel of the stags, as it must have happened in the cool starlight of the preceding night, could be traced and rehearsed from the hieroglyphics on the ground by the sharpened wits of the village specialists, with more confidence than the incidents of a battle can be deciphered by a historian. Here it was, in a narrow glade, that they charged and grappled; there and there they struggled and pushed to and fro till one went backwards, and there at last, as you could see, one backed over [24] the steep and stumbled suddenly into death, to lie on the stones below, until we came and, anticipating other carrion-eaters, cut him up for dinner.

“And now, let’s track the victor!”

Heigh-ho! It was to face a tiger I laid down my book, and not to follow an amorous deer; but the tracks led into the stream again. “The victor went for a drink,” we said to each other, like children rejoicing to find that they can draw an inference for themselves, or rather like men who have learned, as all men do at last, how liable they are to be mistaken, and are slow to feel sure of anything till they find that others agree.

Among the stones the tracks were lost. Then I recalled how Robert the Bruce of Bannockburn had baffled the bloodhounds following him once, in his days of difficulty, by walking along a stream; and I suggested that the deer might in the same way baffle a modern Bruce. But men are more knowing than bloodhounds.

“The stag is not a water-buffalo. He’ll quench his thirst and leave the stream. Won’t he?”

“He must have done so, for he isn’t here.”

“The banks aren’t rocks. We’ll see where he left as well as where he came, won’t we?”

“Assuredly you shall, if you look long enough. I’ll stay ten minutes.”

[25] “I’ll stay till dark.”

It was not needed. The men started to seek the trail with enthusiasm; and in a few minutes there was a joyful shout and soon we were following the vanished stag, as confidently as if he were bodily in front of us, along one of the deer-paths that were a feature of these primeval woods. Our Burmans were admirable. Plain villagers, but all-round men, observant, they could notice swiftly and surely the slightest marks on the surface of the path which were signs of recent tracks. They had a rare reward. Few modern events have caused to sated Europeans the sensations they experienced when, instead of the expected jumble of many prints, to show where our wanderer rejoined his fellows, or at least his partner, they came upon the clean-picked bones and antlers of the stag at the side of the path, and a few fresh tiger-tracks that showed how he in turn had died....

“I like this, I like to get to the bottom of things. I’m glad we came,” cried Bruce. “This is the kind of thing that makes you realise what life in the forests truly is....”

“Beasts for beasts,” said his companion, “if one has to deal with beasts, the four-legged varieties here are simple and almost harmless compared to the rascals on two legs....”

[26] Bruce was urgent upon me to write out this authentic idyll of the woods which he had elucidated. I had to promise; but I did it vaguely—“when I have time,” “when I retire,” “when the spirit moves me”—so that time was not of the essence of the contract. It never occurred to me that there was any need to hurry on his account, for he was the younger man; but now I wish I had kept my promise sooner. For Bruce is dead.