THE TIGER (continued 2)

“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.

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.