"... Had I missed the second shot she would have had us.... She was
very angry. She was hungry and meant business. On opening her we found
that she ... had evidently not had a meal for some days." ... This
illustrates a truth which is often forgotten by us. The big beasts
live from hand to mouth, like improvident working men. A dog may bury
a bone, a tiger return to a kill, and a leopard has been known to put
half a corpse or an unfinished bit of venison up a tree for security.
But beyond the next meal they never look. It is only the insects of
the universe, like ants and bees, or such animals as squirrels, that
practise thrift. Hence arose the Jewish proverb about considering the
ways of the ant in order to be wise. There is no such lesson to be
learned from the cat.
One can be sorry for the tigress all the same. Think of her empty
stomach, and perhaps hungry cubs in her lair; and then this big,
strong Englishman, with his diabolical machinery in his hand,
molesting her as she was stalking the wild cattle. "She meant
business," said he. Of course she did. Did anyone think she was
hunting for amusement?
No matter now! Her body lies inert enough, a subject for their
inquisitive knives to her indifferent.
Put yourself in the skin of that tigress, if you can. Think what a
gunshot means to a wild beast, and consider how, when fired at, she
"faced the music" in the real sense of that phrase, and went "straight
at the guns," as gallantly as the Light Brigade at Balaklava. As even
the enemy notes--"After receiving the shot, _it fell and lay on the
ground, trying to drag itself towards us.... It put its head up and
snarled and showed its teeth._" ... Was she not like the glorious
Englishman, who, when his legs were cut away, still fought upon his
stumps? Did any hero of Homer's ever surpass that sorely-stricken
tigress? Could any living creature have done more? And yet there are
men to be found who call the big cats cowards! I never heard Mr Allan
do that, nor any other man of sense who knew them well at first hand.
No wonder tigers flourished in the days of old. It is the invention of
gunpowder, and then of breechloaders, that has handicapped them
hopelessly. The long guerilla war between them and us has lasted for
scores of millenniums; but the end is now in sight. Let us not libel
the brave that are doomed to disappear. Let us not rail at the
conquered. If they were fierce and strong, they were not cruel. As
Nature made them, so they filled their function. They came, and
chased, and conquered, impelled by hunger: and now that their hour has
come they are going away. The day is at hand when the big wild cats
shall all be as completely extinct as the vanished giants that
wallowed in the primeval slime.
V