When the Philippinos tell you now of the swagger of the Spaniards,
which was the sorest of the sorrows that drove them into revolt, they
often mention that the Spaniards called them "water buffaloes."
"To call you geese would have been kind in comparison?"
"Oh, quite polite!"
Indeed the water buffalo known to us in Burma, also, is not smart at
all. Slow, heavy and dull, amphibious in his habits, he moves like a
very fat pig, with almost less agility. Slipping through the muddy
slush, in the sleekness of his prime, he looks almost "like a whale?"
Yes, round enough for that, and almost like a little whale, except for
his awkwardness, for his legs are not yet atrophied or sea-changed,
and he has only his legs to move by; and also except--a big
exception--his huge horns. These are extended like the arms of a
gesticulating orator or other creature that flings his arms wide and
turns up his hands; but never were arms flung out so gracefully as
those horns, with a sweep like that of a scythe or scimitar,
symmetrical and pointed. They lie on the back, when the owner lifts
its nose to sniff the wind, harmless and out of the way, like a sword
in its sheath. There is nothing ornamental about them, any more than
about the Forth Bridge; and yet so beautiful is fitness that perhaps
no bovine head has finer ornaments.
It always surprises one to see how cool the beast remains with these
exclamatory horns. But it is these very horns that let him remain cool
and at leisure in the haunted woods. From tigers down, all possible
enemies are afraid of them. So the Burman water buffalo never needs to
hasten; and, like a gentleman of independent means, not needing to
exert himself, grows slow. His gait is dignified. His mind is dull.
This is not rhetorical conjecture, but natural history. Every healthy,
living organism is harmonious, meaning all of a piece, such as men try
to make their pictures and songs, and everything else they want to
make well; and this particular collocation of cause and effect might
be illustrated and proved by many modern instances.
Not to be offensive to our fellow-men, who in every country exhibit
the same tendency; averting our gaze from all who are happy in "having
something else than their brains to depend upon"; avoiding politics,
which is a legitimate field of natural history, but obscured by
vapours which make observation difficult, let us take the skunk--not
meaning any kind of men, who are really miscalled skunks, for they
have none of the beast's qualities but one, and in general have the
nimbleness of rats--let us come among the animals and candidly
consider the four-legged skunk.
He is a little beast, no bigger than a house cat, and lives, as puss
would do in the woods, on worms and insects and mice and birds and
such small game. But he is not nimble, like the cat, or fox, or any
other hunting and hunted creature. He is as leisurely as the water
buffalo, and as careless of observation in the wildest country as a
dog in a farmer's yard. However hungry, the bigger beasts of prey,
whose natural food he might seem to be, prefer to leave him alone. The
fact is that he can make himself be smelt in a sickening way for
nearly a mile off; and so "the skunk," according to an observer, "goes
leisurely along, holding up his white tail as a danger-flag, for none
to come within range of his nauseous artillery."
"Call me a skunk?" a man might say, "I wish I were, sometimes." There
is perhaps no kind of life that is not worth living; so we need not
wonder that there is something to envy in the skunk. The water buffalo
is a perfect gentleman, compared to him; but the same security against
enemies has produced in both the same leisurely habits. The horns
protect the buffalo, and are at once his weapon and his danger-flag.