Not long ago I read in Indian papers about a leopard in Central India
which had killed about 173 men and women, and the carcass of which
showed fore-paws and chest muscles of unusual size. "It had almost the
front of a tiger," wrote one of the scribes. This was exactly the
description of another of the same kind, which was told me about 1888
by Colonel Bingham, then Conservator of Forests for an eastern
division of Burma. He beguiled the long evening in a rest-house on the
fringe of the woods by telling me the life-history of a man-killing
leopard in Central India, which I believe he had hunted there about
twenty or thirty years before. It made the "hours and minutes
hand-in-hand go by" so light that it was long, long after our usual
bed-time before we thought of looking at our watches.
If he had been the common story-teller, I could never have kept awake,
much less forgotten to note the time. He was a man of accurate and
scientific tastes, and great knowledge of Natural History, and, best
of all, one of those rare comfortable souls who are more interested in
things in general than in themselves. This makes accuracy almost easy,
and modesty comes without an effort. We discussed at length the
question whether that leopard had been a cross between the leopard and
the tiger. The reports about it had made Bingham think it must be so,
but the post-mortem upon it, at which I think he assisted, made him
dubious, for, to his surprise, he found its markings purely leopard's,
and the only difference between it and common leopards to be its size,
especially in front.
"After all," I said, "the size is the chief difference between
leopards and common cats." Bingham agreed, and I found he was still of
the opinion that lions and tigers, leopards and jaguars, are all more
nearly related than at first sight appears. He had been, as I then
was, sanguine about getting evidence that they interbred, and while
telling me he had never succeeded, thought another might. Indeed it
should be better known that the chief difference between lions and
tigers is the lion's way of wearing his hair. The difference in bone
and muscle is less, much less than there is between varieties of
domestic cats; and it is easy to exaggerate the specific importance of
colour. I know a worthy Dutchman (Mr Hegt), who told me he acquainted
Charles Darwin with an interesting accouchement of a lady-leopard in
Holland. She brought forth at a birth kits black and white, such as
the naturalists had till then classed as different species. Darwin was
delighted at the news.
The best part of our talk, however, was about the leopard's
adventures. Bingham was not a man to forget that the carcass cut up
after death is not the leopard. It is merely a confused conglomerate
of hide and flesh and bones and teeth and claws, drenched in blood.
Such things are the mortal remains of the leopard; but its spirit, the
fire of life that made it terrible, that great reality, whatever you
call it, has fled away on the wings of the wind. So fled the spirits
of its victims. Its fleshy garment lies before you as helpless as ever
were theirs, as harmless as if it had been a sheep.
It was a little playful kitten in the forests, not long before it
became a terrible killer of men, for its tribe grows fast. It took to
killing as its trade, like a fish to water. Its mother taught it
nothing else. When her milk ran dry, she taught it how to flesh its
baby fangs; and under her kind, encouraging, maternal eyes it grew up
big and strong, and then it left its mother's lair to feed itself and
live alone.
There is something thrilling in the strangeness which such separation
brings. The cat is a tender mother, but she soon forgets her children.
A few months after parting, if this leopard and its mother met in the
woods, they would glare at each other like strangers, without
recognition. If you doubt this, study your civilised domestic cats,
especially when they are hungry. The matter is not doubtful.
This does not mean that the leopards eat each other. As hawks do not
peck out the eyes of hawks, so leopards seek for tenderer beef than
that of leopards. Besides, their single aim in life being to satisfy
their appetites cheaply, to risk a scratch would be bad business. So
they compete in the woods exactly as mercantile firms do in the city,
each grabbing all it can. They generally die of starvation, but see
nothing odd in that. They have faced starvation all their lives; and
even when the mother-leopard comes to perish so, there is no
bitterness in her heart at the thought that it is her multitudinous
kittens that have made food scarce. She has forgotten them. They have
passed out of her mind completely, like the shadows of the clouds that
pass across the surface of a mountain lake, and go by and leave no
sign.