How he brings the horses round!
How the game comes to the ground,
When his arrows kill and wound
Wheresoe'er they go.
Still they go; but, now, they're few;
Now, the quiver's empty too.
Home! The steeds the stable view,
Yet they're coming slow!
In the classical texts, these ancient hunting-songs appear as here
translated; but in singing them, if there is time to spare, the first
may well be sung _after_ the second as well as before it. It is at
once a fit introduction and a fit conclusion.
These two songs are taken from a collection of _Chinese Songs and
Sayings_, not published yet, and put here to show a kind of
tiger-killing deserving as much honour as men can ever give a
fellow-man.
In those days hunting was more like work than sport, and tigers were
still a menace to humanity, such as we can hardly now conceive. There
was great merit in hindering a tiger from escaping then; but to-day
that matters little. Such an event as the song describes is not
uncommon still. I have heard credibly of about a dozen like it among
contemporaries in Burma in the last twenty-four years. Men seeking
deer or other game are suddenly confronted by a tiger similarly
engaged. If the men make way for him, he merely shows his teeth and
swiftly escapes, and that is what generally happens. But if any one of
the hunters hurts him, or his road seems blocked, then there is
danger; and that is how fatal accidents often happen.
Something of that sort was probably impending on this occasion,
740 B.C., or about then. There was probably a big crowd and a
desperate tiger, and while the others facing him were shrinking, Shuh
perhaps leaped from his chariot, certainly stepped to the front, ready
for action, a stalwart Chinese figure, stripped to the waist, like
Nelson's sailors on a day of battle, and in all likelihood a
big-pointed knife in his hand. A shout might make the tiger shy a
second, and so give him a chance; but the likeliest thing is that the
tiger, coming out of the darkness into the glare of the fires, did not
see him, and perhaps was trying to get away, or charging some other
person, so that Shuh could take him sideways and kill him. Somehow or
other, Shuh did it. Think of the few thrilling seconds of glorious
life, and the jubilation of the crowd when the knife went home.
Note the difference between them and us. Miss your shot with the
breechloader, and you can fire again, and even if you do not hit a
vital part, you can stop him. "But with bow and arrows," as an old man
said to me in 1889, telling how he and his father had fought a tiger
with such weapons, and showing me the good old cross-bow they used,
"it is folly to shoot till he is close, for at a distance the arrow
merely irritates him. Wait till he is near."
"Ten yards?"
"My father, let him come nearer. Then you hit his brain through the
eye, if he's coming straight, or the heart through the ribs, if he
shows his side, and so he is dead."
"But if he isn't dead?"
"Then drop your bow, and fight him with the knife. Never try a second
shot, for, if you do, he's sure to get you. The tiger is very, _very_
quick. You have to dodge him and get a knife into his vitals before he
grips you."
I suggested a spear; but was told it was too clumsy and slow to be a
good weapon.
The words of that old veteran, living among the hills between Burma
and China, seemed to me to illuminate the hunting scene in old Honan
better than any of the commentators on the Classics. But for his talk,
one would have been slow to guess that Shuh went close to the tiger
with a knife. That would explain why the poet alluded to Shuh's bare
arms, and to his standing in the front. He could not have fired arrows
from his chariot, for the horses would have bolted. So we may still
see him through so many centuries, afoot and in front, with
business-like bare arms and sharp knife ready; we can rejoice with
them all, and admire him yet, and feel also, with the singers, "once
like that for life will do." It comes like a shock to remember that we
are among the shades, and that more than fifty or sixty generations of
men have come and gone since Shuh and his companions all melted into
dust and air.
It gives us another kind of shock to contrast that kind of work with
modern hunting. Our statesmen at large, slaughtering in foreign woods,
are neither better nor worse than their friends at home, "the
poulterers." The only serious danger is from their own awkwardness in
handling guns. Their butcheries are like those in old Roman arenas;
and even Theodore Roosevelt himself, returning in gory glory but
without a scratch from Africa, can only be compared by one of his
admirers to the immortal Tartarin of Tarascon.