WILD BEASTS IN INDIA
Tigers not often seen. Unlooked-for visits. Appearance of a
tiger. The dead panther. Government rewards. Annual return
of people killed. The tiger's den. Jackals; their cry.
Wolves. So-called "wolf-boys." The Asiatic lion.
When an English boy meets a missionary from India the only thing he
wants to know is whether he has ever seen any tigers, and he is
disappointed if he gets an answer in the negative. The truth is, that
though wild beasts are still numerous they keep out of sight as much
as possible. They soon realise that man is their enemy, and ordinarily
they give him as wide a berth as possible. When a grandee wants to
shoot a tiger the difficulty is to find one, and an elaborate and
lengthy campaign has to be organised, and an army of beaters called
into requisition in order to gradually bring the tigers within range.
A forest officer of long experience, in that jungly region where the
mouths of the Ganges open out into the Bay of Bengal, told me that
though tigers are known to frequent those parts, he had never seen
one.
In the hot weather in India English people sleep with doors and
windows wide open on the ground floor, or in the verandah, or even
quite out of doors in their compound, without apprehension. Whereas in
England, where there are no wild beasts, and thieves may be supposed
to be under control, doors and windows are barred at night as if the
house was about to sustain a siege.
But where there are no barriers of sea to prevent wild beasts from
wandering wherever they please, unlooked-for visits are possible, even
if improbable. Animals are sometimes obliged to abandon their usual
haunts in time of drought, when the normal sources of water have dried
up, and they wander farther afield and come nearer to the haunts of
men than is their wont. Occasionally people are taken by surprise by
the advent of a panther, or even a tiger, in a district which they
were supposed to have deserted.
One of the Brothers and some of the Mission boys were climbing about
the hills in holiday time in the neighbourhood of Kala, a small
village twenty miles or so from Poona, and in the heat of the day
rested for a while in the shade of a thicket of small trees.
Continuing their walk, they were startled on looking back to see a
tiger jump out of the thicket in which they had been resting. Tigers
rarely come into the open in the middle of the day unless they have
been disturbed, and his sudden appearance was soon accounted for when
an Englishman, accompanied by some native beaters, emerged. The
Englishman fired, and the tiger gave a terrible roar, as he generally
does when wounded, and went back into the thicket. To dislodge him was
not an easy task, because a wounded tiger is, of course, a most
dangerous beast. But eventually he broke cover again, and the
Englishman shot him dead; and the boys had the novel experience of
inspecting at close quarters the body of a tiger who, not long before,
had been sheltering from the rays of the noonday sun in the same
thicket as themselves.
One Sunday a bullock-cart drew up at the Mission-house, containing a
large panther which had been shot, some eight or nine miles away, by a
Christian who is one amongst the few privileged natives allowed to
carry a gun. He was bringing the body in order to exhibit it to the
local authority, so that he might claim the Government reward. The
skin also fetches a good price. The scent was getting rather strong,
so after photographing the successful hunter and his son, standing
over the beast in the approved fashion, we were glad to hurry him on.
Its claws and teeth were in a very dirty and neglected condition,
which may partly account for the great danger of even slight
lacerations made by an animal of this kind.
Government sometimes spends as much as L8000 a year on rewards for the
destruction of wild beasts and snakes in British India, and the annual
return of the number of human beings reported as having been killed by
them shows that they are still sufficiently numerous to be a power in
the land. In a recent return this number reached the enormous total of
24,576. But snakes were accountable for 21,827 out of these deaths. In
the same year, in the case of 48 people killed by tigers in the
Central Provinces, nearly all were the victims of one tigress which
had been infesting the jungle for some years. A confirmed man-eater
becomes very crafty, and difficult to kill.
There are many hills and dales where wild beasts found a congenial
home from which they have gradually retreated in the face of man and
civilisation. A den in the hillside, visible from the Mission bungalow
at Yerandawana, is still spoken of as the "Tiger's den," and a remote,
but probably true tradition lingers of an immense tiger who lived
there and who was eventually hunted down and slain by order of the
then ruler of the district. At the present day, in the immediate
neighbourhood of Yerandawana the only wild creatures left are the fox
and the jackal, with an occasional hyena. Jackals visit the outskirts
of the village at night to see if there is anything eatable to be
picked up, and they sometimes race across the Mission compound in the
early morning on their way home. It is to be feared that they visit
the Hindu cemetery, where the graves are often so shallow that the
bodies are scarcely covered. The low-caste men, whose duty it is to
bury stray corpses, do not expend more labour over their task than
they can help.
Jackals generally travel in companies at night, and they utter a most
peculiar and rather attractive sharp cry in chorus, which they are
commonly said to repeat after exact intervals of time. But solitary
jackals are often to be met with. In the mountainous district somewhat
farther away wolves are still found, and they do a little damage
amongst the flocks of the villages. Some two or three hundred persons
are carried off yearly by wolves in British India. The majority of
these victims are very young children who have strayed away a little
from their parent's hut.
There is a widespread belief in rural India that wolves, instead of
devouring these babies, occasionally bring them up amongst their own
young ones. It has been questioned whether these stories of
"wolf-boys" have any foundation in fact. A schoolmaster, whose
evidence was reliable, told me that he had actually seen a boy of this
description brought to a mission in North India by people who had
found him in the jungle. They led him by a string, as if he had been a
wild animal. The Mission accepted the charge, and the boy proved quiet
and docile; but he never learnt to speak, nor, in fact, was it
possible to teach him anything. He did not join the other boys in
their games. When he went to church he sat there quietly, but without
any apparent understanding of what it meant. He learnt, however, to
smoke, and made signs to indicate that a cigarette would be
acceptable; and if one was given him he gave a kind of salute by way
of acknowledgment, which shows that his mind was not quite a blank. He
seemed to be about ten years old when the people brought him, but
whether he was still alive the schoolmaster did not know.
Even in this case there was no direct evidence to connect the boy with
wolves. But the natives have so many stories of the kind that it would
seem likely that there is some truth in them. It is not inconceivable
that the young wolves might welcome the arrival of the strange child
as a new playmate, and that if its life was spared at the first the
wolf-boy would, through his human nature, gain a sort of ascendancy
over his foster-parents, and they would eventually fear to hurt him,
after the fashion of Mowgli in Rudyard Kipling's _Jungle Book_.
The Asiatic lion is sometimes spoken of slightingly, as if it was a
feeble creature and almost extinct. A visit to Kathiawar, in Guzerat,
would dispel the idea. In one forest alone, only a few years back,
there were said to be a hundred lions, which were the terror of the
surrounding villages. One of these lions in recent years killed an
officer who formed one of a shooting party organised for the benefit
of one of the former governors of Bombay.