For two years Michael sang his way over the United States, to fame for
himself and to fortune for Jacob Henderson. There was never any time
off. So great was his success, that Henderson refused flattering offers
to cross the Atlantic to show in Europe. But off-time did come to
Michael when Henderson fell ill of typhoid in Chicago.
It was a three-months' vacation for Michael, who, well treated but still
a prisoner, spent it in a caged kennel in Mulcachy's Animal Home.
Mulcachy, one of Harris Collins's brightest graduates, had emulated his
master by setting up in business in Chicago, where he ran everything with
the same rigid cleanliness, sanitation, and scientific cruelty. Michael
received nothing but the excellent food and the cleanliness; but, a
solitary and brooding prisoner in his cage, he could not help but sense
the atmosphere of pain and terror about him of the animals being broken
for the delight of men.
Mulcachy had originated aphorisms of his own which he continually
enunciated, among which were:
"Take it from me, when an animal won't give way to pain, it can't be
broke. Pain is the only school-teacher."
"Just as you got to take the buck out of a broncho, you've got to take
the bite out of a lion."
"You can't break animals with a feather duster. The thicker the skull
the thicker the crowbar."
"They'll always beat you in argument. First thing is to club the
argument out of them."
"Heart-bonds between trainers and animals! Son, that's dope for the
newspaper interviewer. The only heart-bond I know is a stout stick with
some iron on the end of it."
"Sure you can make 'm eat outa your hand. But the thing to watch out for
is that they don't eat your hand. A blank cartridge in the nose just
about that time is the best preventive I know."
There were days when all the air was vexed with roars and squalls of
ferocity and agony from the arena, until the last animal in the cages was
excited and ill at ease. In truth, since it was Mulcachy's boast that he
could break the best animal living, no end of the hardest cases fell to
his hand. He had built a reputation for succeeding where others failed,
and, endowed with fearlessness, callousness, and cunning, he never let
his reputation wane. There was nothing he dared not tackle, and, when he
gave up an animal, the last word was said. For it, remained nothing but
to be a cage-animal, in solitary confinement, pacing ever up and down,
embittered with all the world of man and roaring its bitterness to the
most delicious enthrillment of the pay-spectators.
During the three months spent by Michael in Mulcachy's Animal Home,
occurred two especially hard cases. Of course, the daily chant of
ordinary pain of training went on all the time through the working hours,
such as of "good" bears and lions and tigers that were made amenable
under stress, and of elephants derricked and gaffed into making the head-
stand or into the beating of a bass drum. But the two cases that were
exceptional, put a mood of depression and fear into all the listening
animals, such as humans might experience in an ante-room of hell,
listening to the flailing and the flaying of their fellows who had
preceded them into the torture-chamber.
The first was of the big Indian tiger. Free-born in the jungle, and free
all his days, master, according to his nature and prowess, of all other
living creatures including his fellow-tigers, he had come to grief in the
end; and, from the trap to the cramped cage, by elephant-back and
railroad and steamship, ever in the cramped cage, he had journeyed across
seas and continents to Mulcachy's Animal Home. Prospective buyers had
examined but not dared to purchase. But Mulcachy had been undeterred.
His own fighting blood leapt hot at sight of the magnificent striped cat.
It was a challenge of the brute in him to excel. And, two weeks of hell,
for the great tiger and for all the other animals, were required to teach
him his first lesson.
Ben Bolt he had been named, and he arrived indomitable and
irreconcilable, though almost paralysed from eight weeks of cramp in his
narrow cage which had restricted all movement. Mulcachy should have
undertaken the job immediately, but two weeks were lost by the fact that
he had got married and honeymooned for that length of time. And in that
time, in a large cage of concrete and iron, Ben Bolt had exercised and
recovered the use of his muscles, and added to his hatred of the
two-legged things, puny against him in themselves, who by trick and wile
had so helplessly imprisoned him.
So, on this morning when hell yawned for him, he was ready and eager to
meet all comers. They came, equipped with formulas, nooses, and forked
iron bars. Five of them tossed nooses in through the bars upon the floor
of his cage. He snarled and struck at the curling ropes, and for ten
minutes was a grand and impossible wild creature, lacking in nothing save
the wit and the patience possessed by the miserable two-legged things.
And then, impatient and careless of the inanimate ropes, he paused,
snarling at the men, with one hind foot resting inside a noose. The next
moment, craftily lifted up about the girth of his leg by an iron fork,
the noose tightened and the bite of it sank home into his flesh and
pride. He leaped, he roared, he was a maniac of ferocity. Again and
again, almost burning their palms, he tore the rope smoking through their
hands. But ever they took in the slack and paid it out again, until, ere
he was aware, a similar noose tightened on his foreleg. What he had done
was nothing to what he now did. But he was stupid and impatient. The
man-creatures were wise and patient, and a third leg and a fourth leg
were finally noosed, so that, with many men tailing on to the ropes, he
was dragged ignominiously on his side to the bars, and, ignominiously,
through the bars were hauled his four legs, his chiefest weapons of
offence after his terribly fanged jaws.
And then a puny man-creature, Mulcachy himself, dared openly and brazenly
to enter the cage and approach him. He sprang to be at him, or, rather,
strove so to spring, but was withstrained by his four legs through the
bars which he could not draw back and get under him. And Mulcachy knelt
beside him, dared kneel beside him, and helped the fifth noose over his
head and round his neck. Then his head was drawn to the bars as
helplessly as his legs had been drawn through. Next, Mulcachy laid hands
on him, on his head, on his ears, on his very nose within an inch of his
fangs; and he could do nothing but snarl and roar and pant for breath as
the noose shut off his breathing.
Quivering, not with fear but with rage, Ben Bolt perforce endured the
buckling around his throat of a thick, broad collar of leather to which
was attached a very stout and a very long trailing rope. After that,
when Mulcachy had left the cage, one by one the five nooses were artfully
manipulated off his legs and his neck. Again, after this prodigious
indignity, he was free--within his cage. He went up into the air. With
returning breath he roared his rage. He struck at the trailing rope that
offended his nerves, clawed at the trap of the collar that encased his
neck, fell, rolled over, offended his body-nerves more and more by
entangling contacts with the rope, and for half an hour exhausted himself
in the futile battle with the inanimate thing. Thus tigers are broken.
At the last, wearied, even with sensations of sickness from the nervous
strain put upon himself by his own anger, he lay down in the middle of
the floor, lashing his tail, hating with his eyes, and accepting the
clinging thing about his neck which he had learned he could not get rid
of.
To his amazement, if such a thing be possible in the mental processes of
a tiger, the rear door to his cage was thrown open and left open. He
regarded the aperture with belligerent suspicion. No one and no
threatening danger appeared in the doorway. But his suspicion grew.
Always, among these man-animals, occurred what he did not know and could
not comprehend. His preference was to remain where he was, but from
behind, through the bars of the cage, came shouts and yells, the lash of
whips, and the painful thrusts of the long iron forks. Dragging the rope
behind him, with no thought of escape, but in the hope that he would get
at his tormentors, he leaped into the rear passage that ran behind the
circle of permanent cages. The passage way was deserted and dark, but
ahead he saw light. With great leaps and roars, he rushed in that
direction, arousing a pandemonium of roars and screams from the animals
in the cages.
He bounded through the light, and into the light, dazzled by the
brightness of it, and crouched down, with long, lashing tail, to orient
himself to the situation. But it was only another and larger cage that
he was in, a very large cage, a big, bright performing-arena that was all
cage. Save for himself, the arena was deserted, although, overhead,
suspended from the roof-bars, were block-and-tackle and seven strong iron
chairs that drew his instant suspicion and caused him to roar at them.
For half an hour he roamed the arena, which was the greatest area of
restricted freedom he had known in the ten weeks of his captivity. Then,
a hooked iron rod, thrust through the bars, caught and drew the bight of
his trailing rope into the hands of the men outside. Immediately ten of
them had hold of it, and he would have charged up to the bars at them had
not, at that moment, Mulcachy entered the arena through a door on the
opposite side. No bars stood between Ben Bolt and this creature, and Ben
Bolt charged him. Even as he charged he was aware of suspicion in that
the small, fragile man-creature before him did not flee or crouch down,
but stood awaiting him.
Ben Bolt never reached him. First, with an access of caution, he
craftily ceased from his charge, and, crouching, with lashing tail,
studied the man who seemed so easily his. Mulcachy was equipped with a
long-lashed whip and a sharp-pronged fork of iron.
In his belt, loaded with blank cartridges, was a revolver.
Bellying closer to the ground, Ben Bolt advanced upon him, creeping
slowly like a cat stalking a mouse. When he came to his next pause,
which was within certain leaping distance, he crouched lower, gathered
himself for the leap, then turned his head to regard the men at his back
outside the cage. The trailing rope in their hands, to his neck, he had
forgotten.
"Now you might as well be good, old man," Mulcachy addressed him in soft,
caressing tones, taking a step toward him and holding in advance the iron
fork.
This merely incensed the huge, magnificent creature. He rumbled a low,
tense growl, flattened his ears back, and soared into the air, his paws
spread so that the claws stood out like talons, his tail behind him as
stiff and straight as a rod. Neither did the man crouch or flee, nor did
the beast attain to him. At the height of his leap the rope tightened
taut on his neck, causing him to describe a somersault and fall heavily
to the floor on his side.
Before he could regain his feet, Mulcachy was upon him, shouting to his
small audience: "Here's where we pound the argument out of him!" And
pound he did, on the nose with the butt of the whip, and jab he did, with
the iron fork to the ribs. He rained a hurricane of blows and jabs on
the animal's most sensitive parts. Ever Ben Bolt leaped to retaliate,
but was thrown by the ten men tailed on to the rope, and, each time, even
as he struck the floor on his side, Mulcachy was upon him, pounding,
smashing, jabbing. His pain was exquisite, especially that of his tender
nose. And the creature who inflicted the pain was as fierce and terrible
as he, even more so because he was more intelligent. In but few minutes,
dazed by the pain, appalled by his inability to rend and destroy the man
who inflicted it, Ben Bolt lost his courage. He fled ignominiously
before the little, two-legged creature who was more terrible than himself
who was a full-grown Royal Bengal tiger. He leaped high in the air in
sheer panic; he ran here and there, with lowered head, to avoid the rain
of pain. He even charged the sides of the arena, springing up and vainly
trying to climb the slippery vertical bars.
Ever, like an avenging devil, Mulcachy pursued and smashed and jabbed,
gritting through his teeth: "You will argue, will you? I'll teach you
what argument is! There! Take that! And that! And that!"
"Now I've got him afraid of me, and the rest ought to be easy," he
announced, resting off and panting hard from his exertions, while the
great tiger crouched and quivered and shrank back from him against the
base of the arena-bars. "Take a five-minute spell, you fellows, and
we'll got our breaths."
Lowering one of the iron chairs, and attaching it firmly in its place on
the floor, Mulcachy prepared for the teaching of the first trick. Ben
Bolt, jungle-born and jungle-reared, was to be compelled to sit in the
chair in ludicrous and tragic imitation of man-creatures. But Mulcachy
was not quite ready. The first lesson of fear of him must be reiterated
and driven home.
Stepping to a near safe distance, he lashed Ben Bolt on the nose. He
repeated it. He did it a score of times, and scores of times. Turn his
head as he would, ever Ben Bolt received the bite of the whip on his
fearfully bruised nose; for Mulcachy was as expert as a stage-driver in
his manipulation of the whip, and unerringly the lash snapped and cracked
and stung Ben Bolt's nose wherever Ben Bolt at the moment might have it.
When it became maddeningly unendurable, he sprang, only to be jerked back
by the ten strong men who held the rope to his neck. And wrath, and
ferocity, and intent to destroy, passed out utterly from the tiger's
inflamed brain, until he knew fear, again and again, always fear and only
fear, utter and abject fear, of this human mite who searched him with
such pain.
Then the lesson of the first trick was taken up. Mulcachy tapped the
chair sharply with the butt of the whip to draw the animal's attention to
it, then flicked the whip-lash sharply on his nose. At the same moment,
an attendant, through the bars behind, drove an iron fork into his ribs
to force him away from the bars and toward the chair. He crouched
forward, then shrank back against the side-bars. Again the chair was
rapped, his nose was lashed, his ribs were jabbed, and he was forced by
pain toward the chair. This went on interminably--for a quarter of an
hour, for half an hour, for an hour; for the men-animals had the patience
of gods while he was only a jungle-brute. Thus tigers are broken. And
the verb means just what it means. A performing animal is _broken_.
Something _breaks_ in an animal of the wild ere such an animal submits to
do tricks before pay-audiences.
Mulcachy ordered an assistant to enter the arena with him. Since he
could not compel the tiger directly to sit in the chair, he must employ
other means. The rope about Ben Bolt's neck was passed up through the
bars and rove through the block-and-tackle. At signal from Mulcachy, the
ten men hauled away. Snarling, struggling, choking, in a fresh madness
of terror at this new outrage, Ben Bolt was slowly hoisted by his neck up
from the floor, until, quite clear of it, whirling, squirming, battling,
suspended by his neck like a man being hanged, his wind was shut off and
he began to suffocate. He coiled and twisted, the splendid muscles of
his body enabling him almost to tie knots in it.
The block-and-tackle, running like a trolley on the overhead track, made
it possible for the assistant to seize his tail and drag him through the
air till he was above the chair. His helpless body guided thus by the
tail, his chest jabbed by the iron fork in Mulcachy's hands, the rope was
suddenly lowered, and Ben Bolt, with swimming brain, found himself seated
in the chair. On the instant he leaped for the floor, received a blow on
the nose from the heavy whip-handle, and had a blank cartridge fired
straight into his nostril. His madness of pain and fear was multiplied.
He sprang away in flight, but Mulcachy's voice rang out, "Hoist him!" and
he slowly rose in the air again, hanging by his neck, and began to
strangle.
Once more he was swung into position by his tail, jabbed in the chest,
and lowered suddenly on the run--but so suddenly, with a frantic twist of
his body on his part, that he fell violently across the chair on his
belly. What little wind was left him from the strangling, seemed to have
been ruined out of him by the violence of the fall. The glare in his
eyes was maniacal and swimming. He panted frightfully, and his head
rolled back and forth. Slaver dripped from his mouth, blood ran from his
nose.
"Hoist away!" Mulcachy shouted.
And again, struggling frantically as the tightening collar shut off his
wind, Ben Bolt was slowly lifted into the air. So wildly did he struggle
that, ere his hind feet were off the floor, he pranced back and forth, so
that when he was heaved clear his body swung like a huge pendulum. Over
the chair, he was dropped, and for a fraction of a second the posture was
his of a man sitting in a chair. Then he uttered a terrible cry and
sprang.
It was neither snarl, nor growl, nor roar, that cry, but a sheer scream,
as if something had broken inside of him. He missed Mulcachy by inches,
as another blank cartridge exploded up his other nostril and as the men
with the rope snapped him back so abruptly as almost to break his neck.
This time, lowered quickly, he sank into the chair like a half-empty sack
of meal, and continued so to sink, until, crumpling at the middle, his
great tawny head falling forward, he lay on the floor unconscious. His
tongue, black and swollen, lolled out of his mouth. As buckets of water
were poured on him he groaned and moaned. And here ended the first
lesson.
"It's all right," Mulcachy said, day after day, as the teaching went on.
"Patience and hard work will pull off the trick. I've got his goat. He's
afraid of me. All that's required is time, and time adds to value with
an animal like him."
Not on that first day, nor on the second, nor on the third, did the
requisite something really break inside Ben Bolt. But at the end of a
fortnight it did break. For the day came when Mulcachy rapped the chair
with his whip-butt, when the attendant through the bars jabbed the iron
fork into Ben Bolt's ribs, and when Ben Bolt, anything but royal,
slinking like a beaten alley-cat, in pitiable terror, crawled over to the
chair and sat down in it like a man. He now was an "educated" tiger. The
sight of him, so sitting, tragically travestying man, has been
considered, and is considered, "educative" by multitudinous audiences.
The second case, that of St. Elias, was a harder one, and it was marked
down against Mulcachy as one of his rare failures, though all admitted
that it was an unavoidable failure. St. Elias was a huge monster of an
Alaskan bear, who was good-natured and even facetious and humorous after
the way of bears. But he had a will of his own that was correspondingly
as stubborn as his bulk. He could be persuaded to do things, but he
would not tolerate being compelled to do things. And in the
trained-animal world, where turns must go off like clockwork, is little
or no space for persuasion. An animal must do its turn, and do it
promptly. Audiences will not brook the delay of waiting while a trainer
tries to persuade a crusty or roguish beast to do what the audience has
paid to see it do.
So St. Elias received his first lesson in compulsion. It was also his
last lesson, and it never progressed so far as the training-arena, for it
took place in his own cage.
Noosed in the customary way, his four legs dragged through the bars, and
his head, by means of a "choke" collar, drawn against the bars, he was
first of all manicured. Each one of his great claws was cut off flush
with his flesh. The men outside did this. Then Mulcachy, on the inside,
punched his nose. Not lightly as it sounds was this operation. The
punch was a perforation. Thrusting the instrument into the huge bear's
nostril, Mulcachy cut a clean round chunk of living meat out of one side
of it. Mulcachy knew the bear business. At all times, to make an
untrained bear obey, one must be fast to some sensitive portion of the
bear. The ears, the nose, and the eyes are the accessible sensitive
parts, and, the eyes being out of the question, remain the nose and the
ears as the parts to which to make fast.
Through the perforation Mulcachy immediately clamped a metal ring. To
the ring he fastened a long "lunge"-rope, which was well named. Any
unruly lunge, at any time during all the subsequent life of St. Elias,
could thus be checked by the man who held the lunge-rope. His destiny
was patent and ordained. For ever, as long as he lived and breathed,
would he be a prisoner and slave to the rope in the ring in his nostril.
The nooses were slipped, and St. Elias was at liberty, within the
confines of his cage, to get acquainted with the ring in his nose. With
his powerful forepaws, standing erect and roaring, he proceeded to get
acquainted with the ring. It certainly was not a thing persuasible. It
was living fire. And he tore at it with his paws as he would have torn
at the stings of bees when raiding a honey-tree. He tore the thing out,
ripping the ring clear through the flesh and transforming the round
perforation into a ragged chasm of pain.
Mulcachy cursed. "Here's where hell coughs," he said. The nooses were
introduced again. Again St. Elias, helpless on his side against and
partly through the bars, had his nose punched. This time it was the
other nostril. And hell coughed. As before, the moment he was released,
he tore the ring out through his flesh.
Mulcachy was disgusted. "Listen to reason, won't you?" he objurgated,
as, this time, the reason he referred to was the introduction of the ring
clear through both nostrils, higher up, and through the central dividing
wall of cartilage. But St. Elias was unreasonable. Unlike Ben Bolt,
there was nothing inside of him weak enough, or nervous enough, or high-
strung enough, to break. The moment he was free he ripped the ring away
with half of his nose along with it. Mulcachy punched St. Elias's right
ear. St. Elias tore his right ear to shreds. Mulcachy punched his left
ear. He tore his left ear to shreds. And Mulcachy gave in. He had to.
As he said plaintively:
"We're beaten. There ain't nothing left to make fast to."
Later, when St. Elias was condemned to be a "cage-animal" all his days,
Mulcachy was wont to grumble:
"He was the most unreasonable animal! Couldn't do a thing with him.
Couldn't ever get anything to make fast to."