In India I have seen a certain tribe of gipsies who eat jackals. Now,
a jackal is one of the most suspicious animals that lives, and is very
difficult to catch in a trap, but these gipsies catch them by calling
them in this way: Several men with dogs hide themselves in the grass
and bushes round a small field. In the middle of this open place one
gipsy imitates the call of the jackals calling to each other; he gets
louder and louder till they seem to come together; then they begin to
growl and finally tackle each other with violent snapping, snarling,
and yelling, and at the same time he shakes a bundle of dried leaves,
which sounds like the animals dashing about among grass and reeds.
Then he flings himself down on the ground, and throws up dust in the
air, so that he is completely hidden in it, still growling and
fighting.
If any jackal is within sound of this, he comes tearing out of the
jungle, and dashes into the dust to join in the fight. When he finds a
man there, he comes out again in a hurry, but meantime the dogs have
been loosed from all sides, and they quickly catch him and kill him.
Mr. William Long, in his very interesting book called _Beasts of the
Field_, describes how he once called a moose. The moose is a very
huge kind of stag, with an ugly, bulging kind of nose. He lives in the
forests of North America and Canada, and is very hard to get near; and
is pretty dangerous when he is angry.
Mr. Long was in a canoe fishing when he heard a moose bull calling in
the forest--so just for fun he went ashore and cut a strip of bark off
a birch tree and rolled it up so as to make a kind of megaphone, With
this he proceeded to imitate the roaring grunt of the bull moose. The
effect was tremendous; the old moose came tearing down, and even came
into the water and tried to get at him--and it was only by hard
paddling that in the end he got away.