quicker, more excitable, savage and enterprising than her mate. Once
when Gérard was lying in wait by a dead horse a lioness arrived with
her cub, but pretended not to see the hunter. She instantly pounced on
her unsuspecting whelp, drove it out of harm’s way, then made a detour,
and stole silently back to kill him. This means maternal solicitude to
the extent of temporary self-forgetfulness, presence of mind, rapid
comprehension of the circumstances involved in an unexpected and
unusual situation, determined purpose, and courage. Tigers constantly
make false charges with the design of intimidating their foes; lions
perhaps resort to this ruse less frequently, but they adopt other
means to the same end. Much of their awe-inspiring appearance is due
to causes acting independently of will; still, they deliberately
attempt to excite terror. One night while Green and his friend Bonfield
occupied a screen near a watering-place, a lion passed and repassed,
inspecting them closely. He wished the intruders away, but thought it
imprudent to attack their position, and they objected to fire because
the noise would frighten away elephants for which they were waiting.
Then the lion walked off a little distance, lay down facing them, and
reflected on the situation. Shortly he sprang up and began to cut
extraordinary capers, at the same time setting up “the most hideous
noise, neither a roar nor a growl, but something between the two.”
The beast was trying to frighten off these unwelcome visitors who
might keep game at a distance and interfere with his supper. No one
who watches young wild beasts, and more particularly those of the cat
kind, can fail to notice that they continually rehearse the chief acts
of their lives under the influence of imagination. A lion’s memory is
good, and he can be taught much. His judgment is excellent, and he
seldom attempts what he is unable to carry out. In cold blood, prudence
is one of his distinguishing characteristics, and he is also very
suspicious and on the lookout for destructive devices and inventions
of the only enemy he has reason to fear; that is to say, man. Thus,
although parts of Africa may be said to be undermined with pitfalls,
lions rarely fall into them and when this happens they often claw steps
in their walls and get out. Not, however, out of the trenches dug
inside of the fence round an Arab cattle pen, for there their enemies
occupy its edge, and then it is seen that there are certainly occasions
when lions meet inevitable death in a very dignified manner.
THE LEOPARD AND PANTHER
Those conflicting opinions we have thus far seen expressed upon the
habits and characters of wild beasts, are not replaced by any unanimity
upon the part of those who have described leopards and panthers. They
have a less voluminous literature than the lion or elephant, but their
temper and traits are disputed about in every particular, and even the
place they occupy in nature.
The only difference between a panther and a leopard is one of size; or
as G. P. Sanderson (“Thirteen Years among the Wild Beasts of India”)
expresses it, the distinction is the same as that existing between a
“horse and a pony.” Dr. Jerdon (“Mammals of India”) states that they
are merely “varieties of _Felis pardus_,” and if the species-making
mania were not so prevalent, one might wonder at men who constantly met
with these creatures in Asia and Africa, and yet wrote about them as if
they belonged to distinct groups, and had very little in common.
[Illustration: THE LEOPARD.
[_From a photograph by Gambier Bolton. Copyright._]]
Major H. A. Leveson (“Sport in Many Lands”) thus describes the panther:
“This animal frequently measures eight feet in length from its nose
to the end of its tail. It has a well-defined, bony ridge along the
centre of its skull for the attachment of the muscles of the neck,
which is not noticeable in the leopard or cheetah. The skin, which
shines like silk, and is of a rich tawny or orange tan above and white
underneath, is marked with seven rows of rosettes, each consisting
of an assemblage of black spots, in the centre of which the tawny or
fulvous ground of the coat shows distinctly through the black. Its
extremities are marked with horseshoe-shaped or round black spots.
Few animals can surpass the panther in point of beauty, and none in
elegance or grace. His every motion is easy and flexible in the highest
degree; he bounds among the rocks and woods with an agility truly
surprising--now stealing along the ground with the silence of a snake,
now crouching with his fore-paws extended and his head laid between
them, while his chequered tail twitches impatiently, and his pale,
gooseberry eyes glare mischievously upon his unsuspecting victim.”
Captain J. H. Baldwin (“Large and Small Game of Bengal”) writes in much
the same strain upon the specific differences between these varieties,
and he is at a loss to understand how Dr. Jerdon and Mr. Blyth, Captain
Hodgson and Sir Walter Elliot, can regard panthers and leopards as of
the same species. The difference between their skulls--that of the
leopard’s being oval, while the panther’s is round--is, he asserts, “of
itself conclusive evidence upon this disputed question;” and besides
that, “the two animals altogether differ from one another in size and
character.”
Technical discussions have been avoided so far as it was possible to do
so, but here it seems necessary to say briefly that head-measurements
as a basis for classification, whether among beasts or men, have
always failed; also that developed ridges and processes are for the
most part merely concomitants of more massive skulls in larger animals
whose muscles are of greater size; and that bulk by itself means very
little, and varies in most cases very much. Finally, the coat-markings,
in their minor details, of all animals whose skins are variegated,
constantly differ in the same species. Among _Felidæ_ one scarcely sees
two lions with like manes, or two tigers with identical stripes. As for
the spotted or rosetted groups, their spots not only vary in members
of specific aggregates, but even upon different sides of the same
creature’s body.
Lockington (“Riverside Natural History”) states that “the leopard
(including both varieties of _Felis pardus_ under this term) is very
variable in size and color.” Stanley, Emin Pasha (Dr. Schnitzer), and
Hissman speak of those in Somali-land as much larger than any others
in Africa, yet it is certain that there is but one true species now
extant, and that this includes those forms already spoken of, together
with the snow leopard of the Himalayas, the long-furred, ring-marked,
bushy-tailed variety of Manchuria and Corea, and the “black tiger” of
India and the Malasian Archipelago, which is nothing but a panther
with its colors reversed,--a “sport,” as G. A. R. Dawson (“Nilgiri
Sporting Reminiscences”) calls it, and which according to him is “of a
uniform dull black color, with its spots (of a fulvous tint) showing in
particular lights.” Colonel A. C. McMaster proved that these dark cubs
had been found in litters having the usual coloration. General Hamilton
demonstrated the same thing, and Colonel Pollok (“Natural History
Notes”) states that “the black panther, which is very common towards
Mergeri and Tavay, is only a _lusus naturæ_.” He himself “saw a female
panther near Shoaydung, with two cubs, one black and one spotted.”
The “snow leopard” is very little known on account of the solitary
and inaccessible regions it inhabits. “It is the rarest event,”
says Colonel F. Markham (“Shooting in the Himalayas”), “to see one,
though it roams about apparently as much by day as by night. Even the
shepherds who pass the whole of the summer months, year after year,
in the area where it lives, that is to say, above the forests where
there is little or no cover ... seldom see one.... It is surprising
and unaccountable how it eludes observation.” He describes its ground
color as being of a dingy white, with faint yellowish-brown markings,
and represents the animal to be considerably smaller than its congeners
of the hot country below. Captain Baldwin, however, saw a skin as
large as a panther’s. This was “of a light gray color, with irregular
black spots. There was a black line running lengthways over the hind
quarters, the hair was long on the neck, and the tail was remarkably
long, ringed with black, and black at the tip.”
An animal of the same species, and very like this, is confined to the
equatorial belt of Africa. It is as rare as the “snow leopard,” and
has only been seen once or twice. Andersson (“Lake N’gami”) reports
that the “maned leopard” was mistaken by him for a lion. This name
is a translation of the native title--N’gulula, and Leslie, who knew
more about it than any one else, states that “a cub is gray, light,
and furry.... The half-grown one, gray also, but the spots are faintly
distinguishable. In the full-grown animal they are perfectly plain,
but very dirty and undefined. There is also a peculiar gray hog mane.”
W. H. Drummond (“Large Game and Natural History of Southern Africa”)
also met with the N’gulula, and he, like Andersson, thought at first
that it was a small lion, which it greatly resembled “in shape and
color.”
We may now turn from the varieties of _Felis pardus_ and their external
characteristics, to an investigation of those traits which have become
organized in them during the long course of ages in which they have
become specialized, physically and mentally, for a predatory life.
To know what an animal of this kind feeds on, and how it takes
its prey, is also to know much about its structure, temper, and
disposition. Neither lions nor tigers find the game upon which they
subsist in trees, and the latter, therefore, rarely climb, while there
is no account of the former having been seen to do so.
With the panther and leopard this is quite different. There are no
climbers more expert than these beasts. As the Panama chief said to the
explorer Oxenham, “Everything that has blood in it is food”; to these
animals many things without blood, or at least without red blood, are
food, for they eat the larva of insects, insects themselves, and birds’
eggs; likewise many fowls, from the splendid peacock to a common crow,
which, as Sir Samuel Baker remarks, “lives by his wits, and is one
of the cleverest birds in creation.” The panther preys on deer more
commonly than any other kind of game, although it destroys reptiles,
rodents, etc., and wild pigs in great numbers. Perhaps a wild boar,
the “grim gray tusker” of Anglo-Indian tales and hunting songs, “laughs
at a panther,” as General Shakespear (“Wild Sports of India”) declares.
But all the weaker members of his race become victims to this spotted
robber’s partiality for pork. Monkeys, too, from the sacred Hanuman
down through all secular grades, are eaten with avidity by these
animals, and they kill great quantities of them despite their cunning.
There is nothing alive of which monkeys are so much afraid.
Both leopards and panthers can endure thirst much better than tigers,
and the latter are cave-dwellers to a greater extent than any of the
larger _Felidæ_. They only drink once in twenty-four hours, and always
at night. Their retreats lie amid low, arid, rocky hills covered with
underbrush, traversed by gullies whose sides have been washed out into
recesses by floods, and their rocks worn away into caves by weathering
or percolation. They are much more active and energetic than their
striped relatives, can better endure fatigue, and are, as a rule,
bolder and more enterprising.
It is very far from being a fact, however, that “the habits of leopards
are invariably the same”; that is an error into which Sir Samuel Baker
was betrayed by the doctrine of instinct, and which has likewise been
shared by nearly every other writer upon natural history. There is a
certain sameness in the behavior of such creatures, as there is in that
of all classes of animals leading similar lives; but this is as much
as it is possible to say. In some localities, for example, the panther
is strictly nocturnal; in others it appears that he hunts during
the day nearly as much as at night. In no instance is he an organic
machine. Far from it; this prowling marauder is the fiercest and most
adventurous of wild beasts, astute to a degree, capable of using every
faculty to its fullest extent, well able to take care of itself, and
fatally skilful in compassing the destruction of others; a being in
every way qualified to design and execute its projects, to achieve all
those ends which courage and cunning enable it to attain, and quite fit
to meet the ordinary emergencies that may arise during the perpetration
of its acts of rapine and bloodshed.
The panther’s cry--Gérard (“Journal des Chasseurs”) calls it a
“scream”--is often heard upon Indian hillsides when darkness begins to
obscure the scene. Captain Baldwin describes it as a harsh, measured
coughing sound, without much timbre or resonance, rather flat, in fact,
and not at all like the roar of that animal it most resembles,--the
American jaguar. Like most of the _Felidæ_, this species commonly
gives tongue upon leaving its lair, or, at least, has been frequently
reported as doing so. This is not a point of much moment, but it is a
matter of considerable importance to the inhabitants of any village
that may lie in the neighborhood, whether that ominous voice dies away
in the forest, or appears to be approaching their dwellings. When a
panther takes to man-eating, Colonel Pollok (“Sport in British Burmah”)
and Captain James Forsyth (“The Highlands of Central India”) assert,
“he is far worse than a tiger.” Certainly, no records of such desperate
ferocity exist in the case of any other creature of the cat kind; no
other is reported to have taken like risks or to have succeeded in its
fatal enterprises in the face of equal difficulties.
It is to be taken into consideration that a panther very rarely exceeds
eight feet from tip to tip, or weighs more than a hundred and seventy
pounds. Several writers have said that this animal’s powers of offence
are scarcely inferior to those of the tiger; nevertheless, nothing
is more certain than the fact that with all its great strength, its
exceeding activity, and formidable armature, a panther cannot stand
before a tiger for a moment. It cannot overwhelm a man instantly,
bite him through the body, or crush his life out with a single blow;
and yet, unless like the superstitious people whom this fell beast
destroys, we can imagine demons becoming incarnated to scourge
humanity, nothing more terrible and deadly than a man-eater of this
class can be conceived of. Captain Forsyth thus sketches a famous
panther of the Seoni district, which he was in charge of when those
scenes alluded to occurred. “This brute killed, incredible as it may
seem, nearly a hundred people before he was shot by a shikári. He never
ate the bodies, but merely lapped the blood from the throat. His plan
was, either to steal into a house at night and strangle some sleeper
on his bed, stifling any outcry with his deadly grip, or to climb into
the high platforms on which watchers guard their fields from deer,
etc., and drag his victim thence. He was not to be balked of his prey,
and when driven off from one side of a village, would hasten round to
the opposite side, and secure another person in the confusion. A few
moments accomplished his murderous work, and such was the devilish
cunning he joined to his extraordinary boldness, that all attempts
to find and shoot him were for many months unsuccessful. European
sportsmen who went out, after hunting him in vain, would often find his
tracks close to their tent doors in the morning.”
It is about time that the usual explanation given for this kind of
exceptional conduct upon the part of a beast of prey by those writers
who think it necessary to allude to their character, otherwise than
in general terms, was banished from descriptive natural history. The
course of thought upon the natural relations which subsist between men
and brutes, seems to run somewhat in this wise. At sometime, somewhere,
and somehow, all inferior denizens of this earth were made to
appreciate and fear human superiority. That impression was transmitted
as an instinct, and is in full force now. When, therefore, a predatory
animal does such violence to its nature as to eat a man, the shock,
which according to conventional ideas always attends great crime,
unhinges its mind. A kind of madness ensues. It becomes wild, and is
driven by Furies like an ancient Greek guilty of sacrilege, or early
Christians who, as reported by Gregory the Great and many others, had
swallowed devils. Instantaneous change of character is the consequence,
and the creature henceforth thinks, feels, and conducts itself in a new
and terrible manner.
That is about the sum and substance of most statements bearing upon
this subject, and there is not the slightest foundation in fact for
any of them. This question has been considered in the abstract; but
with regard to the panther’s character the truth is that, in the way
stated, no respect for mankind is discoverable in his conduct. It is
indeed notoriously otherwise; and this is nowhere more clearly shown
than in the records of observations made by men who were convinced
that all species of wild beasts instinctively feared them. “The Old
Shekarry” (Major Leveson) writes (“Hunting-Grounds of the Old World”)
to this effect: “Panthers, like all forest creatures ... are afraid
of man, never voluntarily intruding upon his presence, and invariably
beating a retreat if they can do so unmolested.” Then this authority
goes on to tell what he has learned about panthers in the course of
an experience rarely equalled for extent and variety. They are “more
courageous than the tiger.... The panther often attacks men without
provocation.” When one “takes to cattle-lifting or man-eating he is a
more terrible scourge than a tiger, insomuch as he is more daring and
cunning.” He relates how this timid creature that never voluntarily
obtrudes himself upon human presence, fights hunters on all occasions;
how the beast broke into his own camps, carried off dogs that were tied
to his tent pole, and much more to the same effect.
There is no difficulty in finding exploits of the same kind; Rice,
Inglis, Forsyth, Barras, Shakespear, Pollok, Baker, Colonel Walter
Campbell, who saw the man riding next him in a party of horsemen, torn
out of his saddle, or Colonel Davidson moving with a column of troops
around whose encampments the sentinels had to be doubled to prevent
panthers from killing them, all tell the same story.
“The tiger is an abject coward,” and so is the lion. Panthers are
audacious, but they run away upon instinct, like Falstaff. No
qualifications, no reservations, are made, no middle ground is taken,
only a series of facts is given, which prove, so far as anything in
this connection can be said to be proved, the incorrectness of what was
insisted upon in the first place.
The opinion that a wild beast that has tasted human blood is thereby
metamorphosed morally, “undergoes a transformation of emotional
psychology,” as Professor Romanes expresses it, scarcely deserves a
serious refutation. There is not the slightest reason why any such
change of character should take place, and of course it does not. But
the fact of a wild beast’s taking to man-eating is a sufficient cause
for an alteration in habit. What modifies the animal then, however,
is not the fact of killing a man, but the discovery of the ease with
which he can be destroyed. Under these circumstances the brute simply
substitutes one kind of game for another; it becomes used to the feeble
attempts at opposition met with, and goes on with its murders. Where
the state of affairs is different, where people are ready to combine
against such scourges, to anticipate their designs, pursue, circumvent,
and slay them, these beasts of prey do not devour men; they keep as far
from them as possible.
It is doubtful if it could be shown that panthers are more prone to
anthropophagous habits than other brutes, but the evidence is strongly
in favor of the fact that they fight human beings more readily. Their
ferocity and hardihood are exceptional among the _Felidæ_.
The panther described by Forsyth set at naught quite a number of
favorite theories. His conduct was indeed very different from that
which might have been expected if the main features of character common
to his family are like those which are said to exist. The relations of
cause and effect were not set aside for his benefit, and therefore,
instead of being at once prepared to do the things he is known to
have accomplished, there must have been some period of preparation.
Of all things it is the most improbable that this animal set out on
an expedition at haphazard. Perception, foresight, comprehension,
judgment, resource, were not suddenly conferred upon him when he
arrived at his destination and taken away when he left. He must have
added observation and training to his innate qualities. How easily or
to what extent this was done we cannot decide; for to imagine that
a wild beast could come out of the forest, and instantly become an
experienced master of an entirely new set of circumstances and have
the ability to take advantage of every opportunity and overcome all
opposition, is preposterous; is nothing less than to suppose an effect
without a cause. The brute in question gave terribly convincing proofs
that it understood the situation in its entirety, and how this could
have been the case unless it was known, in what way known without
being learned, and how learned without a mind passing through ordinary
processes, does not appear.
To isolate the traits of an animal and consider them separately is
a mistake. It is to fall into the same error that Stallo and the
transcendental school in physics have made with reference to the
attributes of matter. These abstractions of the mind are not identical
with realities in nature. They cannot be studied by themselves without
distorting the subject to be represented. Compared with that of other
great cats the panther’s conduct shows that he is braver than the
rest. But this is only an empirical conclusion and throws little light
upon the animal’s character. We are not in a position, however, to
analyze this in such a way as to show the relative development of its
traits, or to say how far excess in one direction alters the general
disposition.
So far as the brute’s behavior goes, the following narrative will be
found to bear upon several points that have been discussed. Colonel
Barras (“India and Tiger Hunting”) had pitched his camp in the Murree
jungles, and it was crowded with the usual supernumerary attendants,
together with elephants, gharry bullocks, horses, and dogs. One night
as he and his companions--Messrs. Sandford and Franks--lay upon their
camp beds in the deep slumber that follows a hard day’s work, they were
awakened by “a furious roaring.” It appears that a panther had come
among them, and seized upon a pet dog belonging to the Colonel then
tied to his tent pole.