MOTHERS OF THE MENAGERIE
I once saw a picture in strange surroundings. It was “The Madonna and
Child”, tacked in a lion’s den by a bent old keeper who had cut it from
a magazine and posted it there. Beneath this symbol of a sacred thing
was a lioness and her cub.
To the old animal keeper there was nothing unusual about it; merely a
comparison of beautiful motherhood.
Perhaps the old keeper was right in his picture comparison. Perhaps he
was wrong; perhaps too great familiarity with the jungle beasts under
his care had endowed them with qualities not apparent to others. But
this I know—when it comes to the most wonderful thing in the world, you
will find in the cages of the menageries the same things that you find
in every day life: I mean the exalted emotions of motherhood.
Perhaps you have seen an overworked woman who has become a mother, a
gaunt, scrawny, weary-eyed person in whom the mother instinct has been
stifled by the necessity of hard work; the woman whose life consists of
nine long hours every day in the factory, who drags her steps homeward
and then, in seeming indifference to her offspring, disregards the
cries of the child for companionship, for love and for evidences of
affection? Magnify this a hundred times, and you have the “working
mother” of the menagerie. It is almost an invariable rule.
Incidentally, they have a saying under the canvas roof of the circus
menagerie which might be adapted to home life,—that the mother instinct
is something which must be fostered and aided in developing. Were
lawmakers to study this phase of animal life, it might mean some
different statutes in regard to women who work in factories, and whose
life is a drudgery, for as a rule, the brute animal is treated with
more kindliness in this regard than the human. The woman continues to
work; there is nothing else for her to do if she is to earn the food to
place in the mouth of the child-to-be. The animal mother, as a rule, is
treated differently. She becomes a ward of the circus, to be pampered
and petted and cared for until her child is born and until the mother
is strong enough to go forth once more into the circus world and earn
her living.
The side boards about her den are drawn, and she is in solitude.
She is allowed the peace and quiet which she deserves. Every brute
comfort is hers. The mother instinct is allowed to develop without the
interference of outside influences,—with the result that the circus
becomes the possessor of a healthy lion or tiger cub, as the case may
be. Or any other animal, for that matter.
But sometimes, through ignorance or carelessness, the rules are not
followed; the working mother is treated as the human mother too often
is treated, with the result that there is a neglected child, a scrawny,
underfed, undernourished thing which crawls piteously about and too
often dies. If it lives, it is because the same thing has happened that
happens in the human sphere,—the infant has become a bottle baby.
You can find the story of these bottle babies on nearly every circus,
accompanied by caustic remarks for some animal man who didn’t know
enough to allow the mother instinct to take definite form in the mind
of an overworked brute. They are orphans, and, as in the case with
humans, they start life under a handicap.
On a circus with which I once was connected, there came to the train
one night a woman animal trainer, carrying something soft and furry
wrapped in a shawl. Investigation proved it to be a tiny lion cub, born
that day to a lion mother who had been forced to work in the arena
until almost the very moment of her cub’s birth. The result was that
the mother had neglected her child. Staring, wondering, the poor mother
had wandered about her cage, not knowing what had happened to her, not
being able to understand that this furry little ball of fluffiness was
her own life and blood. When its tiny paws had struck at her breasts,
she had clawed them away, as she would have clawed away an intruder. So
the animal men had taken the child from her and given it to the woman
trainer, to be raised as a bottle baby,—a poor little thing condemned
to orphanage because his mother had not been allowed to intensify the
instincts which would have told her what motherhood meant.
There at the “grease joint” as the little restaurant which is set up
every night besides the loading runs is called, we named him “King” and
hoped for his success in life. But we knew what would follow,—that he
would have the same inclinations as any motherless human child, that he
would develop traits, the counterpart of which can be found in many a
waif of the higher stratas of life. But we hoped, nevertheless.
“King” became the pet of the circus train. Far in the night, as the
long strings of flat cars and sleeping coaches were grinding their
tortuous way from one city to another, a wandering porter suddenly
would be frightened by the sight of two glaring, green eyes, then hurry
forward to rescue the shoe of some actress, or actor from the spot
where “King” had dragged it to chew it to pieces. Nothing was safe
from that lion cub. Regularly three times a day he had his bottle, a
regulation child’s nursing bottle, upon which he pulled with all the
enthusiasm in the world. Every one petted him, every one pampered him.
The clowns tried to teach him comical tricks, and he learned them.
There even came the time when, about a quarter grown, he would follow
the actors to the “grease joint” after the night performance and beg
for food from the table, with the result that the clowns taught him to
eat even strawberries and cream! Then the inevitable happened.
King became so large that it was impossible longer to allow him out
of confinement. His claws had grown until they were more than half an
inch in length. There were horses and ponies and small “led stock”
constantly about the train, and there was the fear that some day the
brute instinct might come to the surface and King would leap to the
attack. The result was that he was caged and an attempt was made to
train him. It was impossible. King had been a waif, and the life of a
little outcast had made him a renegade.
All the wiles which the trainers knew were practised upon him. They
were of no avail. Intractable morose, hateful, King spent the entire
time in the arena in lunging at the trainers, in roaring and clawing at
them, and in making attempts to tear out their lives. Day after day the
sessions continued. Then the animal men, droop-shouldered from fatigue,
sought the circus owner.
“It’s no use. That orphan won’t work. He’s turned out just what we
thought he’d turn out to be. Either we let him alone and simply use him
for exhibition, or we’ll have a killer on our hands.”
Nor is there any better comparison for the few lines which we see so
often in the newspapers:
“The prisoner pleaded for clemency on the part of the judge, giving
as his excuse the fact that he had been allowed to run wild as a boy,
without restraint and without the benefit of home training.”
Such is the usual story of the overworked mother and the bottle baby.
But in one case, at least, it was different,—a case which made circus
history, and which began one of the most beautiful stories of the
circus menagerie,—a story of mother love transferred and glorified.
It was in the winter quarters of a western circus that Mrs. Fred
Alispaw, known to the billboards as “Zora, the Bravest Woman in the
World”, arrived one morning in the early spring to take up the work of
training the “cats” for the road. Into the steel arena they went, the
sleek, striped tigers, the heavily maned lions, and lastly, the pet of
the group, “Beauty”, a great Bengal lioness, usually the most tractable
of the whole group. But on this day, something was wrong. Beauty
refused to respond to the demands of the trainer; she was surly and
defiant and even vicious. Until dusk, Zora strove to subdue the beast,
but in vain. An hour later came the reason, in the word that Beauty had
given birth to a cub. More, she had refused to care for it.
Hurriedly the trainer went to the great cat’s cage, to find her
wandering about in a dazed, stupid manner, while far in a corner of the
den was a piteous, yowling bit of animal life, the neglected child.
The animal tenders had not known. Beauty’s cub had come into the world
without the aid of mother love. Beauty simply could not understand; her
attitude toward her baby was one of plain indifference. The only thing
she could know, the only thing she could feel was pain.
Until late that night, the trainer and animal men sought in vain to
make the mother understand her duties. It was impossible. Then Zora
made a decision:
“Beauty’s never going to raise that cub,” she announced. “The only
thing we can do is to try to find a substitute.”
Hurried calls were made to the Home for Homeless Animals, then to the
dog pound. At last the word came.
“We’ve got a little Skye terrier out here with four puppies. Think
she’d do?”
There was a long debate. The terrier itself, they knew, would be little
bigger than the cub. But a chance was better than nothing at all. So
out into the snowy night went Zora, to return at last to the menagerie
house with a big basket, closely wrapped. In it was a fond-eyed
little Skye terrier, whose motherhood had saved her life. She had
been unclaimed at the city dog pound. Another day and the door to the
chloroform room would have opened. “Scotty” as she had been dubbed by
the dog-catchers, would have been no more. Then the puppies had come,
and even pound keepers can be soft-hearted. So Scotty had lived.
Now, in the softly wrapped basket, she and her puppies were carried
into the big, steam-heated menagerie house of the circus. One by one
the yelping little things were taken from her breast, while her big,
soft brown eyes watched them as they were carried away. Then, in their
place, came a lion cub!
There was no resistance on the part of the patient little
dog-mother,—only wonderment. The yowling cub, denied food practically
from the moment of its birth, sought the breasts hurriedly, hungrily.
For a few moments the Skye terrier, no more than twice the size of its
strange foster baby, allowed the poor, scrawny thing to nurse, then,
with a sudden little cry, leaped from her basket and went in search of
her puppies.
They say that there were tears in the eyes of the menagerie man who
carried away those four pitiful little babies,—things condemned to
death that a lion might live. I believe it, for I have found more
soft-heartedness than cruelty in the menagerie. But Scotty did not
know they had gone to their death; here and there about the menagerie
house she searched, even scampering under the feet of the tremendous
elephants, braving death itself that she might look for the things that
were her own flesh and blood; for the death of a strange dog, once it
wanders along the picket line of the elephants, is almost a certainty.
But this time was an exception. Perhaps by some strange freak of animal
intuition, the great, hulking beasts knew her to be only a poor,
wondering mother, in search of her young. They snorted and trumpeted,
but they neither crushed her nor swept at her with their tremendous
trunks. On she went, unmolested, to bark with sharp, staccato
calls,—calls which went unanswered. Out where the snow lay heavy about
the menagerie house was a little box, covered by a heavy cloth. Within
was a sponge of chloroform and four little puppies that never would
play again.
An hour, then Scotty went back to her basket, to whine pitifully as
the night grew older, to fret nervously, and to watch with inquiring
eyes the strange, yowling thing which clambered about her. Finally they
slept, the lion which some day was to be the king of a menagerie, and
the tiny Skye terrier which was to be its mother.
For three days the fruitless search continued, for Scotty had not
forgotten. Into every nook and cranny of the menagerie house she went,
only to return from a hopeless search to the one thing which could fill
the void left by the departure of her puppies,—the scrambling, hungry
cub. Then, resigned at last, she settled herself to her new task,
devoting her whole time and strength to this strange, new thing which,
by some sort of animal instinct, she seemed to know needed her care and
nourishment. The circus men stood about the basket and grinned. Now and
then a coarse hand traveled toward eyes which had seen the tragedies
of the circus lot come and go, the blow-downs, the floods, the great
stretches of canvas a stricken thing in the midst of ice and snow, when
the show had lingered too long upon the road in the months of autumn;
the horror of wrecks and the terror of burning horses, trapped in fiery
cars; men who had seen everything that can speak human terror, human
sorrow, the ebb and flow of human emotions, yet men not sufficiently
calloused to withstand the piteous eyes of a little Skye terrier dog
who still whined for her missing puppies, yet who was willing to mother
a lion!
For two months it continued, while the cub grew bigger and fatter,
until he was nearly the size of his foster mother. Then Scotty decided
upon action. The cub was old enough to be weaned, and Scotty decided
that it should be done. “Grit”—such had the cub been named because of
his tenacity—decided otherwise. For days a battle was in progress, in
which the terrier nipped and snapped at her strange brood, in which
the lion yowled and scratched and strove by main force to continue the
ration to which he had been accustomed, finally to result in a truce
which cut the apportionment of food to two meals a day. Finally Scotty
lowered this to one, and at last weaned the cub entirely. But they did
not part company.
Love had become engendered in the heart of the lion as well as in that
of the dog! Once they tried to take Scotty away; the result was a
screeching, catlike solo which continued until the mother playmate was
returned. So the companionship continued, of a lion and a dog,—even
though the baby now was larger than the mother who had saved his life!
Months passed. Grit gained his first taste of meat, and together they
gnawed on the same bone. Then, in clumsy playfulness, the meal at last
finished, the lion would raise a paw and with one cuff send his little
foster mother scrambling half across the cage in which they now lived.
But the mastery didn’t last long. A bark and a snap, then Grit would
settle in funny dignity, as though wondering what he had done to offend
the black, shaggy little thing which had announced herself to be the
mistress of his destinies. The animal men watched and laughed, in spite
of the fact that they knew it all must end some day.
At last the time came, when Grit was a year old and fully eight times
the size of the little beast who had given him life. They took Scotty
away, and that day was a memorable one in that particular menagerie.
The fear had come that in his rough play, Grit some day might draw
blood, and blood to a lion is all that tradition asserts for it,
crazing the beast, calling into play its every instinct of the jungle.
So tender hands reached between the bars, and Scotty came forth, to
be lugged away, while a bounding, clumsy lion whined and roared and
bellowed and clawed at the bars. If ever a child cried for its mother,
Grit cried that day. More, the dog, secluded in another part of the
menagerie, whined piteously and sought escape by every possible means.
But it all was a necessity. The companionship of Grit and Scotty had
ended, for the safety of a tiny dog who had mothered a king of beasts.
But not the visits.
Under the care of watchful animal men, the dog was taken to “see” her
child once every few days, that the grief of both might be assuaged.
Gradually the intervals were lengthened until the visits ceased. But
never was there a time during the three years which the dog remained
with the show that it failed to recognize Grit as it passed the lion’s
cage, or to bark a greeting in dog language, while the lion bounded
and roared in playful, happy acknowledgment.
To-day, Scotty is a pensioner. Old, a bit gray, she is the prized
possession of a ranch in the hills of Colorado, where Zora and her
husband, Fred Alispaw, are realizing a dream of circus days in the home
for which every performer hopes and plans.
But last year the circus came to Denver, and forty miles across
country Zora and her husband rode horseback that they might catch the
train to the city to see the thing of canvas and spangles which they
still loved. Zora carried a basket, from which peeped a funny little
misshapen animal, Scotty, on the way from the solitude of the mountains
to the bustle and the blare of the circus, to see her baby.
And “the baby!” In a great group of performing lions, one stood forth
preëminent, a magnificent Nubian, full-maned, proud, even haughty. It
was Grit, the king of the group, and to him they led Scotty.
There was a moment of sniffing. Then suddenly the lion growled
playfully and bounded in clumsy, kittenish fashion about his cage.
The dog barked and leaped. Even after years, they had recognized each
other. Zora looked toward her husband.
“Do you think we dare take the chance?”
Fred Alispaw nodded and grinned. A moment more and Scotty was within
the cage, a tiny bit of dog flesh, frolicking about with a lion which
tried his best to be kittenish. The old bond still was there. Grit
still remembered his mother and loved her! Nor was that to be the last
visit. As long as Scotty lives, and whenever the gleaming lights of
the circus chandeliers shine in Denver, a man and a woman will make a
long pilgrimage across the plateaus to the railroad and thence to the
city, bringing Scotty with them,—a proud little mother going to look
upon her son, her boy, her baby who became a king!
Nor in all of this was Beauty, the real mother, to be blamed. She
simply was a worker who, through a mistake in menagerie records, had
been denied the right to learn what motherhood means. For once that
thing is developed in the menagerie, no obstacle is too great for the
animal mother to overcome for the benefit of her tiny burden of the
heart, no danger too great to be dared for the safety of the thing
which is the blood of her blood, the life of her life, as truly, as
fully as the human baby is the life of the human mother. Even death
itself means nothing!
In the halter, or “led stock” one year, was a group of llamas, long
necked, sheeplike beasts from South America. To one of the gentle
animals was born a fragile kid, and the mother nurtured it with all the
love and tenderness of a human mother.
But animal children reach the investigation stage much earlier than
do those of the higher race. When the kid was two days old, it
looked about it, noticed the far stretches of the menagerie tent,
the weird things which were contained there, and started upon a
tour of investigation. Here and there it wandered, while the mother
watched anxiously, calling vainly for its return to the fold. The kid
apparently paid no attention and gamboled on, at last taking a course
which led directly toward the elephant herd.
Danger! The mother seemed to sense it. Her sheeplike “ba-a-a-a-a-a”
became a tremulous, almost hysterical thing. But the kid did not heed.
Straight toward the massive beasts it wandered, while the mother tugged
at her halter, swerved and jumped and strained, but to no avail.
Five feet more, and the kid was playing under the very feet of the
hulking pachyderms, while they, all too easily frightened, had begun to
fret and were threatening every second to start the milling operation
which precedes a stampede. At the halter the mother made one last,
frenzied effort; then the rope parted.
A leap, and she had cleared the partition which enclosed the herd.
Then, straight toward the elephants she sped, her frightened cry of
warning echoing through the menagerie tent like the cry of some human
mother warning her child of danger. It was the finishing touch. Just as
she reached the picket line, that milling of tremendous, ton-weighted
forms began. Two great mountainous beasts crashed as they turned,
catching between their massive bodies the delicate form of the mother
llama, crushing it and killing it, while the kid, bleating with fright
now, scampered to safety far at the other side of the tent. A mother
had saved the life of her child at the cost of her own.
Naturally there followed the inevitable consultation of animal men. A
mother was dead; who now was to feed and care for the baby? At last a
lion tender scratched his head.
“About the only thing I see to do is to put it in the Foolish House
with that mess of goats,” came his suggestion. “There’s one of ’em
that’s got a kid. She might take on this here orphan.”
The Foolish House was a corner of the menagerie surrounded by carved
figures of Mother Goose characters, devised to amuse the children. To
provide more amusement, a dozen or so goats had been placed in the
enclosure, with the idea that their appetite for paper would be as
highly amusing as the constant pleading of the elephants and monkeys
for peanuts. There went the little South American orphan, to bleat
piteously, to search from one to another of the paper-eating occupants,
and, at last, to come to the mother and her baby.
Perhaps there is a universal language among animals. I don’t know. All
that I can say is that the llama and the mother goat rubbed noses,
apparently talked it over, and there was an end to it. The orphan was
adopted. What is more, she was reared with as much maternalism as was
bestowed upon the true baby, and the person who sought to interfere was
met with a hurtling pair of horns! It was simply another instance of
the mother instinct that is in the heart of an animal. In any menagerie
you can find a hundred examples of it.
More, you will find that an animal will grieve for her young, and that
she will do exactly the same thing which more than one human mother
has done,—seek for a substitute when her own baby is taken from her
in death. In the “dog wagon” was a giant rhesus, a performing monkey,
which, because of her act, consisting of tricks performed in company
with a pony and several dogs, was carried separately from the other
simians of the circus. One day a baby came to her, and with all the
tenderness of a human mother she crooned over it, and fondled it,
and held it close to her breast. But that afternoon only a drooling,
piteous sound came from her compartment. The baby was dead, and animal
men had carried it away. In a far corner of the den the monkey had
begun that period which only too often ends with a small grave on the
circus lot,—suicide through starvation, superinduced by grief. But a
day later the mother changed her mind.
In the next compartment of the cage was a performing dog with four
puppies. Those wobbly little things seemed to fascinate the grieving
mother. Hour after hour she watched them, calling to them, striving by
every means at her command to induce one of them to come to her. Then,
one day, in bringing forth the dog for its performance in the ring, the
compartment door accidentally was left open. When the dog was returned,
it was found that one of her puppies was missing. Kidnapped!
The rhesus had followed the inclinations of her mother nature. Denied a
child of her own, she had taken a substitute, and she loved him with a
whole-heartedness that was almost pathetic.
It was a new world to the poor little wobbly puppy, but she lightened
it as much as possible for him. She taught him to nurse at her breast;
hour after hour would she scheme to devise some way in which he could
cling to her, as her own child would have done, as she leaped about her
cage. It was useless, and at last she abandoned it, apparently content
to forego the natural impulses of her life to swing and bound, that
she might hold tight in her arms the baby which had taken, in part at
least, the place of her own child. Gradually she weaned him; then came
the call of kind.
Outside the cage, the pack barked and played and raced. The dog nature
of the adopted child urged that he be with them, with the result that,
whining, he would stand at the edge of the cage, striving to paw
his way through, while with chirping and twitting the monkey would
endeavor to claim his attention; it was the pitiful sight of a mother
with a wayward child. At last it was necessary that the door be opened
for him, and out he went, out into the world for which he longed and
the life for which he fretted, while behind, in the cage, remained a
mother who did not forget. Nor—be it said to the credit of the adopted
child—did he wholly forget his mother. There were times when he would
go to the cage and beg, with the result that a delighted mother would
leap and scream until the attendants would open the door for him. Then
in he would go, while the rhesus would fondle him and croon over him
in a frenzy of delight. But these periods grew farther and farther
between. At last came the time when the dog, fully grown now, forgot
his monkey mother entirely. The same was not true of the rhesus; she
could recognize her child, even in the midst of the pack, and at the
bars would call to him and strive to entice him to her. But the dog
would not heed.
Mother nature! It is present in the menagerie in its every beautiful
phase. The uninformed have some weird stories of caged jungle
beasts,—how they hate their young and kill them, rather than see them
endure captivity. It is not true. The jungle beast, when caged, often
does kill her babies; but it is through love for them, not dislike.
Their poor, non-understanding brains know but the instinctive rules of
the jungle, and when those are not successful within the confines of a
cage, death results.
For instance, the instinct of a cat beast is, in time of danger, to
carry its young to a place of safety. Therefore when a thronging crowd,
or some unusual excitement, causes nervousness on the part of a lion
or tiger mother, she naturally seizes her cub by the nape of the neck,
and lifting it, strives to find some spot in which it will be protected
and safe from the dangers which she believes are present. But no such
place is available. Back and forth she paces, turning, twisting, almost
writhing in her anxiety for seclusion. If the cage is closed and
darkened, she will set her cub down immediately. But if the attendants
are uneducated in the ways of the jungle breed, or are careless, and
allow that cage to remain open and the fancied fears to continue, the
mother naturally will continue to carry her young, with the result that
when, at last, the baby is set down, it is dead,—from suffocation.
The mother has not killed her baby. The attendants have done it,
through ignorance and carelessness. The same is true when a lioness
or tigress kills her young by attack. Carelessness, inattention, lack
of nutrition; all have maddened the ill, hungry beast. She is a mother
in delirium, and more than one human mother has killed her baby while
suffering from mental aberration. The same is true of animals. But
there is this to the credit of the animal mother: never has there been
a cub killed after its lips have touched her mother breasts!
If you do not believe in animal love, watch, some day, the grief of
a menagerie mother, the silent, trustful grief of the beast as she
watches for the man who has taken her dead baby away. To him she looks
for its return; her eyes search for him in disregard of all others;
he is the one who took her baby away, and in some trustful way she
believes he will bring it back. She cannot realize the meaning of
death; her baby still is alive, her baby will come back to her! The
travail continues for days, until at last the undeveloped intellect
fails of concentration and her grief is ended through a merciful
forgetfulness. Which brings about the story of a seemingly unnatural
mother,—who wasn’t.
The birth of an elephant calf is an unusual thing in a circus.
Therefore when Alice, one of the great “bulls”—as elephants are called
in show language—brought a baby into the world, there was happiness and
excitement. But only for a short time. Hardly had the baby been born
when the mother turned upon it and beat it to death!
There was only one conclusion to be drawn; that the mother did not
want her baby to be born into captivity, and that she rather would see
it dead than living under such conditions. When her second baby came,
the legs of the tremendous beast were chained to heavy stakes driven
deep into the ground, and the baby taken from her at the earliest
possible moment. That day was a mad one on the circus. Alice tore the
stakes from the ground; she butted her way through every surrounding
protectorate that could be raised against her; she was an elephant gone
insane. The baby died. A third time, and Fred Alispaw, her trainer,
began to investigate,—with some surprising results. Alice had not been
trying to kill her baby; she had been trying to bring it to life!
For Alispaw learned some interesting things about elephant mothers. One
of them was the fact that they bring babies into the world in solitude,
in a swamp or at a water hole, often as far as a hundred miles from
the rest of the herd. He learned that, to start the circulation and
to really cause the beginning of the functioning of life in the newly
born calf, the mother beats her baby with her trunk, kicks it about,
stamps it into the mud and often throws it high into the air, allowing
it to drop into the water, from which she immediately rescues it, that
the performance again may be begun. For hours this continues, until
circulation is established to its fullest extent, and the baby is
ready for the other struggles of childhood. In her kicking and beating
and stamping, Alice merely had followed the traditions of her jungle
instincts. Nor was her brute mind to know that beneath her was a
cement floor, which meant death to her child at the first blow!
Therefore, with this knowledge, an experiment was attempted. The
elephant was given to a city park zoo, with instructions that she be
allowed to follow her natural instincts when the time came for the baby
to be brought into the world. One day she wandered away, to remain for
nearly a week. Then she returned, bringing with her a tiny elephant
calf, upon which she bestowed every evidence of affection. More, she
tried her level best to rear it. But again she had not counted upon the
influences of civilization. The public became too interested and too
generous. The calf died from being over-fed.
So, you see, the spirit of motherhood can be present even in a fat,
wobbly, pig-eyed elephant. In fact, you can find it in every part of
the menagerie and in every degree, just as you can find every phase of
it in the human race. Perhaps you’ve seen the human mother who goes
into hysterics the moment her child leaves the front lawn, who runs
frantically about searching for it, then, when the lost is found, cuffs
and slaps and scolds it all the way home? The next time you see a camel
and a calf, watch them. You’ll find the same sort of performance.
If ever a poor baby was tied to a mother’s apron strings, it is a
camel’s calf. Privileges? It has none. Ever must it be beside its
mother, otherwise there is a near panic and trouble in plenty! Once
a camel calf wanders from its mother, the menagerie is raucous with
bawling and braying, while the mother tugs at her rope, kicks and bites
at everything near and gives every evidence of hysteria. Then, the
second she has recovered her child, chastisement follows. She butts it
about. She scolds it with coarse, frequently repeated grunts, and as a
finale, seizes it by the nape of the neck with her heavy teeth, lifts
it high and slams it on the ground. Woe be unto that camel calf if it
tries to arise in the next two or three hours. Mother is watching it,
mother is peevish, and mother has that look in her eyes which more than
one human mother displays as she turns hurriedly and announces:
“No! No! No, I said! Mamma spank!”
Indeed, the existence of a baby camel is far from a happy one. It has
no child life whatever, no babyish rambles or gambols; it is simply an
attachment to a mother. Haven’t you seen many a human child struggling
along under the same conditions?
More than that, you’ve seen the child of the ostrich in human life,
the poor, neglected, catch-as-catch-can affair which wanders through
childhood while its mother is too busy even to notice the last time its
neck was washed; who has for a mother its father, who knows about as
much concerning the rearing of a child as a man could be expected to
know, which is nothing? That, in the menagerie, is the baby ostrich,
the outcast of the circus. Its mother is a society woman, its father a
poor, henpecked fish, and its life a muddle from beginning to end. Such
a thing as hatching eggs? Oh, dear, no!
To begin with, in the natural state, the eggs of an ostrich, each
weighing from three to four pounds, are scratched into a hole in the
sand and lightly covered. Then Mamma strolls away, leaving the rest of
the work, in the daytime, to the sun. The night shift is taken by Papa,
who is a poor lunkhead anyway, and who doesn’t know any more than to
hatch the eggs upon which his wife should be setting. For forty-two
days this continues, and then the mother ostrich finally consents to
take some time from her regular duties of swallowing oranges, pieces of
glass and anything else that glitters. She actually breaks the eggs, so
that the chicks may emerge. This completed, she is utterly fatigued,
and the henpecked husband once more takes up his duties, for it is he
who mothers the brood and protects it, not the female. Such a thing as
raising children? My word!
Which brings me to another phase of the question of parentage, and
perhaps the strangest. It is perhaps only natural that a beast should
show the instincts of motherhood. But what of the father? In one case,
at least, I have the knowledge that the instinct of parentage exists
even in the male, for I have seen it.
“Glory,” the mother, was ill, dying. There was no hope for the newly
born cub which strove in vain to suckle at her breast; the eyes of the
beast already were glazed, the great legs and paws were beginning to
straighten with a rigor which formed a prelude to death. In the other
half of the cage paced Hamid, her mate and the father of her cub,
roaring in a tremulous, grumbling fashion, and leaping at intervals
against the bars. They were Nubian lions, and Hamid was the largest
black-maned specimen of the menagerie.
The customary consultation was held among the attendants. Then an
animal man entered the den of the mother beast, being forced however,
because of a broken lock, to go through the portion occupied by Hamid,
and reach the lioness through the partition door which divided the
cage. Very carefully he lifted the cub and started out on his return
trip with it. But as he came through the partition he slipped, and, a
yowling ball of fur, the cub rolled to the floor.
A leap, and Hamid was on the man, knocking him to one side, then
swerving that he might seize the cub in his jaws. Menagerie attendants
shouted and ran for prod-rods, that they might attempt to save the life
of a helpless infant. But suddenly they ceased their efforts.
For the jaws of Hamid were clinched with gentle, almost loving strength
upon the nape of that baby’s neck. A moment more and he had set the
cub upon the floor, spraddling it with his forelegs and roaring his
defiance at the entire circus. It was hours before they could take the
cub from him, and then he roared and bounded and paced until it was
fed from a bottle and returned to him. In the days and months which
followed, no mother could have been more gentle, more careful, more
affectionate than Hamid was with his cub; the menagerie tent was one
series of rough growls and thunderous roars until he learned that the
daily kidnapping of the baby was only for the purpose of feeding it.
Together they stayed, together they are to-day, Hamid and Hamid the
Second,—a father and a son he mothered when the lioness who had borne
him passed into the Great Beyond!