Beast and Man in India Part 14

CHAPTER XIV

OF ANIMAL TRAINING

India,--land of waning wonders,--has a great name for the training of animals, a pursuit in which the people are popularly believed to attain marvellous success by reason of special apt.i.tudes and faculties. In the yellow-backed romances of the boulevard Orientalism in which the French indulge, Indian princes and princesses are habitually attended by trained leopards and tigers, while English writers dwell on the skill of the trainers. But seen from near and compared with what has been done and is now done in other countries, the wonder pales a little. Nothing half so squarely attempted and completely accomplished as the modern European and American training of wild beasts in performances foreign to their nature and habits has ever been thought of in India. It should be noted, to begin with, that only persons of low caste ever engage in this pursuit, which demands peculiar qualities of hand, will, and temper, and cannot be learned as easily as wood-sawing. These people have a wonderful knowledge of woodcraft, and are fearless with the creatures they know so well. They can catch and tame, but, at the risk of falling into the pestilent error of hair-splitting, I venture to discriminate between taming and training. The first is the most important part but not nearly the whole of the latter, and it is the first only which is well done.

But as to training as indicated, for example, in the deservedly popular works of the late Rev. J. G. Wood, it may be worth while to look a little nearer. This authority wrote that "in India trained otters are almost as common as trained dogs." But they are not used throughout Hindustan, nor in Central India, nor in the Punjab, where they are found in great numbers, and in the regions where they help in fishing they are never seen out of the hands of their owners, obscure river-side tribes. They are only employed in the back waters of Cochin, in part of Bengal, and on the Indus river. All that we see of the otter in Britain is a poor little beast desperately fighting for its life against murderous crowds of dogs and men; but in reality there are few animals of more amiability, talent, and docility. A Scottish gamekeeper once trained one to go with dogs, and used to say it was the best cur in the pack. They are effectually tamed in India, which is an easy matter, and they practise for the benefit of the fisherman the art to which they are ordained by nature. The cormorant and the pelican are also used by the Indus boatmen as in China for fishing. The pelican, though furnished by nature with the finest game-bag or creel ever carried by angler, is inferior to the cormorant (_Graculus carbo_) as a fisherman. Both these birds, like the otter, fish by nature, nor could Buckland or Cholmondeley-Pennell teach them a turn of their craft. It is certainly interesting to see the hooded cormorants on the fishermen's house-boats and the otters tethered to stakes near, playing with the no less amphibious children and behaving like the playful, intelligent water-cats they are. But both this sight and the knowledge that they are used in this wise are distinctly _un_common and out of the range of the people of India at large.

[Ill.u.s.tration: A HUNTING CHEETAH]

The same writer also descants on the great powers of Orientals in training the cheetah or hunting leopard (_Felis jubata_). In this instance the only point where real skill comes into play is in the first capture of the adult animal, when it has already learned the swift bounding onset,--its one accomplishment. The young cheetah is not worth catching, for it has not learned its trade, nor can it be taught in captivity! The Christian Missionary is occasionally asked to state exactly how he proposes to convert the heathen man, and he sensibly concludes, as a rule, to begin with the child. The problem of how to catch uninjured so powerful and active a beast as the hunting leopard seems as difficult as the conversion of the heathen adult. In practice, however, it is simple. There are certain trees where these great dog-cats (for they have some oddly canine characteristics) come to play and whet their claws. The hunters find such a tree, arrange deer-sinew nooses round it, and await the event. The animal comes and is caught by a leg, and it is at this point the trouble begins.

It is no small achievement for two or three naked, ill-fed men to secure so fierce a captive and carry him home on a cart. Then his training commences.

He is tied in all directions, princ.i.p.ally from a thick grummet of rope round his loins, while a hood fitted over his head effectually blinds him.

He is fastened on a strong cot bedstead, and the keepers and their wives and families reduce him to submission by starving him and keeping him awake. His head is made to face the village street, and for an hour at a time several times a day his keepers make pretended rushes at him and wave cloths, staves, and other articles in his face. He is talked to continually, and women's tongues are believed to be the most effective anti-soporifics. No created being could resist the effects of hunger, want of sleep, and feminine scolding, and the poor cheetah becomes piteously, abjectly tame. He is taken out for a walk, occasionally, if a slow crawl between four attendants, all holding hard, can be called a walk, and his promenades are always through the most crowded bazaars, where the keepers'

friends are to be found. The street dog snarls and growls from a safe distance at the little procession, and occasionally a child, suddenly catching sight of the strange beast, breaks into a frightened cry; but the people on the whole are rather pleased than otherwise to see the Raja's cheetahs among them.

[Ill.u.s.tration: A RESTLESS BEDFELLOW]

It is difficult to give a just idea of the curious intimacy with animals that exists in India among those who have charge of them. The cheetah's bedstead is like that of the keeper, and when the creature is tamed, leopard and man are often curled under the same blanket. When his bedfellow is restless, the keeper lazily stretches out an arm from his end of the cot and dangles a ta.s.sel over the animal's head, which seems to soothe him. In the early morning I have seen a cheetah sitting up on his couch, a red blanket half-covering him, his ta.s.selled red hood pushed awry, looking exactly like an elderly gentleman in a night-cap as he yawned with the irresolute air of one who is in doubt whether he will rise or turn in for yet another nap. Of actual training in the field there is little or none.

So it is not wonderful that the cheetah loses its natural dash and is often left behind by the antelope. At the wedding festivities of a Punjab chief the other day (March 1886) the guests were shown this sport, and the cheetah caught and killed a black-buck. But it was found that the Raja's servants, by way of making quite sure, had first hamstrung the poor antelope!

The ordained procedure is that the hooded leopard is taken afield on a cart driven near a herd of black-buck, shown the game, and slipped. In a few bounds he reaches and seizes it, is rewarded with a draught of blood, or a morsel of liver in a wooden spoon, and put on his cart again; but there is a large proportion of failures. And the creature is not practising a feat he has been taught, but is merely let loose to perform an act he learned in a wild state, which his keepers cannot teach, and for which, in fact, their teaching seems to unfit him. I fail, therefore, to see where the "wonderfully perfect training" of which the Rev. J. G. Wood speaks comes in.

In some hunting pictures by Indian artists, the cart that bears the cheetah and his keeper is drawn by a pair of black-buck antelopes, and you often hear of the Nilghai also being trained to the yoke for Indian Princes. Nay, there are Englishmen who have tried to harness these fine animals to the buggy and the dog-cart. But though confidently reported, you may go far before meeting with an authentic case of successful antelope-harnessing. An Oriental hears vaguely of things of this nature, and promptly accepts them as common and indubitable facts. In official life, speaking with Europeans, he is learning to say, "I have _heard_," but in private he is as c.o.c.k-sure as a London literary man who has found a fallacy repeated in five books.

[Ill.u.s.tration: A BEAR LEADER]

Still less capacity is shown in the training of animals for street performances. The bear, the monkey, the goat, and sometimes the bull, are led abroad to fairs by men of low caste. The gray bear (_Ursus isabellinus_) and the common black bear (_Ursus l.a.b.i.atus_) are most docile creatures, and would repay good teaching. But the bear-leader is a man of few and chance-hap meals, and though starvation and the stick make his creatures gentle enough, he has not the wit to teach them well. Some bear-leaders buckle a leather ap.r.o.n round their bodies and, thus protected, pretend to wrestle with the poor beast; but a paralytic dance on his hind legs, cadenced by jerks on his chain and blows with the staff, is the usual depressing performance. No more complete picture of misery can be imagined than that presented by a dancing bear on a hot day in a town in the Plains, where there is no escape from the pitiless sun.

[Ill.u.s.tration: PERFORMING MONKEYS AND GOAT]

A goat and two or three monkeys are the actors in a little play that goes on unceasingly all over India. Their leader is a picturesque tatterdemalion who wanders far in search of audiences and is suspected of picking up more than alms. The goat kneels as a salaam; sometimes he stands with all four feet carefully adjusted on a pile of hour-gla.s.s-shaped blocks of wood, and he serves as charger to the monkeys, who put on caps and coats and are jerked to and fro by their chains in a sort of dance, their hungry eyes intently watching the crowd for something to eat. They are Rajas going to court, they are Lord Generals-in-Chief going to fight, they are champions and swordsmen; and they do everything with sad indifference to the accompaniment of a droning mechanical patter intoned with an air of profound boredom. While confessing that this performance always makes me melancholy, I must admit that children, for whom it is intended, and who ought to be good judges, are delighted by it. To some generations of Anglo-Indian children as well as countless hosts of native little ones it has given a vast amount of gratification.

Dogs are so entirely neglected that the ordinary fetch-and-carry tricks of an English spaniel or retriever are looked at with astonishment, and you are listened to with polite incredulity when you describe the performances of a good collie with sheep.

I have mentioned the elephant in another place, but while cordially acknowledging that Indian mahouts have a complete and most intimate mastery and knowledge of their own peculiar beast, I would point out that it is naturally docile and gentle, and that American and English circus trainers make the creature do more than the most skilful mahout has taught.

It is seldom in Northern India that the bulls led about by the _quasi_-religious mendicants known as "Anandi" do more than shake their heads or kneel at a sign of command. With a clever _boniment_ or patter even this much might be made entertaining, but the patter is seldom clever.

In Southern India a bull and a cow are sometimes made to enact a quarrel and a reconciliation, but there is not a showman in Europe who would consider the animals taught to any purpose. So little contents an audience of rustic Indian folk, and when you call your bull Rama, and your cow Sita, and they are, to begin with, sacred and most cherished objects, there is obviously no need for elaborate performances.

[Ill.u.s.tration: A PERFORMING BULL (MADRAS)]

As to horses, they are not so much trained as constrained, with the often cruel constraint of a timorous hand. No animal throughout India is brought to that wonderful pitch of education shown by the horses employed in railway shunting yards in England, where trains are made up. At a word these fine animals put forth a measured strength to set a carriage in motion, at a gesture they stop or turn; they seem to know the intricate points of the rails as well as the signalman; and, their service done, they take up of themselves their own place in the labyrinth of iron, standing unmoved while the locomotives go roaring and screaming past.

No, the Oriental is not a first-rate animal trainer. With almost boundless patience, he has no steadfastness of aim, nor has he sufficient firmness of hand and will to secure confidence and obedience.

Yet, while the art of training may not be very thoroughly understood, the tribes which have to do with jungle life are often wonderful trackers and highly skilled in woodcraft. Many English sportsmen in their talk, and some sporting writers in their books, fail to do justice to the courage and skill of the unarmed a.s.sistants on whom they depend for success. There are many chases in which the honours ought to go to the bold and patient trackers who mark down the game day after day, and manage to drive it up to the guns of the well-fed English gentlemen, waiting serene and safe with a battery of the best weapons London gunsmiths can provide. This mistake in taste and judgment is not made by such masters as Sir S. Baker and Mr.

Sanderson, who show a friendly sympathy with their a.s.sistants.

CHAPTER XV

OF REPTILES

"And death is in the garden awaiting till we pa.s.s, For the krait is in the drain-pipe, The cobra in the gra.s.s."

_Anglo-Indian Nursery Rhymes._--R. K.

[Ill.u.s.tration: VISHNU RECLINING ON THE SERPENT (FROM AN INDIAN LITHOGRAPH)]

The serpent has swallowed up the rights of the rest of the reptiles in Indian lore and talk. As Adi Sesha Seshnag or Ananta, the nag or cobra is a sacred eternal creature on whom the world rests. He is also a couch to Vishnu, and the hoods of his thousand heads are cl.u.s.tered like the curls of a breaking wave in a canopy over the form of the Creator. In rustic ceremonies, survivals of the antique prime, before sowing or reaping, the village Brahman's first care is to find in which direction the great world-supporting serpent is lying, while the peasants wait, awe-stricken, half fancying they hear the stir of his slow uncoiling. The beloved Krishna, too, India's cerulean Apollo, is often represented in modern bazaar pictures standing on the head of the great black snake he slew and dragged from the river Jumna. He bruised its head with victorious heel, but in the pictures he stands at ease, tranquilly blowing his pipe and attended by Lamia Gopis or milkmaids.

Then there are still beliefs in serpent folk and serpent transformation, and legends and chronicles of dynasties of naga or cobra kings. The serpent of Scripture who "was more subtle than any beast of the field which the Lord G.o.d had made" has perhaps conveyed to the minds of the nineteenth-century Europeans some notion of what snake legends may be like.

But it is no disparagement to the faith of Christians to say that in Europe the Eden serpent is vague. When we do not (like Dr. Adam Clarke) injuriously suspect him of being an ape, he serves mainly as a metaphor, a mere vehicle for the spirit of evil, and we are too far off to make out his scales, his flat triangular head, and his quick darting tongue. In India he is alive,--alive with swift powers of death, and always very near. In the roof thatch, the stone wall, the thorn fence, the p.r.i.c.kly pear thicket, the well-side, or coiled on the dusty field path, he waits his appointed hour to strike.

He takes part in a thousand tales of mystery and wonder, and is wiser and more wicked than all the sons of men. There are several fabled Indian jewels; that in the Elephant's brow, in the lotus of Buddhism, in the head-dress of the princely Bodisat or Buddha-to-be; but the jewel in the cobra's head evokes a livelier faith than the rest. It is not infected with the serpent's guilt, but is an antidote to poison and a sure remedy for pain. Fortune waits on its possessor, and he will never bear a heavy heart.

But it is not easily come by, for they say, "A chaste woman's b.r.e.a.s.t.s, a serpent's jewel, a lion's mane, a brave man's sword, and a Brahman's money are not to be handled till they are dead."

Serpent tales are too numerous to be told at length. In some, a young Prince accidentally swallows a snake which feeds on his vitals. Many involved turns of the story-teller's art follow after this beginning. In one an anxious Princess, watching by her afflicted husband's side as they are journeying in search of health, sees the snake emerge from his mouth as he lies asleep, and overhears a conference with another snake which guards a treasure. They reveal the charms by which they may be subdued, and the Princess restores her husband to health and gives him illimitable wealth.

This is also an old European superst.i.tion, for Gerald of Barri says that a young man, grievously afflicted by reason of having swallowed an adder, went to all the shrines of England for relief in vain, but found at last health and peace in Ireland, where no snake may live. Physiologists could tell us what would really happen to a snakelet exposed to digestive processes. That snakes guard treasure is a modern Italian superst.i.tion.

Lamia stories are common. A peasant meets a lovely disconsolate woman in the woods, brings her home, and makes her his wife. A holy man pa.s.ses that way and repays his entertainment by instructing the peasant how to detect and destroy the monster woman snake.

So the now suspicious husband prepares for dinner a salt curry, having previously broken the drinking water vessels. As he lies by her side, pretending to sleep, her beautiful head rises from the pillow, the neck slowly, slowly lengthens, the forked tongue plays in feverish thirst as the serpent curves and twines round the hut seeking the door. Then, with sinuous stretch, it glides out and away, and he hears the lapping of water on the distant river brink, while the fair body by his side is cold and still. Then it returns, coil on coil shortening and settling noiselessly down, until at last a lovely woman's head is laid on the pillow with a soft sigh of content. The next day, while his industrious and beautiful wife is busy at the oven outside, the peasant thrusts her into its glowing depth and piles on wood till she is utterly consumed, even as the holy man instructed him. In some varieties of the tale the _paras_, or philosopher's stone, which turns all it touches into gold, is found in the oven after the burning, and other adventures ensue.

The worship of the serpent may not everywhere survive in official form, and there are, I believe, no temples entirely consecrated to Nagas, but it is still practised as a domestic ordinance in Southern India, and everywhere the true Hindu reverences the fateful creature that carries pure death in its fangs. _Sarpa homa_ is the name given to the somewhat elaborate ceremony of snake-worship. But in everyday life, when the women of a household hear a cobra chasing rats or mice in the ceiling or roof, they will pause in their work and put their hands together in silent adoration.

_Nag panchami_ is the serpents' fete-day--a holiday throughout India. In the south models of the five-hooded cobra are made in terra-cotta, bra.s.s, or silver, so contrived that the centre coil forms a socket for a cup in which an offering of milk is put and the whole is worshipped.

In poetry it is easy to talk of a thousand heads; the sculptor and the painter content themselves with five, so modern folk say that in old days the cobra had five heads, but in this iron age he has deteriorated. In Ceylon, and possibly in the extreme south of India, the snake is often an almost familiar member of the establishment, seen daily and regularly fed and worshipped. Nor is it wonderful that the cobra should be reverenced when his attributes are taken into account. He is the necklace of the G.o.ds, he can give gems to the poor, he is the guardian of priceless treasures, he can change himself into manifold forms, he casts his skin annually and thus has the gift of eternal youth, he can make milk, fruit, bread and all innocent food stark death when he chooses to pa.s.s over them, he is of high caste, he is in the confidence and counsel of G.o.ds and demons, and when the great world was made he was already there.

In rustic life the serpent has peculiar reverence as the appointed guardian of the village cattle; in this capacity he is regarded as an incarnation of some ancestor, and is generally named by a colour, as the Red, Black, or Blue snake, and becomes in a sort a tutelary divinity. Poisonous snakes kill scores of cattle, therefore they are in India accounted the natural protectors of cattle.

The Government pays large sums annually for the destruction of poisonous snakes, but it will be many a year before a respectable Hindu will willingly kill one. This is not surprising when we reflect that an ordinance not yet obsolete decrees that when a snake is killed the Hindu shall perform mourning ceremonies of a like ritual to those in honour of a dead relation. This, of course, is not often done, but the snake's skin is frequently burned as an atonement to its outraged spirit. They call him Raj-bansi, royal scion, as an honourable name, and generally seek to propitiate as we to destroy the pest.

A Financial Commissioner of the Punjab told me that once, when walking through fields with the son of a village Lambardar or head-man, he raised his stick with the Englishman's instinct of killing a cobra crossing the path, but the young man laid a hand on his arm, saying: "Nay, sir, do not strike, the snake also has but one little life,"--an unusual act, from which the lad's father would probably have refrained, partly in deference to a high officer of the Government, and partly from the Hindu habit of minding his own business and letting other people alone. But it shows the ingrained respect for serpent life.

It is possible, however, to show mercy to many generations of serpents and yet to know little about them. When a snake has a musk-rat in his mouth he is considered to be in a terrible dilemma. If he swallows it he becomes blind, if he vomits it he becomes leprous. The way out of it is for him to go into the water. I have never been able to understand the how or why of this escape, but it is accepted as a triumph of serpent cunning. No need to say that the snake, having swallowed the rat, brings the dislocated gearing of his jaws together and thinks no more about it, or that the musk-rat is just as welcome to him as any other.

Sayings which treat the snake as purely noxious may be guessed to be mainly Muhammadan, but the Hindu is not prevented by a sense of veneration from speaking his mind, as the numerous gibes at Brahmans show. "The snake moves crookedly as a rule, but to his own hole he can go straight enough," is a reflection on a Brahman or a cunning and selfish person. "In a council of snakes tongues play fast," is a reproach to those who talk much and do little. The silent play of the serpent tongue, however, scarcely suggests talk. "Even the breath of a snake is bad" is a common saying. I have noticed an evil odour in the breath of a python, the only creature of the race I have ventured to be intimate with, and it may be this is based on observation.

"The gadding wife sees a snake in the roof of her own house" is a wise word for India, but inapt for England, where the customs of modern good society have elevated gadding into a duty and a fine art and falsified the folk-talk of ages. "Kill the snake but do not break the stick," is sensible advice often given to over-eager people; and to those who miss opportunities, "The snake is gone, beat the line of his track." To appreciate this it should be remembered that over the greater part of India is a layer of dust on which the track left by a snake is plainly imprinted.

The hopelessness of snake-bite is acknowledged in "Bitten by a snake, wants no water," _i.e._ will not live to drink it. The snake's bite goes in like a needle but comes out like a ploughshare, is an expressive phrase used in Bengal. A rhyming saying might be Englished "After snake-bite sleep, after scorpion weep." In the first case the sleep of course is eternal. Of the deadly little Kupper snake they say in Western India, "Its bite begins with death." Another contrast with the relatively harmless scorpion is a saying applied to rash and foolish persons, "Doesn't even know the spell for a scorpion, but must stick his finger in a snake's mouth." "Even in a company of ten the serpent is safe," they are all so much afraid of it is the inference. "One serpent can frighten a whole army" is an expansion of the same notion. But there is something worse than even snake-bite: "You may survive the cobra's fang, but nothing avails against the evil eye,"

says popular superst.i.tion.