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Presented to the
library of the
UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO
by
Mr. Peter Curzon
CIMARRoN DOGS.
[See page 72.]
ZOOLOGICAL SKETCHES
A CONTRIBUTION
TO THE
OUT-DOOR STUDY OF NATURAL HISTORY.
BY
FELIX L. OSWALD,
AUTHOR OF
SUMMERLAND SKETCHES OF MEXICO AND CENTRAL AMERICA.'
" The Book of Nature is ever new, though never self-conflicting." — Lessing.
WITH THIRTY-SIX ILLUSTRATIONS
BY HERMANN FABER.
LONDON:
W. H. ALLEN & CO. 13 WATERLOO PLACE.
1883.
PREFACE.
The tendencies of our realistic civilization make it
evident that the study of natural science is destined to
supersede the mystic scholasticism of the Middle Ages,
and I believe that the standards of entertaining literature
will undergo a corresponding change. The Spirit of
Naturalism has awakened from its long slumber.
A year after the birth of the Emperor Tiberius, says
Plutarch, a Grecian trading-vessel sailed along the coast
of yEtolia in the Gulf of Patras, and when the sun went
down the crew assembled at the helm to while away the
night with songs and stories. The night was calm, and
some of the sailors had already fallen asleep, when they
heard from the coast a loud voice calling the name of
their steersman, Thamus. They were all struck dumb
with amazement, but at the third call Thamus manned
himself and answered with a loud mariner's shout.
"O Thamus," the voice called again, "when you
reach the heights of Palodes announce that the great
Pan is dead !"
Four hours later, when the moonlit hills of Palodes
5
6 rREFACE.
hove in sight, Thamus complied with the strange re-
quest, and a minute after, the coast resounded with in-
describable shrieks and lamentations that continued for
a long time, till they finally died away in the heights of
the Acarnanian Mountains.
The tradition bears the mark of that suggestiveness
which distinguishes a philosophical allegory from a
priest-legend. Pan was the God of Nature. Can Plu-
tarch have divined the significance of the impending
change ? Whatever is natural is wrong, was the key-
stone dogma of the mediaeval schoolmen. The natural-
ism of antiquity was crushed by supernatural and anti-
natural dogmas. The worship of joy yielded to a wor-
ship of sorrow, the study of living nature to the study
of dead languages and barren sophisms. Literature
became a farrago of ghost-stories, monks' legends,
witchcraft- and miracle-traditions, and astrological vaga-
ries. The poison of antinaturalism tainted every science
and every art and perverted the very instincts of the
human mind. Painters vied in the representation of
revolting tortures. The exiles of Mount Parnassus
assembled on Mount Golgotha. The moralists that had
suppressed the Olympic festivals compensated the public
with autos-da-fe. The whole history of the Middle
Ages is, indeed, the history of a long war against
nature.
But nature has at last prevailed. Delusions are
clouds, and the storm of the Thirty Years' War has
PREFACE. j
cleared our sky. The real secret of the astounding suc-
cess of modern science and industry is a general renais-
sance of naturalism, and the same revival begins to
manifest its influence in the tendencies of modern lit-
erature. Ghost-stories are going Out of fashion. Like
scrofula and other bequests of the Middle Ages, the
sickly pessimism of the sentimental school is yielding
to the influence of a revived taste for the pleasures
of out-door life. Books of travel, of sports and adven-
ture, historical, zoological, and even biological and cos-
mological studies, are fast superseding the historical
romances of the last generation. Even the Pariahs of
our reading-rooms have advanced from ghost-hunts to
scalp-hunts, from impossibilities to improbabilities. And,
moreover, the progress of natural science tends to super-
sede fiction by making it superfluous — even, for romantic
purposes. There is more romance in the travels of
Humboldt, more magic in the idyls of Thoreau and the
revelations of Darwin and Haeckel, than in all the fan-
cies of the mediaeval miracle-mongers. The wonders of
nature begin to eclipse the wonders of supernaturalism.
A Zoological Garden attracts more sight-seers than the
best Passion-play. Pan has revived.
The plan of the present volume is modest enough :
its theories are mere suggestions ; its limits have often
obliged me to reduce a chapter of zoological adventures
to a page of zoological anecdotes. But in offering it as a
contribution to the entertaining literature of the English
8 PREFACE.
language, my diffidence arises from a distrust in my own
abilities rather than from the deficient interest of the
subject itself, for the history of that literature has re-
peatedly proved that natural science can be made more
attractive than the products of fiction or mysticism — by
just as much as the resources of nature exceed the
resources of her rivals.
Felix L. Oswald.
Cincinnati, March, 1882.
CONTENTS.
CHAPTER I.
OUR FOUR-HANDED RELATIVES.
PAGE
Human Affinities — A Biological Problem — Nose-Apes — The Fore-
head-Criterion — Delusive Symptoms — The Wanderoo — A Man and
Brother — The Medicean Paragon — Curious Analogies — Scratching
and Striking Arguments — Monkey- Habits— The Marvels of the
Brain — Singular Contrasts — Untamabl e Brutes— Amativeness — The
Spider-Monkey — African Baboons — A Bold Marauder — Superhu-
man Fists — A Vegetarian Argument — Capuchin-Monkeys — The
Ne Plus Ultra of Cowardice— Obstreperous Passengers — Frederick
Gerstaecker's Expedient — Dwarf Monkeys — Midas Rosalia — The
Moor-Ape — Total Depravity — A Farmers' Pest — Monos de Ca-
dena — The Genius of Mischief — A Fatal Oversight — Platonic
Homunculi — The Pet of Cartagena — Reasoning Capacities — Dogs
and Monkeys — A Four-handed Buddhist — Nest-building Animals —
Strange Bedfellows — A Picnic Adventure — Lesser Evils — A Prac-
tical Physiognomist — Defying the Landlord — The Macacus Rad-
iatus — Self-Reliance — The Scale of Intelligence — Curiosity — The
Secret of Epaminondas — An International Language — The Red
Howler — Treetop Serenades — The Science of Tucbeer — Anthro-
poid Apes — Pansy's Stratagem — Love at First Sight — The Advan-
tages of Circumspection — The Javanese Manki — Mind vs. Matter —
A Casus Belli — Victorious Impudence — Yielding under Protest
— Esprit de Corps — A Self-Asserting Pet — Catching a Tartar —
Captain Hess — Salto Mortale — Freebooters — The Patron Saint of
9
CONTENTS.
PAGE
Thieves— Incurable Kleptomaniacs— Mr. Thielman's Cook— Mis-
placed Confidence— Monkey Education— A School for Pickpockets
.-Unnatural Mothers— Living by Stealth— Nest-hiding— A Queer
Predilection— Buddha's Foibles— A Moral Experiment— Martyrs to
Free Inquiry— Taciturn Monkeys— The Rhesus Baboon— An Ob-
scene Saint— Four-handed Drunkards— The Force of a Bad Ex-
ample—Is our Love of Salt Natural ?— Original Sin— Eating on
Principle— Fruges Consumere Nati— Lung- Poison— A Curious
Experiment— What Kills our Menagerie Monkeys— A Physiologi-
cal Puzzle— Anthropoid Monkeys— Their Antipathy to Children-
Paradoxical Character-Traits— The Monkeys of New Freiburg—
Over-practical Jokes— Fatal Consequences— The Victim of the
Wanderoos— Vicarious Atonement — The Faculty of Dissimulation. 21
CHAPTER II.
MOUNTAIN SHEEP.
By-Laws of Nature — -Man and his Fellow-Creatures — Solution of a
Zoological Mystery — Survival under Difficulties — The Haunts of
the Mountain Sheep — Grazing Cimarrons — Picket-Posts — Retreat-
Tactics — Adventure of an American Engineer — A Camp of Obser-
vation — The Progress of Culture — Four-footed Emigrants — Colonel
Pennypacker's Recollections — Our Last Hunting-Grounds — The
Guests of the Northland — Winter-Horrors — A Strange Honeymoon
— Elder Millard's Discovery — Protective Instincts — An Ill-fated
Rookery — The Gamekeeper of Rheinharts-Brunn — Hibernation —
Biornir-Nott — Weather-Prophets — A Storm-Signal — Highland
Camps— Zoological Nondescripts — Perplexities of a Modern Na-
turalist — Untamable Kids — A Dangerous Pet — Don Panchito —
Intemperate Quadrupeds— Borracheria — The Perils of Pulque — A
Long-horned Dilemma— Ex Infernis— A Singular Instinct — Fam-
ily Duties— Vse Victis— A Last Resort— Zoological Superstitions
—How Wild Sheep descend a Precipice— Sheep-Hounds— A
Hunter's Ruse — Domestic Fera^" Sheep-tickle"— The Wind
River Range— Lonely Hunting-Grounds— The Meadows of the
1 ra de San Simon— Four-footed Bachelors— A Wary Hermit—
Rock-Labyrinths— An Ethnological Conjecture . . . .60
CONTENTS. i ]
CHAPTER III.
A STEP-CHILD OF NATURE.
Mexican Mountain-Forests — The Mono Espectro — Voices of the
Wilderness — Dog-day Siesta — A Daylight Owl — The Tardo Ne-
gro — A Chase in the Tree-tops — Constitutional Stoicism — The
Better Part of Valor — An Awkward Predicament — Frugal Habits
— A Child of the Air — Arboreal Mammals — Euphorbia-Trees — A
Hairy Hamadryad — Four-footed Trappists — A Vital Problem —
The Crime of Helplessness — Adventure of a Lumberman — Martes
torquatus — Chicken-Thieves— Mischief-Joy — Life under Difficul-
ties — The Tarda Morena — In Articulo Mortis — A Sleepless Crea-
ture — Survivors of the Fern-Age — The Spotted Sloth — A Three-
legged Pensioner — Grunts et praeterea nihil — A Freak of Nature
— Imperturbable Stoicism — A Philosopher of the Horatian School
— Cinderella — -A Strange Pet — -Abusing Good-Nature — Precocious
Egotism — Nostalgia — Universal Instincts — Non-resistance — The
Wisdom of Compensating Nature — Secrets of Happiness . . 79
CHAPTER IV.
SECRETIVENESS.
Rudimentary Instincts — Their Natural Development — The Faculty
of Direction — Hunting under Water — The Simia Destructor and
his Four-footed Rivals — Phrenological Indications — The Skull of
a Weasel — The Hiding-Faculty — Artful Dodgers — Nest-Hiding —
Bears and Birds — The Orchard Oriole — Birds Fooling their Pur-
suers — Instincts of Young Birds — Impromptu Hiding-Place — An
Astonished Fox-Hunter — Procul de Jove — Outwitting his Landlord
— Raccoons and Muskrats — What becomes of Dead Animals —
Secretiveness in Articulo Mortis — A Lost Pet — Where they found
Him — Night-Walkers — The Ghost Hour — Mysteries of a Poultry-
House — Night Visions — Migratory Birds — Their Favorite Routes —
Nocturnal Wanderers — Paso del Norte — Plenty Room higher up
CONTENTS.
12
i
-Chronological Instinct-Sunday in France— Sanguinary Sabbaths
—The Virginia Partridge— Cautious Marauders— Rat-Patriarchs—
Ratification-Meeting-Wall-Mice— Discovery of a Boarding-house-
Keeper— Secret Lodgers— The American Skunk— Hidden Head-
quarters-Extinct Animals -Our Natural Game- Preserves-
Panthers and Wolves— A Beast Asylum— The Mountains of North
Carolina— French Wolves— The Mystery of Allendorf— A Strange
Spoor— In the Salpetar-Loeh— The Oberforster's Opinion— Science
vs. -Empiricism— A Zoological Lecture— Stubborn Sceptics— An
argumentum ad hominem— " Secret Camelopards"— A Frank For-
ester
97
CHAPTER V.
BATS.
Curious Fossils— A Relic of a Bygone World— Children of Tartarus
—The Winged Lemur— Night-Apes— The Bat-Mystery— Spallan-
zani's Conjecture— The Sixth Sense— Night- Walkers— Gluttons and
their Characteristics— Bat-Voices— Aristotle's Opinion— A' Winged
Nurse— Useful Hooks— Winter-Quarters— The Effects of Frost-
Latent Vitality— Queer Dormitories — The Grottos of Posilippo —
The Biels-H5hle— A Mass-Meeting House— Canadian Bats— Le
Borgne Corne— Phrenological Reflections — Brainless Brutes — A
Subterfuge— The Salzburg Acropolis— A " Bat-Rookery"— Routing
his Lodgers — An Acherontic Spectacle — Children of Chaos — Na-
tional Superstitions — Natt-Backa — Devil-Birds — A Paragon of
1 Igliness — Slandered Benefactors — Bacon-fat — The Cockatrice —
Vampire-Lore — Ominous Symptoms — Sleeping under Difficulties —
The Ghoul-Bat — A Vampire Trap — Bonpland's Receipt — A Valua-
ble Accomplishment — Entomological Enigmas — Mosquitoes — How
they subsist in the Woods — The " Sunken Lands" — An Ugly Di-
lemma — The Vampirus Spectrum — A Miraculous Instinct — Two
Drunken Sailors — Exsanguis — Tropical Bats — The Kalong Nui-
sance — Voracity of the Javanese Roussette — Insatiable Boarders —
A Tough Constitution — The Pets of Cape Angol — Rydenberg —
Tropical Sports — The Dutch Colonists — A Fox-Chase in the Air
— The Matives of Wynkoop's Bay — Fighting the Harpies — The
5ky-Fox"— Monkey-Birds— The Wages of Sin. . . .114
CONTENTS. 13
CHAPTER VI.
SACRED BABOONS.
PAGE
Waterton's Experiment — An Asylum for Birds and Beasts — The
Children of the All-Father — Hindoo Ethics — Queer Proteges —
Four-handed Demi-Gods — The Bhunder Baboon — Sacred Croco-
diles — Eupeptic Pets — Sir Emerson Tennent's Statistics — Inviolate
Carnivora — Deva-Ghee — Monkey-Hospital — High-Caste Apes —
Strange Bequests — Pariah Monkeys — The Favorites of Brahm —
Lunch- Fiends — Dangerous Superstitions — Captain ElphinstoneS
Gardener — The Lex Talionis — Sacred Bulls — Their Expensive
Privileges — Reverend Quadrupeds — Fraternity and Equality — Dr.
Vanjorden's Experience — Baboon Asylums — Punctual Boarders —
The Pets of the Dhevadar — Cheek — A Natural Knapsack — The
Papio Rhesus — Obstreperous Pensioners — A Council of War —
Willy-nilly — The Mahakund — " Pious and Continent Paupers" —
Race-Prejudices — A Hindoo Legend — Ravan and the Rishis —
The Monkey-Honuman — Honuman's Stratagem — Unforeseen Re-
sults — The Sacred Mountain Lake — Incontestable Proofs — A Val-
uable Relic — The Spoils of the Virey — Inviolate Guests — The
Saints of Khunar — Precautions — Impious Britishers — " Ludere cum
Sacris" — Tempting the Saints— A Repentant Sinner — Plethoric
Pensioners — Exiled Aristocrats — The Victims of the Sepoy Insur-
rection — Destitute Monkeys — City-Monkeys — A Four-handed
Tramp — The Upper Ten — No False Modesty — Eccentric Mussul-
mans — Their Hatred of Idols — Resolute Mendicants — Kleptomania
— The Delhi Bhunders — Race-Instincts — A Boy protected by
Monkeys — The Cause of the Indian Insurrection — Interceding for
a Pickpocket — Dr. Vanjorden's Servant — Mons. Duvancel's Mis-
take — Stuffing a Saint — " Wicked Harbarat's Place" — A Parthian
Shot — Mohammedan Allies — Shah All urn's Sentence — Four-handed
Convicts — Cemetery Monkeys — Dr. Mackenzie's Scrape — The
Limits of Human Patience — A Question of Casuistry — Lecturing
a Bull — Gymnastic Exploits . . . . . . . . 132
CONTENTS.
CHAPTER VII.
ANIMAL RENEGADES.
1 V.GH
Nature vs. Slavery— Secret Protestantism— Our Truant Pets— Dogs
—Their Night-Rambles— Private Business— Proofs Positive— A
Practical Argument— Gadding Cats— How Tomcats spend their
Summer Vacations— Bush-Pork— The Goats of the Tyrolese Alps
—Animal Renegades— Rebellion en masse — Wild Horses and
Cows— Ownerless Dogs — Cabras Pardas — Wild-Cats and Feld-
.1 — Bactrian Camels— The Wild Asses of Yemen— Burkhardt's
Conjecture — Reappearance of old Race-Habits — The Khelp el
Khamr— Eating a Sheik— My Mexican Friend — El Perro pelon —
Tramp-Dogs— Business Practice— A Provident Puppy — Treasure-
trove— Buddhistic Ethics— Broomstick Logic— A Declaration of
Independence — Pampa Curs — The Canis Azarae — Sierra Goats —
Spontaneous Reversion — The Wild Cattle of the Brazos — Le
Bidet Sauvage — An Equine Outlaw — Adventure in the Sambre
Highlands — The Price of Liberty — Nemesis — Syrian Dogs — Dr.
Tanner's Rivals — Chances for a Sausage-maker — Black-muzzled
Cows — Hyena-Heads — A Singular Character-Trait — Mobbed by
Mustangs — Wild Camels — Dangerous Travelling — Esprit de Corps
— The Chinaco's Dog — Revenge by Proxy — A Werewolf's Den —
Facing his Foes — An Unequal Combat — La Mort san> Phrase —
Carrion-Eaters — An Unnatural Appetite — Dietetic Experiments —
Communistic Insurrections — The Autocrat of the Animal Kingdom
— Captain Kellerman — Misplaced Confidence — Into the Jaws of
Death — An Appeal for Charity — Obstreperous Beggars — A Fatal
Mistake— Orphan Puppies— The Tramp-Bitch— Foster-Children —
An Errand of Mercy — Nocturnal Visits — Higher Duties . -159
CHAPTER VIII.
PETS.
Natural Selection— Non-egotistical Instincts— Duties in Disguise—
The Purpose of the Pet-Mania— Animals in Danger of Extermina-
CONTENTS.
tion — Natural Safeguards — Du Chaillu's Gorilla — Contradictory
Reports — The Protege of the Berlin Aquarium — Young Animals
— Their Natural Tameness — Jaguar Cubs — Unconditional Surren-
der — Dietetic Influences — Infidel Pets — The Postmaster of San
Pablo — Juanita — A Friend in Need — Jacko's Adventure — By the
Skin of his Teeth — Independent Youngsters — Monkey-Babies —
Their Ridiculous Tameness — My Bonnet-Macaque — A Four-handed
Micawber — Love in Abstracto — Billy Hammock's Pets — A Fawn-
finder — Dutch Storks — Their Fondness for Human Society — Fore-
going their Winter-Trip — Rival Pets — Scared Chickens — Untam-
able Animals — Hospitality — Herr Hainan's Boarders — The Guests
of Miss Meiringer — Suaviter in modo — The Funeral of St. Renal-
dus — Grateful Bucks — The Santon of the Bakony Wald — Personal
Magnetism — The White Doe of Rylstone — A Four-legged Kid-
napper — An Affectionate Lynx — The Love-lorn Dolphin — A
Strange Legend — The Whelps of the She- Wolf — A Story from
India — The Wolf-Boys — Discovery of a Tax-Collector — Dietetic
Predilections — A Strange Orphan — The Mountain-Wolf — Hunting
Panthers and Trained Eagles — The Art of Falconry — Winged
Retrievers — The Eagle of Judenburg — A Useful Bird — The Pen-
sioners of Vishnu — St. Anthony's Pigs — An Eccentric Lady — The
Curiosities of Mount Morris — Domestic Bears — Frank Buckland's
Rats — Useless Pets are the most Affectionate — The Instinct of
Freedom — Its Unexpected Revivals — The German Barnum — A
Lion at large — Homeward Bound — Passive Resistance — Taming
a Jackal — A Heroic Cure — The Canopy of a Beast-Tamer — A Re-
luctant Boarder — The Landlord of Eluelen — Love's Labor Lost —
Snake-Charmers — Dr. Grotius's Remark — East Indian Beast-
Charmers — Dangerous Pets — The Guruwalla — Lord Dalhousie's
Wizard — The Coluber Dryas — Natural Magic — An Alligator-
Charmer — Business Secrets — Professional Rat-catchers — East In-
dian Exiles — Gypsy Tricks — The Story of the Pied Piper — Orpheus
— Self-sacrificing Animals — Major Keogh's Old Roan — The Train
of the Wahabees — Trusty Dogs — The Shepherds of the Transvaal —
Professor Schomberg's Experiment — The Power of Conscience —
Enfant Perdu — The Lex Talionis — Micheline — Freak of a Tame
Elephant — The Influence of Education — Hunting Panthers — A
Test of Loyalty — Town-Dogs — Their Trials and Temptations —
The Salzburg Acropolis — Sensitive Bats — Schopenhauer's Theory
15
i6
CONTENTS.
PAGE
—Musical Brutes— After Dark— Night-Terrors—Types and Arche-
types—Origin of a Strange Character-Trait — The Power of Habit —
Mill-Horses— Survival of the Fittest — The Influence of Domestica-
tion — A Conjecture • . 1S4
CHAPTER IX.
TRAPS.
Tool-making Animals — A First Attempt — Monkey- Men — The Value
of Experience — Experts and Amateurs — Von Tschudi's Anecdote —
A Vicuna-Trap — Hunter's Secret — Race-Foibles — How Minks are
Trapped — Turkey-Pens — A Strange Fact — Secret Burrows — Favor-
ite Haunts — Ideal Luxuries — Cardinal Retz — Partridge- Hunters —
A Fatal Foible — Simple Rat-Traps — The Nest-hiding Faculty —
Persistent Intruders — A Rat-proof Building — Otter Burrows — Fun-
loving Animals — Unexpected Results — A Trapper's Trick — Olfac-
tory Predilections — Strange Preferences — De < rustibus, etc. — Sewer
Studies — Rat-Poison — A Singular Fact — The Language <>f Signs —
Profiting by Experience — Rats — Their Parental Solicitude — The
Trappers of Singapore — Outwitted Monkeys — Fuddle-Cakes —
Dangerous Munificence — A Counter-Stratagem — In Gloria — The
Wages of Sin — Steel-Traps — Ferocious Captives— Catching a Wild-
Cat— Liberty or Death— Pitfalls— A Daring Trapper— In for it-
American Hindoos — The Monkeys of Michoacan — A Test of Pa-
tience—Retribution by Proxy— Capuchin-Traps— The Trampa—
Strong Inducements— The Inhumanity of Man to Man— Templed
Guests— A Monkey Patriarch— Impulse vs. Principle— A LucU
Stranger— Panic-Stricken— Lord Bacon's Remark— The Owl-Trap
— Biters Bit — A Curious Experiment ... . . 223
CHAPTER X.
FOUR-FOOTED PRIZE-FIGHTERS.
Circus Combats— Herbert Spencer's Remark— Sax. a,, and Latins—
An Easy Way to cross the Styx— Death in Battle— Torres Vedras
CONTENTS. j -
— A Premature Boast — Rowdy Jack — The Scythe Brigade — Natural
Selection— Ethical Contradictions — Bishop Riley's Respondent —
An Argumentum ad Judicium — Gran Matanza — The Roman Circus
Games — Their Magnitude and Influence — Startling Statistics — An
Army of Wild Beasts — African Novelties — The Spanish Moriscos
— Bull-Fights — A National Mania — Papal Edicts— Bulls and Coun-
ter-Bulls — Jose Perez — His Popularity and Successful Career —
Popular Bulls — A Reluctant Triumphator — Apis-Worship — Fight-
ing Elephants — No Sinecure — The Hutti — Untimely Tantrums —
Dying Revenge — Hindostan Beast- Fights — Royal Sportsmen — The
Prince of Baroda— A Private Menagerie — Famous Fighters — A
Carnivorous Horse — Black Jan — The Idol of Samarang — Wolf-
Baiting — Hungarian Sports — Sunday Morning Amusements — Bruin
and the Pinchers — A Magnanimous Victor — Grizzly Bears — Mr.
Presswood's Boy — The Mustek Martes — Guerre a. l'outrance — The
Rock-Plover — Paid in his own Coin — Ferrets and Rats — Bulldog
Courage — Baron Gaisner's Wager — Tackling a Panther — An As-
tonished Dog — Prehistoric Sports — Spanish Man-hunts — Leoni-
cico — A Werewolf — Balboa's " Adjutant" — A Rival of Cerberus —
Aragon Hounds — Vse Victis — The Rhamadan — A Strategic Sug-
gestion — Dutch Sports — The Pets of Amsterdam — Muidenhaven —
Private Circenses — Dog-Dynasties — An Invincible Quadruped —
Street-Fights — Not Easy to Scare — A Stranger from Ceylon — King
Klaas ............ 237
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.
i. Cimarron Dogs .
2. The Chacma Baboon
3. Total Depravity
4. Unrequited Love
5. Salto Mortale .
6. Misplaced Confidence
7. Martyrs to Free Inquiry
8. Winter Quarters
9. A Steep Alternative .
10. A New Departure
11. Prepaying the Debt of Nature
12. A Slothful Family
13. A Vantage-Ground
14. Reconnoitring .
15. Sunday Morning
16. Children of Erebus .
17. A Vampire-Trap
18. A Fox-Chase in the Air
19. The Pets of the Mahakhund
20. Four-handed Lazzaroni
21. The Limits of Human Patience
22. Bactrian Camels
23. Mustang Cows .
24. Wild Dogs
25. " Juanita" .
26. Strange Messmates
27. The Ger- Eagle .
PAGE
Frontispier.
25
29
39
46
48
52
64
7i
85
87
89
101
105
107
117
123
127
137
H7
155
163
171
175
187
193
197
19
20 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.
PAGE
28. The Alligator-Charmer 207
29. A Dangerous Playmate . . . . . . . . 215
30. Survival of the Fittest . . . . . . . .219
31. The Wages of Sin 229
32. " In for it" 233
22- Decoy Owls .......... 235
34. A Reluctant Triumphator ........ 243
35. The Rajah's Pet 247
36. " Vae Victis" . 259
ZOOLOGICAL SKETCHES.
CHAPTER I.
OUR FOUR-HANDED RELATIVES.
Our nearest relatives in the large family of the animal
kingdom are undoubtedly the frugivorous four-handers,
with some of their nocturnal congeners, but it would be
difficult to classify the Quadrumana after the degree of
that relationship : no naturalist could name the most
man-like ape. It is a retiadated, rather than a graduated
system of affinity, as Carl Vogt expresses it : the type
of the human form is a centre from which the connect-
ing lines diverge in various directions. To every sup-
posed characteristic of our physical structure some genus
or other of the multiform family has been found to ex-
hibit a parallel ; only the combination of these attributes
distinguishes man from all monkeys.
The Latin word simia is derived from simus (flat-
nosed), and yElian considered the prominence of the
human nose as a prerogative of our species; but Sir
■x 21
22 ZOOLOGICAL SKETCHES.
Stamford Raffles discovered a nose-ape, the Borneart
representative of the genus Scmnopithecus, a big, long-
tailed brute with a truly Roman proboscis and the nar-
row nostrils of the Caucasian race. In proportion to
his size the white-handed capuchin-monkey of Western
Guiana has a higher forehead than the two-legged in-
habitants of his native woods; and the anatomist Cam-
per demonstrated that with respect to the length of the
tail-bones immortal man forms the connecting link be-
tween the lower apes and the orangs. The Arabs who
question the human pedigree of the beardless Ethiopian
would have to hail the wonderoo as a man and brother ;
and the male orang-outang, too, can boast of a chin-tuft
that would do credit to a modern senator. With the
exception of her expressive eyes, the face of the female
orang is the most outrageous caricature of the Medicean
paragon; man-like lineaments are, indeed, by no means
a characteristic of the higher apes, and in that respect,
at least, some of the macaques and Colobi would per-
haps be the true anthropoids; but even the grotesque
physiognomies of the South-American flat-noses are
always redeemed by some strikingly human feature.
The skinny spider-monkey has a mignon mouth and
delicate white teeth, the little marmoset parts its hair
in the middle, and the red howler (Mycetes ursinus) has
the ear of a Spanish maya— every fold, every dimple of
the rim, a perfect fac-simile of the corresponding parts
of the human auricle.
OUR FOUR-HANDED RELATIVES. 2 \
A similar analogy surprises the observer of certain
gestures and tricks that distinguish our four-handed
cousins from all lower animals. It is an innate habit of
the Siamese gibbon to screen his eyes with the palm of
his hand when looking at some distant object. Children
in such an attitude often lean forward, and so does the
gibbon, — as if a difference of three or four inches would
avail him at a distance of a mile. Monkeys never grin
without a twinkling movement of their eyelids. That
might be caused by an interaction of the facial muscles ;
but what makes them avert their eyes if they pout, and
stretch out their open hands if they surrender at dis-
cretion ? Or why does the Rhesus monkey clutch his
ears when he expects a hard blow ? Does instinct teach
him what his science has taught the anatomist, — viz.,
that the zygomatic arch is the weakest part of the skull ?
Or is it a result of educational influences, since the
female of the same species is very apt to enforce her
maternal authority by striking arguments ? Peculiari-
ties of structure may partly account for the singular
tricks of certain species of monkeys. One of my ac-
quaintances has caged a spaniel with a little long-fingered
macaque, and at meal-times the monkey often resorts
to a favorite stratagem of small boys in their scuffles
with a bigger playmate, by looking sideways and keep-
ing his hand rather out of sight when he is going to
make a sudden grab. The dog knows that trick, and is
all suspicion ; but his twenty sharp teeth cannot compete
ZOOLOGICAL SKETCHES.
with the twenty fingers of his little rival. Next to the
eye, the prehensile hand is, indeed, the organic master-
piece of the Creator.
But stranger than the most fearfully-wonderful organ-
ism is the human mind, that mysterious medley of con-
flicting propensities, as Schopenhauer calls it ; and the
mental characteristics of our Darwinian relatives exhibit
a not less wonderful diversity. The sundry breeds of
our domestic dog differ considerably in talents and dis-
position ; but that difference almost disappears before
the character-contrasts of the various four-handers. The
above-mentioned red howler of the Orinoco Valley is
all but untamable, a most spiteful, morose, and repulsive
brute ; but his countryman the coaita or black spider-
monkey is more absurdly affectionate than the fondest
lap-dog. Solitary confinement almost breaks his heart ;
restored to liberty, he lavishes his embraces alike on
friend and foe, and, faute de mieux, will hug an old tom-
cat for hours together. Spurzheim's nomenclature has
no word for that peculiar propensity; it has nothing to
do with amativeness, nor is it " friendship," for it can
dispense with reciprocation : it is rather an excess of
affectionate confidence in the abstract, combined with a
total want of resentment, for fear itself will not prevent
the coaita from pressing his endearments upon an ill-
tempered keeper.
A very different kind of confidence is that of the
chacma baboon, who enters the fields of the Namaqua
OUR FOUR-HANDED RELATIVES.
25
Hottentots in broad daylight and often before the eyes
of their fraus and children. After stuffing his cheek-
THE CHACMA UABOUN.
pouches, he retreats, but leisurely and slowly, well know-
ing that no dog will dare to encounter him in the open
fields. His eye-teeth are three inches long, and as sharp
as those of a panther, but he rarely makes use of them ;
he relies on his arms, on the grasping and wrenching
power of his superhuman fists. The orang-outang re-
sembles him in this respect, but the orang never fights
as long as he can possibly escape ; the chacma yields to
nothing but fire-arms, and finishes his meal in the pres-
26 ZOOLOGICAL SKETCHES.
ence of a troop of yelling children and yelping curs with
the leonine calmness of a mastiff among a swarm of
Skye terriers.
His intrepidity seems to refute the favorite argument
of the anti-vegetarians, for the chacma subsists on ber-
ries, roots, and field-fruits ; but with the same diet, and,
in regard to its climate at least, a very similar habitat,
the white-faced capuchin {Cebus leucomeros) is relatively
and absolutely the greatest coward in creation : the mere
sight of an unknown object is enough to frighten him into
a fit of extravagant jumps and contortions. Cowardice
is hardly the right word: if his conduct in captivity
can be accepted as a criterion of his mental constitu-
tion, the Cebus seems to pass his life in a delirium of
abject terror with rare and short self-possessed intervals.
The screams that accompany his fits of trepidation make
him a rather undesirable pet, for the constant exercise of
his vocal apparatus has developed that organ to a degree
out of all proportion to the size of the little alarmist.
Frederick Gerstaecker, who shipped a boxful of these
creatures on a Hamburg steamer, had to spend all his
loose cash in trinkgeld to save his proteges from being
kicked overboard by the exasperated crew. But, ac-
cording to Montaigne, poltroonery is merely a sign of
unusual foresight; and, if this be true, the providential
faculties of the capuchin must amount almost to clair-
voyance.
In his lucid moods the Cebus is, on the whole, an
OUR FOUR-HANDED RELATIVES. 27
inoffensive chap; and it would, indeed, be a mistake
to suppose that all monkeys are naturally mischievous.
The little Tamarin {Midas rosalid) handles its playthings
more carefully than most children, and the females, espe-
cially, seem almost afraid to stir without their keeper's
permission. Gratuitous destructiveness is rather a dis-
tinctive trait of the African quadrumana, and their repre-
sentative in this respect is perhaps the Ccrcopithecus
Maurus, the Moor-monkey, or monasso, as they call him
in Spain, a fellow who seems to consecrate his temporal
existence to mischief with an undivided and disinter-
ested devotion. This Maurus and his cousin the rock-
baboon are the terror of the Algerian farmer ; but the
baboon contents himself with filling his belly, while the
other tears off twenty ears of corn for one he eats, and
often enters a fig-garden for the exclusive purpose ot
stripping the trees of their leaves and unripe fruit. In
captivity he cannot be trusted even with a leather jacket,
and, finding nothing else to spoil, does not hesitate to
exercise his talent upon his younger relatives, to the
detriment of their woolly fur. Still, his intelligence and
restless activity make him a prime favorite with the fun-
loving Spanish sailors, and in the Andalusian seaports
every larger household has a monasso or two, — monos
de cadeua, " chain-monkeys," as the dealers call them, a
Moor-monkey and a cadeua being as necessary concomi-
tants in civilized regions as a king and a constitution. A
rupture of the concatenation creates an alarm as if the
2 g ZOOLOGICAL SKETCHES.
chained beast of the Apocalypse had broken loose, and
if an unchained monasso gets a five-minutes' chance at
a kitchen or a parlor he can be relied upon to commit
all the havoc a creature of his strength could possibly
execute in five times sixty seconds : an instinct border-
ing on inspiration seems to tell him at the first glance
where and how to perpetrate the greatest amount of
actual damage in the shortest possible time. In a harbor-
hotel of Cartagena I saw a mono whose terpsichorean
talents had made him a more than local celebrity. He
could dance the Moorish zameca, besides the bolero and
fandango, and was sometimes released at the request of
his admirers, who pitied his constant collisions with the
lock of his drag-chain ; but on such occasions the land-
lady used to charge a real extra, for even her presence
did not prevent the mono from indulging his ruling
passion. Under pretext of returning the caresses of his
visitors, he managed to abstract their buttons, upset a
flower-pot or two, or interrupted his performances to
make a grab at a litter of poodle puppies on the veranda.
His scar-covered skull proved that the lot of the trans-
gressor is hard ; but the depilated condition of his neck
was owing to a peculiar trick of his, as the posadera ex-
plained it. He would hug a post near his couch under
the veranda, and, stretching his head back and his
tongue out, would twist his neck to and fro, as if in the
agonies of strangulation. During a temporary absence
of their mother he once succeeded in deceiving the chil-
OUR FOUR-HANDED RELATIVES.
2 9
dren by these symptoms of distress : they loosened his
chain-strap an inch or two, but happily took the prccau-
W%'< ?W^'U I
tion to shut the
house-door and
the cellar-gate.
But they had
forgotten the
poultry-house ;
and when the
lady returned
in the evening
her sixteen
hens had been
converted into
Platonic homunadi, — " bipeds without feathers and with-
out the power of volitation." On another occasion he
came near setting the house on fire by drenching the
cat with the contents of a large kitchen-lamp. Still,
after trying sundry other four-handers, the lady declined
TOTAL DEPRAVITY.
, ZOOLOGICAL SKETCHES.
to part with her monasso, though she lamented his
utter want of principles, like the Devin du Village :
Helas ! que les plus coupables
To uj ours sont les plus aimables !
The Cercopitheais Maurus is the near relative of the
Indian macaques, beyond any doubt the most interesting
pets of their size. Without the pensive despondency of
the larger apes, the Cercopithecus Macacus has a large
share of their reasoning capacity: in whatever way we
may choose to explain his intelligence, we certainly can-
not ascribe it to instinct. The instinctive faculties of
animals are limited in the nature of their purpose, —
working in a certain direction with a perfect adaptation
of means to end, but narrowly objective, — while the sub-
jective capacity of our four-handed relatives is converti-
ble and pervertible to all possible good, bad, and frivo-
lous purposes: a monkey's mental process subserves the
intents of his individual caprice rather than the interests
of the species. On my last visit to Antwerp I bought
a young Siamese bonnet-macaque {Macacus radiatus),
whose conduct under circumstances to which no pos-
sible ancestral experiences could have furnished any
precedent has often convinced me that his intelligence
differs from the instinct of the most sagacious dog as
essentially as from the routine knack of a cell-building
insect. His predilection for a frugal diet equals that of
OUR FOUR-HANDED RELATIVES. 3 I
his Buddhistic countrymen, and I have seen him over-
haul a large medicine-chest in search of a little vial with
tamarind jelly. He remembered the shape of the bottle,
for he rejected all the larger and square ones, and after
piling the round ones on the floor began to hold them
up against the light and subdivide them according to the
fluid or pulverous condition of their contents. Having
thus reduced the number of the doubtful receptacles to
something like a dozen and a half, he proceeded to scru-
tinize these more closely, and finally selected four, which
he managed to uncork by means of his teeth. Number
three proved to be the bonanza bottle, and, waiving all
precautions in the joy of his discovery, Prince Gautama
left the medical miscellanies to their fate and bolted into
the next room to enjoy the fruits of his enterprise in his
favorite corner. A dog's nose might have saved him all
that trouble ; but no dog in the world could have devised
a plan of simplifying the investigation in default of his
physical senses.
Neither a dog nor a monkey is naturally a nest-build-
ing animal, and on a cold day a terrier would content
himself with crawling into a warm Gorner; but Buddha
has noticed that the sun of my hearth is apt to wane in
the eleventh hour, and obviates that contingency by col-
lecting all the loose rags and papers he can lay his hands
on whenever the state of the weather threatens a cold
nieht. As a last resort he offers his enemies a truce
and bundles in with one of the dogs, — with the poodle
-2 2 ZOOLOGICAL SKETCHES.
generally, on account of his calorific fleece. He was in
the habit of utilizing a young spaniel bitch in that way,
but toward dark the dog was subject to a fit of whining
and scratching and had often to be ejected as a common
nuisance, — till Buddha, giving his bedfellow the benefit
of his superior foresight, saved her and himself from the
discomforts of a cold night's lodging by forcibly sup-
pressing her symptoms of uneasiness. In his inter-
course with his two-handed protectors his attachments
are not very demonstrative, but his affection, just like a
child's, becomes more intimate in moments of real or
imagined personal danger. I took him out to a picnic
one day, but the festivities were interrupted by the cus-
tomary thunder-storm, and I was glad to accept a seat
in the tent-wagon of one of my next neighbors. Before
we got home the rain had swelled the little creek to a
torrent, and, finding the ford impassable, we had to make
a detour to the next bridge. It was pitch-dark when
we reached it, and, hearing the booming of the creek,
I jumped out to reconnoitre the safety of the passage.
The bridge was in its place yet, so I hallooed to the
driver to come on ; but through the rush of the water
and the rumbling of the coach I heard the uproarious
laughter of the occupants. Somehow or other the mon-
key had noticed my absence and gone almost crazy with
excitement. Remonstrances and caresses were quite in
vain : he screamed like a madman, and was in the act of
jumping out, when I laid hold of him and called him by
OUR FOUR-HANDED RELATIVES. 33
his name. Recognizing my voice, he flew at my throat,
fastened his teeth in my collar, and, thus clasping my
neck, gave vent to his feelings in a curious kind of spas-
modic sobs. The farmer's girls finally lugged him to the
front of the wagon ; but every now and then he came
back to my corner and tried to establish my identity by
passing his hands over my face and feeling for my beard.
When his offences against the eighth commandment had
roused the wrath of the housekeeper, he used to hide
under the stove; but on one such occasion, while the
duenna was after him with a broom-stick, a strange dog
happened to enter the kitchen, and, without a moment's
hesitation, Buddha chose the least of two evils, and, fly-
ing into the woman's arms, clung to her for protection,
though he had to take a good thrashing into the bargain.
Monkeys are practical physiognomists, and can read
half-suppressed emotions in the symbolism of the human
face. An angry look at once puts them on their guard.
They have an eye for individual dispositions and foibles.
During a two years' residence in the suburbs of Vera
Cruz I often left Buddha in charge of my landlord, or
rather of his children, for the old man was a hipped
Cuban refugee and very apt to drown his cares in
aguardiente. When I came home in the evening, a
single look at the monkey-perch told me if the Cubano
had been once too often " round the corner," for in that
case the Macacus radiatus was hiding behind the curtain
or under the sofa, unwilling to meet the enemy in single
24 ZOOLOGICAL SKETCHES.
combat. But the appearance of an ally at once restored
his courage : as soon as I entered the room he sallied
forth, and seemed to defy the wrath of the tyrant by
marching up and down with a strutting gait and an
occasional wink at the neutral by-standers. When I pre-
tended to go out and leave him in the lurch, he would
sneak along the wall to regain his ambuscade by a
roundabout way, and remained as still as a mouse as
long as the angry voice of the colonel kept the room
under martial law. But if the irate hidalgo selected a
scapegoat among his boys, the monkey reappeared in
the background as soon as the yells of the victim told
him that matters were approaching a crisis, and, taking
advantage of the general confusion, would make a raid
on the table and fill his cheek-pouches with substantials.
After a successful foray of this sort the house-dog often
joined him in his retreat, and, instead of resisting his
communistic claims, the Macacus then submitted to
black-mail, and only now and then silenced the demon-
strations of the quadruped by an angry gesture: " Hush
up, you fool!" in the plainest language of dumb show.
But whenever the obfuscation of the Cubano reached
the hypnotic stage, Buddha's tactics underwent a cor-
responding change : he sallied boldly, mounted the pros-
trate refugee with a view-halloo whoop, and sometimes
proceeded to search his pockets with all the cool effront-
ery of the Neven de Ramcau. His pragmatical specula-
tions on the condition of a top-heavy foe may be rather
OUR FOUR-HANDED RELATIVES. 35
vague, but he is evidently gratified at the reversion of
the order of mental precedence between himself and the
big biped. After a flagrant breach of the domestic by-
laws he will often forego a couple of meals rather than
leave his hiding-place, and only curiosity will bring him
out at such times.
In regard to their rank in the scale of intelligence the
various quadrumana might be classified after the degree
of their curiosity ; and I cannot help thinking that man
himself owes his supremacy as much to the inquisitive-
ness as to any moral virtue of his primogenitor. The
American sapajous are rather incurious creatures in com-
parison with their Oriental congeners : no special cor-
respondent in the Divan of the Padisha can be more
wide-awake than a macaque in the presence of a stranger
or upon his first arrival in a new lodging. Nothing
escapes his restless eye : the swaying of an ivy-leaf at
the window, the vibration ot the teapot-lid, the slightest
movement of a strange dog, at once attract his attention
and become objects of his vigilant interest. If I am
going to refill my mucilage-bottle, I must take care to
divert the macaque's attention to the opposite end of the
room ; when I am sealing a letter, I have to touch sun-
dry other articles on the table, or Buddha will try to find
out what I have been hiding in that envelope with such
particular care. He had devised a way of opening his
cage by sticking his fingers through the bars and lifting
the bolt from below ; but I baffled his ingenuity by plug-
36
ZO OL O G1CAL SKE TCHES.
ging the hinge with a wooden wedge, and the next time
I released him he mounted the cage as soon as I turned
my back, and began to scrutinize the door with the un-
mistakable intent of discovering the obstructive innova-
tion. In the first month after his arrival in the United
States he was sitting in the chimney-corner with a little
Brazilian coaita, when the cold rain suddenly changed
into a snow-storm. Both monkeys flew to the window,
and, after contemplating the phenomenon in mute sur-
prise for the space of ten or twelve minutes, began to
exchange inquiring looks with a peculiar sotto-voce chat-
ter, as if the portent had almost taken away their breath.
But the conduct of the coaita may have been prompted
merely by the example of her elder companion, for she
contents herself with enjoying the warmth of the fire-
place, while the Asiatic seems to take an abstract in-
terest in the process of combustion, the crackling of the
fuel especially, and the occasional eruption of a streak of
flaming gases. Not far from my present dwelling-place
a suburban railroad company is digging away at a lime-
stone bluff in the way of a projected branch line. The
heavier rocks are drilled and fractured with dynamite,
and about every six hours a series of detonations go
off in quick succession like the shots of a Gatling gun.
My menagerie-box is a picture at such moments. The
four-handers at once huddle together and accompany
each discharge with a convulsive start or a simultaneous
attempt to force the door, while the quadrupeds just look
OUR FOUR-HANDED RELATIVES. 37
up and go to sleep again. When the blasting com-
menced, an infant capuchin-monkey always became the
centre of an excited group : his senior relatives crowded
around him with a sudden appearance of eagerness to
protect the jabbering brat.
The study of a certain peculiarity in the character of
men and monkeys may have induced that shrewd old
Theban Epaminondas to reorganize the army of his
native state by a division into clans and brotherhoods.
The primates of the animal kingdom become heroic in
defence and in the presence of their friends. If a single
boy be caught on the wrong side of an orchard-wall he
will give up at once, and generally manage to propitiate
the wrath to come by an unconditional capitulation : a
pair of chums in the same predicament are almost sure
to make matters worse by their defiant sauciness. The
same with monkeys : defiance of human authority by
means they would never dare in defence of their own
lives they will risk for the sake of their companions. It
is said that a man can make his own dog bite him ; but
the experiment might fail to succeed with several spe-
cies of monkeys: a macaque, I believe, would rather die
than use his teeth in vindication of his private wrongs
against the dread chief of the primates ; yet this same
Macacus will fly like a bull-dog at any man or any num-
ber of men who dare to molest his favorite companion.
The above-mentioned young capuchin has a full share
of the squealing propensities of his species, and if I lay
^8 ZOOLOGICAL SKETCHES.
hold of him his outcries never fail to bring Buddha to
the rescue. He does nqt offer to bite me, as long as
there is any doubt about my intentions, but in the mean
while serves an injunction by grasping my coat-tail and
contracting his brows in a menacing way. With other
animals this instinct is limited to the protection of their
young; though something like a defensive and offen-
sive alliance of friends has been observed among the
larger pliocee, — sea-bears and sea-lions, — and, strange to
say, is not rarely found among geese ; a single goose
is an arrant coward, but a pair of them are liable to
become belligerent. The protective association of wild
hogs is something quite different, — a sort of esprit de
corps, founded not on individual friendships, but on the
strength-in-unity principle, a courage en masse, strictly
proportioned to the numerical strength of the confed-
eration.
The language of our little cousins has a sound or a
gesture for every emotion. In his fits of loving-kind-
ness the black spider-monkey chirps like a bird, and
hugs the objects of his affection with such a fervor of
kindness that dogs and cats have often to use their teeth
to escape suffocation. In a huff he struts up and down
with his long tail straight erect like an Hungarian pike-
standard. The pretty vevet {Cercopithccus calMthrix) has
an amusing way of intimating his desire for food by
moving his head to and fro with alternate simpers and
grins. In a fit of anger he gets his back up like a pan-
OUR FOUR-HANDED RELATIVES.
39
ther crouching for a spring, and claws the floor as if he
were scratching or tearing something. Prince Gautama
UNREQUITED LOVE.
expresses his displeasure by a sort of smacking click
and a chattering movement of his jaws. If he is petted
or wrapped up in a shawl on a cold morning, he pro-
4 o ZOOLOGICAL SKETCHES.
trudes his lips with a quite peculiar mumbling purr more
nearly resembling a certain modulation of the human
voice than any animal sound I am acquainted with. His
signal of alarm is a coughing scream, not unlike the
yell of a frightened dog. The meaning of that scream
seems, indeed, to be understood by every beast or bird,
as certain onomatopoetic words recur in the language of
every nation. The screech of the capuchin-monkey is
somewhat louder and shriller: an adult of the white-
faced variety, a fellow not much larger than a cat, can
out-yell a couple of good-sized boys. Nearly all the
South-American ring-tails are obstreperous brutes, and
their talent culminates in the big red howler (Mycetes
ursinus), a vocalist whose performances, combined with
the screams of the jaguar, make the nocturnal forests of
the Orinoco a howling wilderness in the most shocking
sense of the words. The meaning of his nightly uproar
is rather doubtful, since it can hardly be a love-note, like
the amorous acclaims of the red deer and buffalo at cer-
tain seasons of the year. It may be intended to frighten
his enemies ; and if it answers that purpose a troop of
Mycetes cannot complain of want of elbow-room, for
the whoops of the old sachems can be plainly heard at a
distance of four English miles. Besides this astonishing
vocal power, the chacma baboon is a still greater master
of the science of tucbeer, the stentorian art of intimida-
ting an enemy, so much valued among the ancient Sara-
cens and modern Sioux. The hoarse, coughing bark of
OUR FOUR-HANDED RELATIVES. ^
the male chacma expresses, indeed, a very paroxysm of
savage passion, and, added to his ferocious appearance
in a fit of rage, may well frighten the Namaqua nymphs
out of their scanty wits.
The anthropoid apes are a somewhat taciturn race,
but a chimpanzee's murmur of affection is very expres-
sive, and quite different from his grunt of discontent.
A sick orang-outang sheds tears, moans piteously, or
cries like a pettish child ; but such symptoms are rather
deceptive, for the orang as well as the chimpanzee is a
great mimic, not of men only, but of passions and patho-
logical conditions. Two years ago I took temporary
charge of a young chimpanzee who was awaiting ship-
ment to the Pacific coast. His former landlord seemed to
have indulged him in a penchant for rummaging boxes
and coffers, for whenever I attempted to circumscribe the
limits of that pastime my boarder tried to bring down
the house, metaphorically and literally, by throwing him-
self upon the floor and tugging violently at the cur-
tains and bell-ropes. If that failed to soften my heart,
Pansy became sick. With groans and sobs he would lie
down in a corner, preparing to shed the mortal coil, and
adjusting the pathos of the closing scene to the degree
of my obstinacy. One day he had set his heart upon
exploring the letter-department of my chest of drawers,
and, after driving him off several times, I locked the
door and pocketed the key. Pansy did not suspect the
full meaning of my act till he had pulled at the knobs
4 2
ZOOLOGICAL SKETCHES.
and squinted through the keyhole, but when he realized
the truth life ceased to be worth living : he collapsed at
once, and had hardly strength enough left to drag himself
to the stove. There he lay, bemoaning his untimely fate,
and stretching his legs as if the rigor mortis had already
overcome his lower extremities. Ten minutes later his
supper was brought in, and I directed the boy to leave
the basket behind the stove, in full sight of my guest.
But Pansy's eyes assumed a far-off expression : earth
had lost its charms : the inhumanity of man to man had
made him sick of this vale of tears. Meaning to try
him, I accompanied the boy to the staircase, and the
victim of my cruelty gave me a parting look of intense
reproach as I left the room. Hut, stealing back on
tiptoe, we managed to come upon him unawares, and
Pansy looked rather sheepish when we caught him in
the act of enjoying an excellent meal.
Jules Michelet asserts that few women know any
medium between love and hatred ; but his paradox is
strictly true in regard to the sympathies and antipathies
of some of our Darwinian relatives. In a domesticated
ape's intercourse with strangers open hostility is gen-
erally the only alternative of importunate endearments.
The pros and cons are decided very promptly by some
inscrutable criterion, for his loves at first sight are by no
means biassed by prepossessing appearances nor even
by friendly overtures on the part of the biped. It may
be something more than caprice : a monkey may detect
OUR FO UR-HANDED RE LA TIVES. ^
the insincerity of a caress or good nature under a gruff
mask by symptoms that escape the human eye. Still,
their conduct toward visitors depends somewhat upon
circumstances : in private interviews they treat strangers
with a cautious reserve, often evidently suggested by
the idea of having been surrendered into the hands of
an enemy, possibly of a new master whose good will it
might be advisable to conciliate.
Humility is said to be the virtue of those who have
no other merit. Judging from the analogies of the brute
creation, the rule would seem to admit of occasional
exceptions: some very meek and lowly animals are
by no means without parts; but the most gifted of all,
the doubly-ambidextrous four-hander, is certainly the
most self-asserting. In a congregation of miscellaneous
mammals a monkey at once assumes command ; he
knows his rank, and no Arabian sheikh in an assembly
of African chieftains is swifter in resenting any disre-
spect to the Ccesarea majestas of his mental superiority.
A female Javanese Manki, the smallest variety of the
genus Ccrcopithecus, managed for several months to lord
it over the occupants of my zoo-box, till her supremacy
was disputed by a Scotch terrier, who had to maintain
a national dignity of his own and declined to accept a
passive role in a game of leap-frog. But he soon ascer-
tained that a practical joke can be a lesser evil : the peace
of his life was gone ; he could not eat, drink, or romp
without awakening the anathemas of the Manki, who
44 ZOOLOGICAL SKETCHES.
seemed to watch him like a lynx, and at his least sign
of playfulness pretended to fly into a violent passion,
chattering- and screaming till the quadruped subsided
like the victim of a vociferous shrew. His native pride
upheld him for three or four days, but before the end
of the week he was glad to conclude an armistice on
the Manki's own terms, and submitted to anything that
would secure him the privilege of eating his meals in
peace.
Most monkeys are masters of the art of bullying their
fellow-beings by intimidating gestures, especially a sud-
den erection of the scalp-bristles, combined with the
attitude of a bull-dog crouching for a spring. In reality
the average small monkey is a poor fighter : his finger-
nails are blunt, and his teeth frugivorous and short; but
dogs, as well as cats and raccoons, are generally imposed
upon by his impudence, apparently concluding that so
much assurance must be backed by some occult martial
resources. But even upon their retreat before an un-
doubted physical superior the little half-men yield only
under protest: when the Mexican bush-panther con-
tinues his forays after daylight, the capuchin-monkeys
keep up an incessant chattering, jumping to and fro, as
if they defied him to a climbing-match through the tree-
tops. Should he happen to catch one of them, the rest
will risk their own necks rather than forego the satis-
faction of pursuing the murderer hour after hour with
furious screams.
OUR FOUR-HANDED RELATIVES. 45
No monkey submits without " back-talk :" my Bud-
dha, the tamest macaque I ever saw, would bristle up
like a fighting-cock if I thwarted him in his caprices ;
at sight of a stick he retreated just out of reach, then,
suddenly turning, often gave me a bit of his mind, with
a coughing grunt and a look like Faust defying the
Demiurgus : " Ich bin's, bin Faust, bin deines Gleichen !"
His endearments could not be spurned with impunity ;
men and beast had to choose between his caresses and
his wrath ; in his younger days especially, he claimed a
constitutional right to be petted, and would not stand
any slight ; the spretce injuria forma generally threw him
into a squealing-fit, and often into such a huff that no-
thing short of abject flatteries would restore his good
humor. Nor is it easy to frighten a delinquent monkey
into an unconditional surrender as long as he can elude
your grasp; he is apt to dispute the competence of the
court, and has to be arraigned by strategy : salvation by
flight seems to be a fixed idea of the simian mind. To
run down an ape of the larger species is, indeed, no child's
play, even in the open fields and under circumstances
that would insure the capture of any other terrestrial
animal. During the Dutch expedition against Acheen,
Captain Hess, of the Batavian Rifles, procured the skin
of an old orang-outang who had been chased a whole
day by a troop of natives with clubs and dogs and had
fairly exhausted their patience before they could get
hold of him. They had surprised him on a high patina,
46
ZOOLOGICAL SKETCHES.
a plateau with
berry-b u s h e s
and without
a n y larger
trees; but,
though the
doe's cornered
him more than
twenty times,
he always man-
aged to break
away at the
approach of
the hunters,
till they finally
stampeded
lim over a cliff where
neither agility nor elastic
sinews could save his
bones from dislocation.
If the mental character-
istics of the four-handed
folk have anything in com-
mon with the arch-type of
our race, there would seem
to be a strong presumptive evidence that man is not per
naturam a law-abiding animal. The Psalmist may have
stretched his poetic license when he assured us that all
SALTO MURTALE.
O UR FO UR- HA NDED RE LA TI VES. 47
men are liars, but there is no doubt that all monkeys
are thieves. They all steal ; in their native land depre-
dation forms their daily and constant employment, and
Nature has done her utmost to equip them for their
trade. The monkey Hanuman is the Indian Mercury,
the patron saint of shoplifters and freebooters. Light-
fingered, quick, and prehensile, his four hands seem espe-
cially adapted for pillage ; he carries a double " kit," a
pair of capacious cheek-pouches, for storing his plun-
der; his arboreal domicile furnishes him ready-made
ambuscades and lurking-places ; he cannot be caught
napping, his head moves on a versatile fulcrum, and
his furtive eyes are ever on the alert. It is wholly im-
possible to cure a monkey of his raptorial penchant :
you may tame him till he makes your lap his favorite
hiding-place, you may surfeit him with tidbits, but the
moment you turn your back he will ransack the room
from top to bottom and cram his pouches with every-
thing bearing the faintest resemblance to comestibles.
In Hindostan monkeys enjoy all the privileges of a Mo-
hammedan lunatic, being permitted to rob the orchards
with impunity, decimate the rice-crop, and rob all the
birds'-nests they want; but, not content with levying
out-door contributions, they pillage the cottages of the
natives while the proprietors are at work in the fields ;
nay, they often manage to despoil the larder of the foreign
residents, or blackmail their children if they leave the
bungalow with a lunch-basket or a pocketful of nuts.
4 8
ZOOLOGICAL SKETCHES.
The Rev. George Thielmann, of the Moravian Mission,
ho passed several years in the Eastern Punjaub, de-
scribes the despair of his German cook at the impudence
w
MISPLACED CONFIDENCE.
of the light-fingered gentry. " I do not see how the
natives can stand it," said she : " if they take those ba-
boons for Christians, they ought to have a penitentiary
in every village." If she went to the door to answer a
bell, the macaques entered the kitchen through the rear
window ; going to look after her sun-dried peaches,
she found that the Bh under apes had been beforehand
OUR FOUR-HANDED RELATIVES. 4 q
with her; and if she left her bedroom window open she
was awakened by a committee of Hanumans taking an
inventory of her wardrobe. One day she left the gar-
dener's dinner under a tree where he used to take his
siesta, but, returning with a dessert of German dough-
nuts, she was just in time to see a troop of Rhesus
baboons running off with the dishes and bottles.
From the moment that a young monkey is weaned he
has to steal, for Dr. Brehm's observation applies strictly
and literally to every species of quadrumana : the
mother-monkey robs her own child, and forces it to eat
its food by stealth. The proprietor of the " Zoological
Coffee-Garden," in Savannah, Georgia, has been very suc-
cessful in rearing young monkeys, and the visitors of
his happy-family department can witness the same scene
thrice a day, — a number of half-grown capuchin babies
fleeing from the wrath of their own parents. As soon
as the dinner-bucket is brought in, the youngsters hide
in the corner and watch their opportunity, for while
their seniors are feeding there is no hope of a crumb or
a drop of milk ; but sooner or later the old ones are sure
to fall out, and during a general scrimmage for a tidbit
the children sometimes get a chance at the bucket, and
take care to make the best of it. But woe unto them
if their progenitors catch them in flagranti! Sires,
mothers, and aunts combine to avenge the sacrilege,
and the noise of the punishment often sets the whole
menagerie agog. I have seen a she-macaque jamming
c ZOOLOGICAL SKETCHES.
her bantling up against the wall and extracting from its
cheek-pouches the gifts of a charitable visitor, together
with all the crumbs and scraps the little one had gleaned
from the floor, and then adding outrage to injury by
cuffing the victim's ears.
As a consequence of such treatment, a baby-monkey
in the teens of its months is generally as lean as a
rake ; but the apparent cruelty of its parents may be a
wise provision of nature. After Jean Jacques Rousseau's
plan, it would be the best possible education for a
creature that has to make his living by stealth. Hunger
sharpens even a baby's wits, and a young four-hander
of ten months is really as preternaturally wide-awake
as a ten-year-old gamin of the Quattier des Savoyards.
Having learned to mistrust his own parents, he is
naturally very circumspect in his dealings with his
human guardians, and after a year of the kindest treat-
ment a mere contraction of your eyebrows is sufficient
to drive him grinning and chattering to his hiding-place.
A monkey rarely takes an offered present without watch-
ing your eyes and then snatching it with a sudden grab,
apparently unable to realize your generous caprice, but
concluding to take luck by the forelock before you
change your mind. In the summer season I have often
permitted a tame monkey to run at large, and before
the end of the week I invariably found that my room-
mate had established a cache, a hiding-place for storing
his mammon of unrighteousness, — stolen apples, nuts,
OUR FOUR-HANDED RELATIVES. c\
pencils, corks, and often also pieces of meat, or eggs,
that became offensive in the course of time and thus
betrayed his depository. Buddha, too, was incorrigibly
addicted to this kind of nest-hiding, though so fully
aware of the illegality o{ the practice that he took to
his heels as soon as I discovered his swag. I once, to try
him, put a scalding-hot egg on the table, and went out
to watch him through a key-hole. A rumbling in the
corner told me that he had descended from his perch, and
soon after his head appeared on the farther side of the
table. He touched the egg, gave a grin at the door, and
seemed on the point of retreating, but, drawing himself
up once more, he cast a hurried glance over the table and
snatched the stopper of a vinegar-flask rather than return
empty-handed. At that moment I opened the door, but
Buddha had disappeared, evidently into his usual hiding-
place behind the lounge. He knew I had watched him,
and thought it prudent to keep out of sight till time or
new events had obliterated the memory of his crime.
The English word stalwart is derived from stael-zvorth,
— i.e., worth stealing ; and the same criterion seems to
be a monkey's standard for the value of earthly things
in general. Any novel, movable, and portable object
at once excites his interest. If the digestible qualities
of the novelty seem doubtful, he appears to act on the
principle that in the mean while it can do no harm to
appropriate it. North of the Rio Grande most capuchin-
monkeys are martyrs to rheumatism, and three poor
52
ZOOLO GICAL SKE TCHES.
cripples of the Cebida species had been assigned winter-
quarters in the kitchen of a New-Orleans boarding-house.
They could be trusted, as their complex ailments dis-
qualified them from running and climbing, their only
mode of progression being a sidelong wriggling on their
haunches and elbows. But one
day the landlady heard
a frightful caterwauling,
and, entering the kitchen
in haste, was surprised
to see one of her
patients on top
MARTYRS TO FREE INQUIRY.
of the chimney-ladder, while another was rolling about
in a fit of fantastic contortions. The cook had left on
OUR FOUR-HANDED RELATIVES. co
the floor a bucketful of Pontchartrain crabs, and during
her momentary absence the monkeys had fallen victims
to the cause of free inquiry. Somehow or other, the
cook's manoeuvres had drawn their attention to the
bucket, and, having managed to upset it, their ring-
tails had got entangled with the not less prehensile
crustaceans.
It is a curious fact that all the larger varieties of the
American monkeys are endowed with a voice of almost
superhuman power, while the apes of the Old World are
a comparatively silent race. The reason may be that the
jaguar, the chief enemy of the Brazilian ring-tails, does
not like to be yelled at, while the same expedient would
be unavailing against the antagonists, or rather rivals, of
the Oriental four-handers. The Rhesus baboon, though
one of the demi-gods of the Hindoo pantheon, is about
the most undesirable pet a menagerie could get hold
of. A big brute of this species, an almost hairless old
male, named Bhunder-Beg or Sahib-Onki-Walla, was
presented to the new Zoological Garden of Marseilles,
but, in spite of his unusual size, the superintendent sent
him back by the very next steamer. " I should like to
keep him for your kind intentions' sake," he wrote to
the donor, " but it won't do : with the sole exception of
Petronius Arbiter, your Bh., surnamed S. O. W., is the
most obscene personage known to ancient or modern
history."
Monkeys are arnica/ rather than gregarious creatures :
5
54
ZOOLOGICAL SKETCHES.
they like to consort with one mate, one favorite com-
panion, but dislike a crowd. Their larger assemblies
have always a special purpose, — a combined attack upon
some beast of prey, a foray upon an orchard where out-
posts are needed ; but that purpose attained, the troop
separates pair-wise, even in captivity, unless a low
temperature should oblige them to huddle together.
Wolves, too, as well as many species of migratory birds,
congregate only in particular emergencies, while hogs
and horned cattle always prefer to herd in the largest
possible numbers. The gastronomic predilections of
the four-handed freebooters are more uniform than
might be supposed from the dissimilarity of their habi-
tats. Sweet or sub-acid tree-fruits always form the
staple of their diet ; fantc de mieitx, they manage to
rough it on roots, nuts, mollusks, and even insects,
which, besides a few berries, constitute the only suste-
nance of the Gibraltar macaques ; but meat — i.e., the
flesh of mammals and birds — seems as repulsive as
poison to all daylight monkeys, as well as to the
plurality of the African lemurs. But even the Simiadce
proper, the Asiatic monos and anthropoids, whom no
starvation can drive to carnivorous shifts, are ravenously
fond of milk and eggs, thus justifying the theory of the
" Liberal Vegetarians," who distinguish between animal
and semi-animal articles of food.
Most monkeys are gourmands, and their alleged fond-
ness for stimulants is a favorite argument with the op-
OUR FOUR-HANDED RELATIVES. cr
ponents of teetotalism ; but the truth is that bibulous
monkeys, like boy topers, owe their penchant to the
corrupting influence of their associates rather than to
an innate tendency. Ninety-nine per cent, of our me-
nagerie monkeys have crossed the Gulf of Mexico, if
not the ocean, and Jack Tar would rather forego his
own tipple than miss the fun of forcing grog or tobacco
upon his four-handed passengers. That they contract
a passion for such things proves not their but the an-
cient mariner's natural depravity, and that they indulge
the habit with temporary impunity demonstrates only
the marvellous faculty of adaptation which the quad-
rumana share with their two-handed cousins. It is true
that wild apes are sometimes caught by means of in-
toxicating baits ; but for such purposes the taste of the
alcohol has to be disguised by a liberal admixture of
saccharine elements, and I would wager any odds that
a new-caught monkey would prefer the sourest crab-
apple to a piece of the best Schweizer-kase or chewing-
tobacco. No danger will deter a monkey from grand
larceny if he gets a chance at a good store of candies
or preserves; it must be seen to be believed in what a
short time a little macaque will put himself outside of a
boxful of sugar-plums. Sugar is his Paracelsian quin-
tessence, the elixir of life and joy ; and I suspect that in
pursuit of that summum bonum he will swallow con-
siderable quantities of per se hateful fluids, just as many
a juvenile coffee-drinker would prefer his sweetening
56
ZOOLOGICAL SKETCHES.
" straight." Salt, on the other hand, is his grand aver-
sion, and, for all we know to the contrary, Sylvester
Graham may be right, that only our carnivorous habits
oblige us to swallow a daily dose of chloride of sodium.
But, if the views of Luigi Cornaro are correct, there is
no doubt that the brute creation must be tainted with
original sin : Jacko is no friend of homoeopathic rations ;
of such comestibles as Nature has intended for him he
wants to eat his fill, and quite literally, too ; the Colobi
and Cercopithecs actually devour the utmost amount
of food compatible with the calibre of their digestive
organs ; the slender egret monkey [Cercocebics Ayguld),
for instance, eats with ease a daily quantum exceeding
four-fifths of his own weight. In the Zoological Gar-
den of Schoenbrunn, near Vienna, I saw one that would
never refuse a tidbit : after stuffing himself with apples,
crackers, and untold cherries, he still contrived to find
room for a large piece of ginger-cake. Fruges consu-
mere nati, they act their part well : if their appetite in-
creases with their size, a troop of sacred Hanumans must
severely strain the tolerance of the Brahminical natives.
An anthropoid ape has the stomach of an Arkansas
tramp and the lungs of a hectic school-girl.
Few orangs or gibbons outlive the third year of their
captivity ; the least defect in the ventilation of their
prison amounts to a death-warrant ; every winter month
seems to shorten the term of their life by a year or two,
for in the tropics their average longevity exceeds a
OUR FOUR-HANDED RELATIVES. -y
quarter of a century. The pulmonary diseases of the
human species have less to do with a low temperature
than with the impurities of the in-door atmosphere, and
the effluvium of a menagerie is notoriously offensive :
still, it is a strange fact that small monkeys, like squir-
rels, can for a long time subsist on a very minimum of
life-air. I have seen my macaques crawl into a pile of
cast-off clothing and cover themselves, head and all,
with a sixfold stratum of coats and blankets before going
to sleep ; and during the coldest nights of an Ohio
winter a dealer in zoological sundries kept a spider-
monkey alive by bundling him up with a couple of fluffy
terriers. His method was to chuck them into a sack
half full of wool and hay, tie the sack, put it into a
barrel, and cover it with an extra blanket or two, accord-
ing to the state of the weather. He has tried the same
plan with squirrel-monkeys and capuchins, and his suc-
cess seems to prove that animals can get along with
less air than is generally supposed. The nest of the
common ground-squirrel is even a greater puzzle to the
zoological physiologist: long before the beginning of
the hibernating season the little bobtails retire to the
bottom of a hole where all the air that can possibly
reach them has to penetrate an eighteen-inch mass of
compact moss and hay, often besides a thick layer of
dead leaves and rubbish.
A somewhat paradoxical character-trait of the more
intelligent four-handers is their antipathy to children.
58
ZOOLOGICAL SKETCHES.
The gibbons, baboons, Bhunder monkeys, and all the
larger macaques fly into a passion at the mere sight of a
young biped. The much-plagued menagerie apes might
plead a legitimate reason for this aversion ; but the same
peculiarity may be observed in monkeys that never had
an opportunity to make the acquaintance of a French
cabin-boy or American Sunday-school excursionist. It
may be jealousy, an envious rancor against the natural
competitors for the affection of their master, — akin to a
lap-dog's malice toward a rival pet; or else it is perhaps
a manifestation of a secret antipathy to the gens humana
in general, — a misanthropical penchant restrained in the
presence of the dread king-ape, but exploding against
the saucy princes, as a man might be tempted to sup-
press a young Cyclops before his attainment of a dan-
gerous age. A monkey will risk a good deal for the fun
of teasing an homunculns. I never saw an old macaque
miss an opportunity of that sort. Buddha, especially,
was the terror of my young visitors. In a crowd of half-
grown boys he contented himself with defiant gestures
and a volley of chattering imprecations, but with young-
sters under five he at once proceeded to active hostilities,
pulling their ears or biting them in a way that could not
be mistaken for a practical joke. The son of a German
colonist in New Freiburg, Brazil, was once attacked by
a swarm of Mycetes monkeys whom he had noways
offended ; and an English traveller mentions a case of a
little child being killed by a troop of Ceylon wanderoos :
OUR FOUR-HANDED RELATIVES. eg
" A flock of these animals may be seen frequently con-
gregated on the roof of a native hut; and some years
ago the child of a European clergyman stationed at
Tillipally, having been left on the ground by the nurse,
was so teased and bitten by them as to cause its death."
(Sir Emerson Tennent's "Ceylon," vol. i. p. 132.)
Monkeys seem to believe in the efficacy of vicarious
atonement. A little yellow bitch, whose couch my pet
macaque has shared for the last two years, has to suf-
fer grievous indignities as his monkeyship's scapegoat.
Whenever I detect him in any misdeed, he turns upon his
partner with a look of severe disapprobation, and if his
iniquities bring him to grief he " takes it out" of her, with
a promptitude that has taught her to take to her heels
as often as I arraign him for an unpardonable offence,
and sometimes even during the perpetration of his sins.
As exemplar of the virtues often attributed to a state
of nature, monkeys are, indeed, rather an indifferent suc-
cess. Their standing in the peculiar graces of self-denial
and self-abasement is certainly below the Christian stand-
ard ; but, for all that, one cannot help observing the ways
and tricks of the little sinners with an interest entirely
distinct from the pleasure attached to the study of natural
history in general. Can it be something more than the
mere scientific curiosity of the professional zoologist?
The question is perhaps answered by Arthur Schopen-
hauer's definition of a representative monkey : " An epit-
ome of man without the human faculty of dissimulation."
CHAPTER II.
MOUNTAIN SHEEP.
It is wonderful under what difficulties some wild
animals have managed to survive the endless warfare
of man against nature. Only island-dwellers have suc-
ceeded in utterly exterminating any species of their
fellow-creatures. The dodo of the Mauritius, the blue
parrot of the Norfolk Archipelago, and the Newfound-
land auk (A/ca impennis) lived and perished within their
respective island-homes ; the New Zealand moa, too, is
supposed to have become extinct in recent ages, — sup-
posed, I say, for it is by no means certain that the
gigantic bones discovered by Tasman and Hochstetter
were not of antediluvian origin. But on the mainland
even the large mammals have thus far successfully
maintained the struggle for existence. Danger has
sharpened their protective instincts, and, by a wise law
of Nature, the very scarcity of an animal race improves
the life-chances of its surviving representatives. The
coyest female will encourage the suit of the last male of
her species, reduced food-stores may still supply the
Avants of a reduced number of consumers, and, above
60
MOUNTAIN SHEEP. 6 r
all, persecution abates when there is little left to perse-
cute : the most ruthless and indefatigable of hunters
will hardly care to track and run down the last band
of Norwegian reindeer or the last pair of African goril-
las.
For the same reason, I do not believe that the wild
sheep of the North American continent will ever entirely
disappear from its mountain-haunts. The mountain
sheep or cimarron {Ovis montana) has many enemies
and is not very swift-footed, but it is probably the shy-
est quadruped of the New World. On the treeless high-
lands of our Central States it is no easy matter to get
within rifle-shot of a herd of " bighorns," as the Colorado
trapper calls them, but on their favorite pasture-grounds
in the Pinos Altos range, in Southern New Mexico, the
prospecting miner can sometimes approach them at the
time when the wild-rose-bushes are in full bloom and
confound the scent of the wary outposts. A herd of
grazing cimarrons is a curious sight : they do not con-
tent themselves with posting a single sentinel, after the
manner of the antelopes and wild llamas, but all the
veterans, especially the nursing ewes, take their turn
at the picket-post, and every now and then run to the
next rock and rise on their hind-legs in order to enlarge
their field of view. A low snort, accompanied by a
stamping or scraping kick, is a sign of vague suspicion,
and puts the whole herd on the qui vive ; even the young
kids crowd around their dams and anxiously await the
62 ZOOLOGICAL SKETCHES.
next word of command. The sudden side-leap of an
outpost is a signal of imminent danger; like a well-
drilled squadron the herd at once wheels around and
gallops away in a direction which the leaders seem to
have precalculated for every possible emergency. Dur-
ing their winter migrations from sierra to sierra the
sachems of a large herd become as cautious as the
leaders of the Anabasis, and will often stand immovable
for hours together at the brink of a plateau, with their
eyes fixed upon some doubtful object in the neighbor-
hood of their meditated line of march. If the outlook
is not quite satisfactory, they decline to take the benefit
of the doubt, and stick to their vantage-ground till the
coast is decidedly clear. In the winter of 1874 a com-
pany of American engineers put up a line of telegraphs
from Matamoras to Saltillo, in Northern Mexico, and on
four consecutive days they saw a number of cimarrons
approaching their camp from the direction of the San
Cristoval Mountains and retreating again like the scouts
of a circumspect guerilla leader. But on the following
Sunday a large herd crossed the road, heading due south
toward the Sierra Mesilla, in Western Durango. The
continual extension of the wire line and the noise of the
workmen had delayed their march, the pilgrims having
evidently bided their time in what the French call a
"camp of observation."
The Mexicans assert that the mountain sheep never
stays within earshot of a permanent human settlement,
MOUNTAIN SHEEP. 5,
and that the cimarron population of their border-states
has been considerably increased by emigrants from the
North. There is no doubt that the freedom- 1 ovine
monteros have steadily retreated before the advance of
our noisy civilization, — first westward, and lately both
southward and northward, from the neighborhood of the
great trans-continental highway. Colonel Pennypacker,
of the United States army, has told me that he remem-
bers the time when the " bighorns" were as abundant as
mountain quail in Western Colorado, and that the officers
of Fort Garland used to kill them by dozens in the vi-
cinity of the fort. They are now found only near the
head-waters of the Gunnison River; and if the Lead-
ville Railroad should be extended to the Colorado Val-
ley they will probably leave the State altogether. They
have already left Nebraska, Utah, and Southern Wyo-
ming, and even in the northern part of the territory the
name of the " Bighorn Mountains" is fast becoming an
anachronism. In the Southwest they have maintained
their ground much better (carnero-meat is a drug in the
markets of Chihuahua, Tucson, and Santa Fe, and they
are still pretty abundant in the Sierra Nevada of South-
ern California), but also in the far Northwest — for their
southward migration has nothing to do with climatic
predilections : the mountain sheep is as hardy as the
grizzly bear. The Montana prospectors meet great
herds of them in the main chain of the Rocky Moun-
tains, but especially in the icy summit-regions of the
6 4
ZOOLOGICAL SKETCHES.
Pend d'Oreille range, on the borders of British North
America. Even in midwinter they shun the valley set-
tlements. During ice-storms that drive the black bear
to his den and kill black cattle in the river-valleys the
cimarron survives where the hill-foxes wander, in the
pine wolds and box-elder coppices of the dreary uplands.
WINTER QUAR1 I RS.
In November, and sometimes at Christmas, the miners
of Bannock City hear the cry of the old rams in the
highland-gorges, — a long-drawn, booming bark; not a
MOUNTAIN SHEEP. £e
signal of distress, but an amatory acclaim, an invocation
of the ditlcis Dea Amathusia when the mercury trembles
at forty-five below zero. In stress of weather the cim-
arrons generally take refuge in a lee-side pine grove,
and are thus sometimes cut off from their pasture-
grounds, snow-bound, for a month or two, and have to
rough it on pine sprouts and such roots and herbs as
they can scrape up in the deep-frozen mould.
A party of Mormons, being caught in a snow-storm
while crossing the Wahsatch Mountain in 1849, were
saved, according to Elder Millard's report, by coming
across a sheltered cove in the piny woods where a troop
of mountain sheep had trodden down the snow and
cropped the branches as high as they could reach, thus
forming a series of snug pine arbors, — a ready-made
tabernacle for the necessitous saints. In this instinct of
finding shelter-places from the cold mammals are fat-
superior to birds, probably because they cannot emigrate
so easily. On the bitter-cold New-Year's morning of
1 87 1 the game-keeper of the Duke of Gotha picked up
not less than thirty score of dead crows in his master's
rookery at Rheinhards-Brunn, but a band of fallow-deer
had saved themselves by breaking the lath door of a
cellar-like grotto and crowding into the innermost corner
of the vault. Besides, I believe that most wild beasts
have a little of that talent for hibernation which helps
squirrels and badgers over the worst hours of the long
Biornir-nott, — the " bears' night," — as the old Germans
66 ZOOLOGICAL SKETCHES.
called the winter season. During a heavy " norther"
buffaloes often stand in the hollows of the Texas cross-
timber for days together in a semi-torpid state, and the
little musk-ox must probably draw considerably upon
his inner resources to survive the terrible snows of the
Hudson's Bay territory. It is also certain that some
quadrupeds, including the mountain sheep and the gu-
anaco, are able to distinguish the signs of an approach-
ing storm from those of a common thunder-shower.
Mexican shepherds have often been warned to save their
flocks by the mad gallop of a troop of mountain sheep
fleeing toward some sheltered valley on the lee-side of
a wind which gradually rose to a destructive hurricane.
Frederick Gerstaecker found a cimarron camp on the
very ridge of the Sierra Nevada, but no hunter, so far
as I know, has ever discovered the lying-in establish-
ment of a mother-ewe; the cimarrona seems to sum-
mon all her secretiveness and topographical experience
to hide her new-born lambs from human sight. In
August or late in July — rarely sooner — they are found
in company of their seniors, evidently numbering their
days by weeks, but still rather misshapen, chub-headed,
and ridiculously long-legged little fellows, resembling
fallow fawns rather than lambs. The whole family,
indeed, has something cervine in its appearance. Na-
ture is said to abhor a vacuum, but shows a still more
decided repugnance to systematism, and seems to take
a special delight in puzzling our zoological categorists.
MOUNTAIN SHEEP.
67
There are animals that refuse to be classified. The Swiss
nuthatch (Sitta europcea) is, in habits and appearance,
half titmouse and half woodpecker ; the South African
proteles looks like a hybrid between a civet-cat and an
hyena ; and the Rock} 7 Mountain sheep holds the exact
middle between a sheep and a deer. In the formation
of his neck, head, and horns he resembles the Sardinian
moufflon-wether, but his rump, stump tail, and legs are
those of the Virginia deer; his color, too, is a brownish
dun, and his hair is straight and short, with the excep-
tion of a wreath of long bristles at the base of the neck.
The lambs are whity-brown, with the same dark streak
along the spine that is sometimes seen on fawns and
very young colts. A fox-squirrel the Sciarus cincrcus
is called in the Southern Alleghanies : dccr-slieep would
be the most appropriate English name for the carnero
cimarron.
On a sudden stampede young lambs often get sep-
arated from their dams, and have sometimes been taken
alive. They can be brought up with the kids of a
milch-goat, and get tame enough to follow their foster-
mother to the valley, though they prefer the south side
of a hedge to the most comfortable stable. Domesti-
cated rams are apt to be troublesome, for an old cimarron
is as irascible as a fighting bull, and has a disagreeable
way of charging his adversary from behind, — not rear-
ing and plunging like a billy-goat, but running full tilt and
with an unmistakable business-purpose. If permitted to
68 ZOOLOGICAL SKETCHES.
roam at large, he is given to solitary rambles among the
cliffs, and is liable to lose his way if he has once ascer-
tained the difference between coarse prairie-grass and
the aromatic herbage of the upland leas. But, like
other savages, the cimarron can be subdued by his vices.
The craving of his ruminant stomach for salt easily
degenerates into a fondness for stronger stimulants, —
tobacco, cider, and aguardiente: in quest of a "chew"
he will besiege his master's door and button-hole
strangers with the persistency of a begging friar. Tip-
pling, however, does not improve his temper: the most
petulant pet I ever saw was the wether Panchito, a
domesticated cimarron of such intemperate habits that
he was repeatedly expelled by his first owner, who at
last presented him to the sexton of the Chihuahua
cathedral. I came to Chihuahua in 1873, and was
delayed almost forty-eight hours by the failure of the
stage-driver to procure relays ; the festival of Santa
Maria de Guadalupe had set the city agog, and all
horses and mules were strutting in the cavalcade pro-
cession bedecked with flags and orange-rosaries. On
the afternoon of the second day the festival came to a
crisis ; the doors of the cathedral were thrown open,
and the votaries surged in and out, helped to drag
the ecclesiastic howitzer to the centre of the plaza, and
crowded around the open-air pulque-shops. The national
drink flowed in streams: pulque, a Mexican will tell you,
does not induce drunkenness, but only borracheria, a
MOUNTAIN SHEE1\ 5-
mild form of obfuscation less inconsistent with the char-
acter of a Christian and a gentleman. The white cabal-
leros certainly managed to keep their heads level, and
the ragged mestizo lying on his belly in front of the
esplanade had only lost the use of his legs, since the
activity of his consciousness asserted itself by a tri-
umphant yell whenever the howitzer was fired. At the
third shot, Don Panchito bolted from the basement, him-
self evidently laboring under an incipient stage of borra-
cheria, for at the next discharge he jumped up with all
four legs at once, and then, spying the yelling Indian,
made a rush and " fetched him one in the ribs," to
the uproarious delight of the assembled Chinacos. Six-
teen more shots were fired, and sixteen times Panchito
charged the Indian, whom he somehow seemed to con-
nect with the cause of the obstreperous demonstrations.
He then turned his attention to the school-girls, whose
long scarfs appeared to excite his disapprobation, and
was going to tackle a young lady with a conspicuous
shawl, when a well-aimed kick from her gallant sent
him spinning into the basement-vault. But just before
I left he reappeared, like Satan ex infernis, and when
I saw him last he was butting the choir-boys as the)'
sallied successively from a side-porch.
Domestic sheep that lose their way in the sierra arc
sometimes bunted to death by the wild bighorns ; but
this cruelty is inspired less by malice than by that sin-
gular instinct which impels gregarious animals in a state
70
ZOOLOGICAL SKETCHES.
of nature to destroy the decrepit members of their tribe.
The cimarron, recognizing the Ovis domcstica&s his near
relative, is scandalized at her fatness, stupidity, and help-
lessness, and possibly considers it his duty to put her
" out of her misery." But, if he does not spare his poor
kindred, he certainly does not spare himself either.
Frederick the Great's dictum seems to be his motto : " II
faut trailer son corps en canaille" In merciless winter
storms he will fly against the wind at a tearing gallop
for hour after hour, and he rarely descends from the
highlands on account of the weather only. Wounded
to death, he still tries to keep up with his flying com-
panions ; I have seen a young ram struggling to his feet
again and again with a load of buckshot in his lungs,
stamping the ground impatiently at his growing weak-
ness, till he finally fell over on his side, almost exsanguis,
but working his hoofs to the last. The cimarron cannot
be "cornered," like the Swiss chamois, surrounded, and
captured at the edge of a precipice; driven to such ex-
tremes, the leading ram leaps clown into certain death,
and the herd will follow unless they are numerous
enough to break the blockade with the chances in favor
of a few survivals. Declivities of twenty or thirty feet
will not stop them : they have a wonderful knack of
alighting on their hoofs. There is a prevalent notion
that mountain sheep in jumping from a high cliff
will alight on their horns ; but that is a mistake : they
jump off head foremost in order to keep their bal-
MOUNTAIN SJJEEP.
71
ance, but, on approaching
the ground, take care to
save their lives by stretch-
ing out their fore-feet in
the nick of time. De
Mora, in his " History of
Mexico," goes so far as to assert
that the carnero cimarron cannot
be killed at all by a fall " unless he
should happen to drop on the sharp peak of a rock." A
P
A STEEP ALTERNATIVE.
y 2 ZOOLOGICAL SKETCHES.
bighorn ram attains a weight of from one hundred and fifty
to two hundred pounds, and exceeds the domestic sheep
in size, and I am sure that a plump fall from a height of
forty feet will break the bones of any quadruped of that
bulk ; but it is true that only overhanging cliffs are likely
to prove fatal to the cimarron. In descending a steep
declivity, or even a perpendicular, but not absolutely
straight, rock-wall, he generally contrives to break his
fall by taking advantage of every cleft or protuberance
large enough to give him a foothold for a moment, and
his sharp cloven hoofs seem specially designed for such
purposes. Even goats have that trick. I knew a billy-
goat that would scramble down a high garden-wall as
a bear slides down a tree, and not under the impulse of
fear either, but merely to save himself the trouble of a
little detour.
The North-Mexican mountaineers hunt bighorns with
a special breed of fleet dogs called galgos, or citnarron-
cros, in Nueva Leon, and said to be descendants of those
powerful sleuth-hounds that are used to chase the wolf
and the Iberian ibex in the Eastern Pyrenees. In quiet
winter nights the cimarrons often descend to the middle
region of the sierra, but hurry back to the highlands at
the first alarm ; and, taking advantage of this habit, the
hunting-party divide their forces. A couple of galgos
are taken straight to a mountain-meadow where cim-
arrons are known to graze in the morning; the rest
circumvent their retreat and take post at some point
MOUNTAIN SHEEP. j-,
of the summit-region where they can watch the move-
ments of the game. At a given signal the first galgos
are slipped, and, though they may fail to overtake the
fugitives, they will put them to hard shifts before they
reach the uplands, where they have to run the gauntlet
of the second detachment. If the dogs understand their
business, they will co-operate and keep their game to-
gether till they can make a simultaneous attack ; for, if
the herd scatters, the first victim will generally prove
a scapegoat for the rest. Going straight up-hill the
cimarrons often improve their start by dashing up a
cliff where the pursuer has to turn to the left or right,
but on level ground the tables are turned, and, once
abreast of his game, the hound makes short work of
it, dashes ahead of the nearest good-sized sheep, —
often a nursing ewe, — and, suddenly turning, flies at her
throat in true wolf style and le rasga la vida, as the
Spaniards express it, — " tears out her life," — at the first
grip. The galgo does not remove his prey, but stays
on the spot and summons the hunter by a peculiar
howl, repeated at shorter and shorter intervals if he
has reason to fear that snow-drifts or prowling wolves
will make his post untenable. Professional cimarron-
hunters generally carry a meat-bag, as contact with the
hairy coat of the deer-sheep often inflicts the human
skin with cosquillas (" sheep-tickle"), a persistent itch
that sometimes spreads from the hands to the chest,
but, strange to say, cannot be traced to any visible
74
ZOOLOGICAL SKETCHES.
cause. Like mange and prurigo, it is probably caused
by microscopic parasites.
Dogs can be employed only where the game is very
abundant, for, if a band of cimarrons has been chased
twice or thrice in the same sierra, they arc apt to leave
their old haunts forever or become so shy that the pur-
suit ceases to pay. A herd that has once smelt powder
is very hard to get at : their natural timidity becomes a
restless distrust, constant practice develops an almost
preternatural acuteness of their organs of sight and
smell, and they learn to recognize the form of their
arch-foe at a great distance and in all possible postures,
— standing, crawling, or on horseback. If they can
only scent his approach without seeing him or knowing
his approximate whereabouts, they instantly decamp to
the windward, well knowing that thereby they will
either elude their enemy or ascertain his position, pre-
ferring to bring matters to a crisis some way or another
rather than endure the torture of uncertainty. Among
the rocks of a high mountain-region the echo of remote
sounds is strangely deceptive ; the reverberations seem
to come from all sides at once, and on hearing a shot
or the boom of a distant rock-blast a whole herd will
often resolve itself into a committee of investigation,
scattering left and right, scrambling up the cliffs and
spying in every direction, then, returning, confer with
anxious looks and stamping hoofs, and disperse again
till they can agree upon the safest line of retreat. They
MOUNTAIN SHEEP. jr
seem to have some notion of the modus operandi of gun-
powder, for, if by any chance they meet an armed hunter
face to face, they will strain every nerve not only to get
out of range in the shortest possible time, but also to
confuse his aim by the fitfulness and rapidity of their
motion, touching the ground only for a moment, coming
down in a wide leap and up again instantly like a re-
bounding ball, but going zigzag withal : so that the best
marksman has to fire at random or content himself with
picking off a straggling lamb. A half-hit is as bad as
a miss, for an old bighorn takes an amazing deal of
killing: a shot through the neck or entrails will not
produce any visible effect for the first thirty or forty
minutes.
Herons, hawks, and some other birds that cannot
hide their nests are sure to select the tallest tree in a
thousand, and a similar instinct seems to guide the
cimarron in the choice of his pasture-grounds. He
knows what sort of rocks the average hunter would call
inaccessible. The North American alps abound with
such rocks. Only the roving Apache has ever ap-
proached the heights that hide the sources of the Rio
Gila. In the Wind River Mountains, in the Wyoming
Black Hills, and on the eastern slope of the Sierra Ne-
vada there are thousands of square miles which no
hunter's eye but that of Orion has ever surveyed. The
town of Monclova, near Monterey, is half surrounded
by ramparts of the Sierra de San Simon, and from the
76 ZOOLOGICAL SKETCHES.
bastion of a military post in the neighborhood of the
town the soldiers could often see a herd of cimarrons
frolicking about and cropping the grass at the brink of
an inaccessible plateau. They used to disappear at the
approach of the dry season, — on account of the meagre
pasture, as it seemed, till it was discovered that in dry
summers the plateau could be reached through the
ravine of a creek which formed a series of cascades
during the larger part of the year. Nearly every herd
of our higher sierras has such a place of refuge, which
they never approach by a direct way if they can hope to
elude the pursuer by leading him a long chase through
the rock-labyrinth of the lower cliffs. The ewes of a
flying herd invariably bring up the rear, for fear of losing
their lambs; and the American sportsman therefore
makes it a rule to fire upon the first head in the troop,
unless he can single out the males by their broad horns
and stouter necks. If this rule were observed by the
Mexican hunters it would explain the fact that in the
Southern sierras, as well as in the Northwest, old rams
are often met alone at a considerable distance from the
regular pasture-grounds of their relatives. An old
bachelor of this sort is almost unapproachable, and has
a knack of disappearing like a mountain-sprite, or man-
ages to frequent the borders of civilization for years
before his existence is suspected by the next neigh-
bors. A herd with nursing ewes cannot hide their
tracks in that way ; what with indiscreet youngsters
MOUNTAIN SHEEP. yn
and anxious mothers, they are too apt to expose them-
selves at critical moments, and are rarely out of trouble.
The old rams seem to know this, and to have come to
the conclusion that the safest paths are those which a
body can walk alone, and that celibacy is, after all, the
best life for a peace-loving cimarron. Near Granite
Gap, Colorado, the surveyors of the San Juan Railroad
became familiar with the track of an old bighorn that
used to pay a nightly visit to their bivouac in order to
share the hay-rations of their ponies ; but when they
took it into their heads to patrol the camp after dark
their guest failed to return, and his spoor was seen no
more.
The San Juan range used to be a great hunting-
ground for bighorns, and it seems that they are reap-
pearing on the southern slope since the old Utah trail of
ante-railroad fame has been abandoned, and that portions
of the California Coast Range have thus been repeopled
by emigrants from the Sierra Nevada. On the heights
of the great central plateau that forms the backbone of
our continent the cimarrons will never be entirely exter-
minated. Their range is too boundless ; the extent of
the far-western sierras is too immeasurable. Even on
a map the maze of winding and intertwisted mountain-
ranges, with their net-work of foot-hills, branches, and
spurs, is quite bewildering ; but only the hunter knows
what a sub-labyrinth of highlands and valleys every one
of those little shaded streaks represents, what jagged
78
ZOOLOGICAL SKETCHES.
ridges, lateral chains, cross-chains, wide-branching creeks
and canons, plateaux, peaks, and wooded heights, stretch-
ing away in every direction farther than his eyesight
reaches from the top of the highest rock, measureless
alpine systems as intricate in their surface-conformation
as the convoluted structure of a walnut-kernel, — all
represented on the map by a shaded streak half an
inch long and hidden among a net-work of similar
streaks.
The incalculable influence of civilization upon the
physical geography of cultivated lands makes it difficult
to predict the ultimate fate of the wild fauna of a conti-
nent like ours; but, judging from present indications, it
would seem that the buffalo must perish and that the
mountain sheep will survive. The aborigines of the
New World were a race of valley-dwellers ; among their
conquerors, too, the master-nation, the North Saxons,
are lowlanders by preference ; and in one respect North
America will therefore probably remain what our ances-
tors found it three centuries ago, — a continent of lonely
mountain-ranges.
CHAPTER III.
A STEP-CHILD OF NATURE.
The evergreen hill-forests that cover the border-states
of Southern Mexico harbor an amazing number of noisy-
birds and quadrupeds. All night long the jungles re-
sound with the scream of the tree-panther and the
plaintive cry of the mono espectro, or ghost-monkey,
trumpet-voiced cranes call to each other from the cane-
brakes, and the deep-mouthed cave-owl booms from the
upland thickets. At the first glimmering of dawn the
jungle-pheasant sounds his reveille, and long before
sunrise the woods burst into a universal chorus of bird-
voices, often accompanied by the drumming croak of
the tamandua or the flute-signals of the gregarious
spider-monkey.
The only pause of the many-voiced concert occurs
during the thermal noon, in the first two or three hours
after mid-day. In May and June — the dog-days of the
northern tropics — even insects need a siesta. When the
summer sun reaches the meridian, every animal dis-
appears, and there are minutes when the stillness be-
comes breathless : the very air seems to stagnate ; the
79
So ZOOLOGICAL SKETCHES.
leaves droop, as if the pulsations of Nature's heart had
stopped.
In such moments the traveller who has sought the
shade of the caucho forests is often startled by a singular
cry in the tree-tops, a long-drawn, tremulous moan, not
unlike the wail of the whippoorwill or a certain lugu-
brious variation of a watch-dog's yelp. What can it
be ? — a night-monkey or an owl hooting in broad day-
light?
" It's a tardo" (black sloth) explains your guide : " he
must be somewhere on the south side of that tree.
They are very fond of sunshine."
The tardo (Bradypus tardigradus) has a peculiar talent
for making himself invisible. Even a medium-sized
tree, without an excessive supplement of tangle-vines,
has to be inspected thoroughly and from different points
of view before a slight movement in the upper branches
attracts your attention to a fluffy-looking clump, not easy
to distinguish from the dark-colored clusters of the
feather-mistletoe ( Visaun rubrwni) which frequents the
tree-tops of this mountain-region. Closely-resembling
clusters of feathery leaves and feathery hair are often
seen side by side on the same branch. Which of them
is the animated one ? A load of buckshot may fail to
settle the point. I have seen a troop of idle soldiers
bombarding a sloth-tree for half an hour with the
heaviest available missiles without being able to force
the strong-hold of the occupant, who only tightened his
A STEP-Ch ILD OF NATURE. g t
grip when a well-aimed stone crushed his head visibly
and audibly. But with a good rifle you may dislodge
the most tenacious tardo by hitting his branch some-
where below his foothold, for a fractured caucho-stick
will snap like a cabbage-stalk. Thus displanted, the
falling sloth clutches at the empty air or snaps off twig
after twig in his headlong descent, but generally man-
ages to fetch up on one of the stout lower branches, and
at once hugs it with all the energy of his prehensile
organs; and there he hangs, within easy reach of your
arm, perhaps, but without betraying the slightest concern
at your approach. The human voice has no terrors for
the stoic tardigrade ; menacing gestures fail to impress
him. A blank cartridge exploded under his nose will
hardly make him wink, unless the powder should singe
his eyelids. He permits you to lift his claw, but drops
it as soon as you withdraw your hand. If you prod
him, he breaks forth in a moan that seems to express a
lament over the painfulness of earthly affairs in general
rather than resentment of your particular act. By and
by his love of caloric may lure him back to the sunny
side of the tree, but no incentives a tergo will accelerate
his movements. His claws are a quarter of a foot long
and rigidly tenacious, and, once unhooked, he forthwith
transfers his attachment to your own person. After
spreading his talons fan-shape, he clasps your arm with
an intimacy that seems intended to reassure you of his
peaceful intentions, but will gradually draw himself well
g 2 ZOOLOGICAL SKETCHES.
up, as if unwilling to interfere with your locomotive
facilities.
Judging from the size of his claws, it would seem that
he might use them in a pluckier way ; but after a closer
examination the sloth can hardly be blamed that discre-
tion should be largely the better part of his valor. His
equipment for the struggle of existence evinces, indeed,
an almost unfair and certainly unparalleled parsimony
on the part of our all-mother Nature. The Bradypus
tardigradus has only three toes on each foot and two
fingers per hand, making a total of ten claws, to the
squirrel's eighteen and the bear's twenty; his legs are
so stiff that they can only be laterally extended, and
so awkwardly curved that the knees cannot be brought
together, thus making his movements on a level surface
as hobbling as those of a sprained bat. His molars are
very poorly developed, being merely attached to the ex-
terior gums, without roots and without enamel, while
the bicuspids, canines, and incisors are entirely wanting.
The tail is stumpy or absent, the jaws short, the skull
flat and truncated. His eyes are small, and, like his
ears, almost buried in tufts of coarse, wiry hair. In
short, the sloth is a creature with the vertebrate ground-
work of a mammal, but sadly stinted in the " sizings" of
nearly all his complementary organs.
The school of Antisthenes, however, demonstrated
that a reduction of our wants is virtually equivalent to
an enlargement of our means; and, by pursuing this
A STEPCHILD OF NATURE. 3^
principle to its grim extreme, the tardo contrives to eke
out a precarious existence. He is a strict vegetarian,
and contents himself with a diet which few of his fellow-
creatures are likely to grudge him, — the leathery leaves
of the caucho {Nyssa cupliorbid) and taxus-tree. He
sticks to the milky sap of his caucho-leaves, and totally
abstains from water and all other seductive drinks. lie
never indulges in terrestrial rambles, but, like Simon
Stylites, passes his life in " aerial penance" on the
loftiest tree-tops of the primeval forest, where neither
man nor beast can accuse him of trespassing on their
domain. The sloth is the only exclusively arboreal
mammal. A hill-farmer of the Sierra Madre in the
State of Tabasco told me that a family of black tardos
inhabited a clump of shade-trees behind his house for
eleven years without ever condescending to terra firma
or even to the lower regions of their leafy domicile, and
often passed weeks and months on the same branch. In
the tierrd calicnte, where fig-tamarinds and euphorbias
grow to an enormous size, an old sloth may become
the hamadryad of a single tree, for, unlike njost stupid
creatures, the bradypus is a sparing feeder, and, judg-
ing from the abstemiousness of domesticated specimens,
I should sav that four or five ounces of his favorite
food represent about the average quantity of his daily
ration.
The sloth is as chary of his motions as an orthodox
Trappist of his words. Sedate as if he had to give
8 4
ZOOLOGICAL SKETCHES.
account of every idle movement, he rarely betrays his
whereabouts after the manner of squirrels and monkeys,
that often become victims to their passion for locomo-
tion. The large cats of the American tropics are not
sharp-scented, but hunt by sight in daytime and by hear-
ing at night, and sounds or motions seldom reveal the
hiding-place of the discreet tardigrade. In moonlit nights
his cry comes from the depths of the virgin woods with
a vibratory clang that makes it rather difficult to locate
his tree, and even in his honeymoon season the sloth
is very taciturn and rarely repeats his call in the same
hour. Before sunrise he retreats behind the screen of
the liana-shrouds, and remains motionless till the noon-
tide glow has silenced the voices of the forest. On cool
days he never stirs at all. He has to give his enemies
a wide berth : it is his one chance of safety. By harm-
ing nobody and competing with nobody's pursuits, he
hopes to enjoy his humble fare in peace.
But, as Stanislaus Augustus said from sad experience,
" innocence is no excuse before the tribunal of war,"
and, in the tropics at least, a state of nature is a state
of incessant warfare. In spite, therefore, of all his pre-
cautions and his monopoly of an almost unlimited food-
supply, the sloth is found nowhere in great numbers ;
his enemies are too many for a creature that can neither
fight nor fly. The harpy-eagle skims the tree-tops of
the tierra calicntc or falls upon him like a flash from the
clouds, the lynx lurks in the twilight of the shade-trees,
A STEP-CHILD OF NATURE.
85
the sneaking ocelot explores the inmost penetralia of
the liana-maze : if he meets them, he meets his death.
Carnivora have to combine caution with sudden swift-
A NEW DEPARTURE.
ness to catch
a monkey in
daytime, but
sloth - hunting
is a search
rather than a
chase ; small
palm - cats or
sluggish bears may take a morning ramble through
the branches of his chosen tree, and if they espy the
poor leaf-eater his capture follows as a matter of course;
they need not pursue him, they can collar him at their
leisure; a hungry bear collects a family of sloths as he
would gather a bunch of grapes.
There is a weasel-like animal allied to the Mustela
7
■ft
86 ZOOLOGICAL SKETCHES.
martes, or pine marten, the coviadrbn {Martes torqaatus),
which haunts the rocks and hollow trees of the South-
Mexican sierras and sometimes visits the hen-roosts of
the mountain-farmers on its nocturnal excursions. The
creature is not much larger than a dormouse, and is
dreaded as an egg-sucker rather than as a chicken-thief;
but this same tree-rat commits frequent, and generally
successful, assaults upon the big tardigrade, and during
a visit to Cape Nuna, on the Bay of Campeche, I was
shown the skin of a large whity-brown sloth which had
been obtained under the following curious circumstances.
A party of lumbermen were hauling dye-wood logs from
a neighboring swamp, when the barking of their dog
and a strange hissing and grunting noise drew their
attention to a coppice of rhexia-bushes. On their ap-
proach, a pair of comadrons whisked out and bolted
up the next tree with a flourish of their bushy tails,
but in the underbrush of the coppice and half hidden
under a litter of twigs and fresh leaves was found a tarda
morena with her young, a female sloth of a rare light-
brown variety, the youngster dead, the mother in ar-
ticulo mortis. The little one's claws were still clasping
the neck of its dam, but its head was nearly gone: the
comadrons had eaten its brain and the larger part of its
face. The mother's back had been skinned from the
rump to the neck, and the hair torn off her shoulders,
as if the weasels had tried to get at her throat. When
the lumbermen skinned her the hide came off in two
A STEP-CHILD OF NATURE.
87
pieces, having been gnawed through to the very bone
all along the spine. A trail of blood from the coppice
to the next caucho-tree told the story of her misfortune.
The comadrons had tackled her in the tree-top and
worried her till she attempted to escape the best way
she could, by letting go and dropping to the ground
PREPAYING THE DEBT OF NATURE.
with the youngster in her arms. But the murderers
followed and rode her into the next bush, biting away
till they brought her to a stand-still.
Palm-rats and tree-raccoons, too, are apt to try their
teeth on the helpless edentate; nay, his near relatives
and fellow-vegetarians the marmosets and sapajou mon-
88 ZOOLOGICAL SKETCHES.
keys often tease him, or by their indiscreet chattering
betray his whereabouts with all the schadenfreude —
" mischief-joy" — of blabbing school-boys. Even birds
join in that heartless sport. The discovery of a sloth
seems to excite them like the aspect of a blinking owl.
A tardo is as lean as a monkey ; the sharpest teeth
could not pick more than twelve ounces of meat from
his bones ; but for the sake of those twelve ounces the
South-American variety is unmercifully hunted by the
Brazilian plantation-slaves, who have to eke out their
meat-rations with tortoise-eggs and such game as they
can procure without fire-arms.
No enemy, however, can catch the sloth napping; his
is a sleepless soul ; his inert brain requires no rest.
Heat and cold do not affect his sensorium ; you may see
him hang on to a top branch under the glare of a vertical
sun, eating placidly, — listless and mute, like a survivor
of the antediluvian fauna, the age of sluggish monsters,
when Professor Owen's sloth-like megatheriums pastured
the fern-forests of the tertiary period.
But if his physical organization classes the sloth with
the lowest mammals, his mental calibre degrades him
below the rank of a first-class reptile. There is a small
Peruvian variety of arboreal tardigrades, the iinau, or
spotted sloth, whose habits in captivity I had no oppor-
tunity to observe ; but in the brain of the tardo real, the
large dark-brown sloth of Mexico and Central America,
the faculties which distinguish the average mammal from
A STEP-CHILD OF NATURE.
89
a mollusk are either undeveloped or wholly extinct.
The proprietor of the Hotel de Cuatro Naciones in
Puebla owns a three-legged sloth which he domesticated
A SLOTHFUL FAMILY.
in a little kitchen-garden six years ago ; and, though fed
daily by the same hands, the old pensioner still fails to
identify his benefactor or to recognize his obligations in
9 o
ZOOLOGICAL SKETCHES.
any way. To his ear the human voice in its most en-
dearing tones is a grunt et prceterea nihil: you might as
well appeal to the affections of a cockroach. You may
frighten a pig, a goose, a frog, and even a fly, but you
cannot frighten or surprise a sloth. On my last trip to
Vera Cruz I procured a pair of black tardos, full-grown
and in a normal state of health, so far as I could judge,
but after a series of careful experiments I have to con-
clude that their instinct of self-preservation cannot be
acted upon through the medium of their optic or acoustic
nerves. They can distinguish their favorite food at a
distance of ten or twelve yards, and the female is not
deaf, for she answers the call of her mate from an ad-
joining room ; but the approach of a ferocious-looking
dog leaves her as calm as the sudden descent of a meat-
axe within an inch of her nose. The he-sloth witnessed
the accidental conflagration of his straw couch with the
coolness of a veteran fireman. War-whoops do not
affect his composure. I tried him with French-horn-
blasts and detonating powder, but he would not budge.
One of my visitors exploded some pyrotechnic mixtures
of wondrous colors and odors, but the tardo declined to
marvel : he is a nil-admirari philosopher of an ultra-
Horatian school.
He has learned to accelerate his progress on a level
surface by sliding on his haunches, using the claws of
his forefeet like grappling-hooks, and thus crawled one
day into a basket that had been assigned to a nursing
A STET- CHILD OF NATURE. gj
fox-squirrel and her infant family. She flew at him like
a little bull-dog, gave him a snap-bite, and then stood at
bay, chattering and switching her tail, but repeated her
assault whenever he stirred or as much as turned his
eyes in the direction of the nest. The tardo grunted a
feeble protest, but offered no resistance, and finally seemed
to accept this new phase of his existence as a dispensa-
tion of inexorable Fate. The idea of evacuating the
basket never suggested itself to his guileless soul.
My exotic guests have taken their summer-quarters
in an old tool-shed with a more or less happy family of
indigenous pets, squirrels, gophers, and black-snakes,
and the conduct of the smaller boarders at first evinced
their deference to the superior size of the foreigners ;
but they soon learned to ignore their very existence, or
to treat them as locomotive vegetables, whose rights no
superior being need respect. The gophers use them as
jumping-boards, and usurp their couch with a cool dis-
regard of preemption-laws ; the black-snakes sun them-
selves on the broad back of the he-sloth, and one of the
squirrels has no hesitation in providing herself with
nest-building- material from his hirsute hide. I have seen
a gopher pluck bits of half-chewed apple-peels from the
jaws of the patient tardos ; and I believe they would
submit to excoriation if one of their neighbors should
be in need of a fur cap.
There is no fun in a sloth ; his motions are limited to
a few indispensable functions, and he performs them like
9 2
ZOOLOGICAL SKETCHES.
an ill-constructed automaton. He does not appreciate
caresses ; practical jokes delight him not. Even the
young ones have nothing of the vivacity and playfulness
of other infant mammalia. Grotesque little imps, with
woolly heads and preposterous claws, they will cling for
hours to the rump of their parent, with their noses
buried in her fur, never vouchsafing the external world
a look or sniff. Yet they can be easily weaned, and will
cling as tenderly to a " sham mother," — a milk-bottle
enveloped in a piece of fluffy cloth, — their attachment to
their natural nurse being merely that of a suctorial para-
site to its victim. They develop very rapidly, in weight,
at least, for in agility and intelligence the new-born tar-
dillos are faithful copies of their full-grown progenitors.
Their private life as well as their functions in the house-
hold of Nature could be successfully enacted by a big
caterpillar. I have often watched my tardos when they
thought themselves unobserved, and I do not think that
the conduct of a starfish could be more exclusively con-
trolled by what biologists call the " blind instincts."
They will ensconce themselves in a corner or squat down
in the very centre "of the shed, as chance directs, and
there they sit, not asleep, but contentedly inert, in the
languor of idiocy, for hours and hours. If their door is
left open on a chilly morning, they sometimes come out
to enjoy the sunshine at the rear of the shed, but, instead
of taking a bee-line toward the door, they will crawl
along the walls and nose around in the corners in a
A STEP-CHILD OF NATURE. 93
manner strangely suggestive of the movements of an
imprisoned beetle. They have a curious fashion of mak-
ing their way to the very top of every ascendible object,
the back of a chair or the elbow of a stove-pipe, and
out in the garden often pass the larger part of the day
on the knob of a gate-post, brooding perhaps over
dreamy mementos of their lost tree-top paradise. If
their prison is closed, I have seen them raise themselves
on their hind-legs and inspect a piece of clothes-line
depending from a nail near the door. They often cast
wistful glances in the direction of that rope, — why, I
know not, since they are too clumsy to climb it; but I
suspect that they would like to get away and go home.
The rope possibly reminds them of the bush-ropes dan-
gling from the canopy of their native cauchos. Nostal-
gia, or rather a vague yearning for freedom, may be the
one touch of Nature that makes even the sloth akin to
the rest of mammal kind.
In spite of their formidable claws, they are by no
means first-rate climbers : they can hook their way
along a horizontal bar and scale a ladder or an arm-
chair, but are unable to climb a smooth rope or a
smooth slender tree. I once put them 'on the crook
of a young apple-tree, to see if they could make their
way to the upper branches, but, after clawing away at
the stem as if trying to find some notch or protuberance,
the male came down head foremost, and vented his
shocked feelings in a rasping grunt.
94 ZOOLOGICAL SKETCHES.
This grunt and a feeble, parrying movement of his
fore-legs seem to be his only means of self-defence, —
a dertiier ressort, reserved for emergencies. If a dog
bites him, or if you offer him a tidbit after a prolonged
fast and snatch it away from his very jaws, he will slowly
turn his head, and then, as if the significance of the
indignity were gradually dawning upon his mind, he
breaks forth into crescendo grunts, resembling at once
the whirr of a buzz-saw and the droning hum of a bee-
hive. I do not know if a sloth can be teased into active
resistance, for, after trying all my conscience and Mr.
Bergh would permit, that point still remains undecided.
A Spanish-American sportsman, however, told me that
the females sometimes use their claws in defence of their
young. This would seem to prove that not resentment
or even self-preservation, but child-love and the love of
freedom are either the most radical or the most inalien-
able instincts of the animal mind. The vivacity of an
animal does not depend exclusively on the perfection
of its motory organs, for there are sluggish birds and
restless reptiles, and the sloth, too, is lazier than even
his clumsy structure seems to warrant. His fur is in-
fested with various parasites, but he never employs his
long claws in entomological pursuits. On principle
rather than from absolute helplessness he appears to
surrender at discretion to all his enemies, great or small.
I do believe that a swarm of horse-ants could eat him
alive without meeting with any serious objection on his
A STEr-CIIILD OF NATURE. g^
part. He holds his own life cheaper than that of a sand-
flea.
It looks, indeed, as if neither the sustaining nor the
creative agencies of Nature had thought it quite worth
while to exert themselves for the benefit of the poor
tardo ; Vishnu may have deemed it a waste of trouble
to devise safeguards for the preservation of a life of so
little value even to its possessor. For what should
endear existence to a creature that passes its days in
purblind apathy, in a vegetable torpor, incapable alike
of mental and physical activity? The instincts of a
sloth are those of a cuttle-fish ; the sense of frolic and
the sense of comfort are not represented by any organ
of his cranium. He never sleeps, but his vigils are not
those of a wide-awake creature : his life is a long trance
of open-eyed inanity. Even " alimentiveness," the sole
solace of many brainless beings, seems to him but a
scanty source of enjoyment. His process of mastication
is slow and laborious ; he cannot gorge himself with his
toothless jaws.
Still, Fate has granted the much-bereft edentate one
compensation, — a cheap one, indeed, but still an offset
to many defects : a most contented disposition. On the
morning of an unusually cold April day I was sum-
moned to a neighboring town, and took a look at my
tool-house menagerie before I left. Finding that the
female sloth had monopolized the family couch, I car-
ried her mate up to an empty garret and attached his
9 6
ZOOLOGICAL SKETCHES.
claws to a mantel-piece where he could warm himself
by putting his back against a flue of a hot-air chamber.
An unexpected delay prevented my return that night,
and when I got home the next morning I entered the
garret with sore misgivings about the survival of my
tardo. But no ; there he hung, on the very same spot
and in the same attitude, imbibing caloric at every pore,
and purring to himself in dreamy beatitude, — a tardo
temporarily satisfied that life was worth living.
Like poor Lo, the sloth has no friend to rely on and
but little talent for self-help, but if his desires are limited
to sunshine and caucho-leaves he need not complain.
Our well-being, for all we know, may depend less on
the nature of our wants than on their proportion to our
means, and the bug whose necessities can be supplied
by crawling from leaf to leaf is possibly as content as
the bird that wings its flight from tree to tree.
Yet this negative kind of happiness seems somehow
incongruous in a creature so nearly allied to the pri-
mates of the animal kingdom, so that even from this
point of view the sloth may be considered as an abnor-
mal phenomenon, — a combination of a vertebrate form
Math the mind of an insect.
CHAPTER IV.
SECRETIVENESS.
Animals in a state of nature are endowed with certain
protective instincts to a degree which might often tempt
us to believe in the existence of a " sixth sense :" the
clairvoyance of bats, for instance, and the topographical
second-sight of migratory birds seem almost too mar-
vellous for any less mystic theory. But the specific
purpose of such instincts, and their great variety in
degree as well as in kind, make it more probable that
in stress of circumstances any one of the more or less
rudimentary faculties which the lowest animals share
with the highest is capable of an almost infinite develop-
ment. The necessity of pursuing its prey under water
has taught the dap-chick to find insects at the bottom
of a muddy creek. The exigencies which compel a
nursing she-wolf to return by the shortest route from
a hunting-expedition in a distant mountain-range have
perhaps endowed the ancestors of the genus Canis with
that marvellous faculty of direction ; and the defensive
warfare of many animals against an enemy of superior
strength may have developed their instinct of caution
to the degree which enables them to hold their own
97
9 8
ZOOLOGICAL SKETCHES.
even against the Simia destructor, — the terrible weapon-
inventor, with his murderous machines and four-footed
allies.
Phrenologists assure us that the skull-bones of all
mammals indicate their mental characteristics ; and I
have often examined the head of a weasel and wondered
at the flat top of its little occiput, for, if Spurzheim is
right, the " organ of secretiveness" should form a pro-
tuberance resembling the horn of a Texas toad. A
caged weasel seems rather an uninteresting pet, slow
at learning tricks and not very quick in distinguishing
playthings from comestibles; but let it escape in a fur-
nished room, and its peculiar forte will marvellously as-
sert itself: it will vanish at once, and, with the curious
felicity of some lawyers in hitting impromptu upon the
one tenable subterfuge, it will at once get into the very
best hiding-place the territory affords, — the lining of an
old dressing-gown or the interior mechanism of a spring-
mattress, — and remain invisible and almost inaudible for
days together. Squirrels, too, have a curious knack of
disappearing at the critical moment and keeping out of
sight, even on leafless trees, by dodging behind branches
and excrescences that seem hardly large enough to hide
a good-sized mouse. Our little Northern gray squirrel
rummages the penetralia of every hollow tree, but for
its family nest it almost invariably chooses a cavity
opening into what lumbermen call a "fork-split," — i.e.,
a crack in the fork or saddle between the stem of a tree
SECRETIVENESS. 99
and one of the main branches, and, besides being in-
visible from below, such holes are generally stopped
with moss and leaves. North of the Arkansas the
black bear passes the three coldest winter months under-
ground, either in a cave or in a " dug-out," generally
in the deep vegetable mould near the roots of a fallen
tree, and it is only by the sheerest accident that sucl"
burrows are ever discovered, though the old hibernator
leaves a very visible spoor and is not over-particular
about covering the rear of his shaggy fur. He relies
on his talent for choosing the site of his dormitory, and
is sure to select the most unfrequented spot in a wide
labyrinth of valleys and mountain-ranges. The lower
glens, with their sheltered coves and perennial rills,
must be very tempting; but black cattle and their pro-
prietors are apt to visit such places on cold winter days,
while hunters find the best trails along the ridges, on the
very backbone of a mountain-chain. Ursus niger there-
fore prefers the middle region, some wild ravine in the
steepest rocks of the mountain-flank, half-way between
the ridge and the sheltered valleys, and, if possible, on
the eastern slope, because this side of the Sierra Nevada
the coldest winds come from the northwest.
But the unrivalled masters in the art of nest-hiding
are the feathered songsters of the sparrow tribe, the
Passeres, as our ornithologists call them, though in this
respect the sparrow himself can hardly pass for a repre-
sentative bird. His cousins, though, the linnets, finches,
IO o ZOOLOGICAL SKETCHES.
and ortolans, cannot reproach themselves with risking
the loss of their nestlings by neglecting any possible —
certainly not any humanly possible — precautions in the
construction of their little nurseries. The nest of a green-
finch on a willow- or chestnut-tree defies detection, un-
less you should happen to espy the bird in the act of
feeding her young. No botanist could more exactly
match the color of the tree-bark with the blended hues
of lichens and dry bind-weeds, or imitate with interwoven
twigs the characteristic forms of the protuberances and
" knots" of a gnarled branch. Viewed from below, the
grass bower of the Italian ortolan cannot be distin-
guished from the grayish-green tint of a half-withered
olive-leaf; the bag-nest of the golden wren is hidden
amidst the drooping tassels of the mountain-larch ; and
the pendulous cradle of the orchard oriole looks exactly
like the accidental excrescence of an old apple-tree.
Birds that cannot imitate such textile masterpieces
show a consummate skill in foiling their enemies, —
hawks, cats, and boys. Our tanager never takes a bee-
line to her nest, but beats about the bush, apparently
in search of food, till she sees an opportunity to slip
in unobserved. It is well known that quails and many
small birds often try to divert the attention of a nest-
robber by throwing themselves in his way, shrieking
and imitating the movements of an unfledged nestling ;
but it is a curious fact that in such critical moments
the nestlings themselves keep perfectly quiet, for hours,
SEC RE TIVENESS.
101
if necessary. I once examined the nest of a North-
Carolina chatterer {Ampelis garni la), and while the
A VANTAGE-GROUND.
parent couple fluttered to and fro with incessant
screams their young ones kept as still as mice, though
I0 2 ZOOLOGICAL SKETCHES.
generally the approach of their mother was greeted by
a chorus of voices that justified the surname of the
species.
Squirrels, pheasants, and some other cautious nest-
builders show the same ingenuity in choosing an im-
promptu hiding-place; wounded partridges often crouch
motionless between the twigs of a small bush where
no a priori philosopher would suspect their presence.
Colonel S , a great hunter before the Lord, and
proprietor of a sylvan Tusculum near Huntsville, Ala-
bama, in repairing the lath-work of his vine-arbor
happened to inspect a part of the roof that had never
been visited by the grape-gatherers, when down jumped
an animal which the astonished Nimrod recognized as
a black-tail fox, an old offender, for whose special bene-
fit the sporting fraternity of the county had been under
arms that very morning. No one had dreamed of
beating the enclosed garden, and Master Black-tail had
evidently ascertained by experience that procul de Jove
procul de fulmine is a rule with occasional exceptions.
Musk-rats, too, have a knack of burrowing in the most
unexpected spots of a frequented river-bank. Indeed,
all much-hunted animals seem to find by a sort of intu-
ition the safest and most out-of-the-way places of refuge.
This instinct may, after all, furnish the right solution of
a problem that has puzzled more than one speculative
philosopher, — the question, namely, where animals bury
their dead :
SE CRE Tl VENESS. 1 3
What becomes of pins, we should like t<> know,
And the birds that die, where do they go?
What becomes of old birds ? Do they perish in the
attempt to cross the sea in their biennial migrations,
or are they eaten, devoured utterly by beasts of prey or
insects ? Why is it that hunters so rarely come across
the remnants of a murdered bird? the ravages of hawks
and owls do not account for the tenth part of the mor-
tality implied by the difference between the possible and
actual yearly increase of creatures that rear from five
to ten young ones every spring. And what about the
larger habitants of the wilderness, the countless Polish
wolves, Georgia raccoons, and Texas squirrels, that do
not fall by the hand of man and have few other enemies?
Are they eaten by ants? The woods would be covered
with skeletons. No ; I believe that animals die in the
best hiding-places they can find, and in a region of
tangle-woods and craggy cliffs that would mean a good
deal. Some of the bones we find in the Jurassic lime-
stone caves are perhaps the remnants of animals whose
secretiveness in articulo mortis was rewarded by an un-
disturbed repose of fifteen or twenty thousand years.
Raccoons, like bears and other plantigrades, are subject
to a kind of mange, and one of my acquaintances in
Columbus, Georgia, tried to cure his pet coon with a
dose of nux vomica. The remedy promised success
if life itself is a disease : the little plantigrade stretched
IC >4 ZOOLOGICAL SKETCHES.
his legs and his eyes turned yellow. After sunset,
however, on being exposed to the cool night-wind, he
revived and crawled away, — to the sanitarium of the
wilderness, it was supposed ; but two years after, his
remains, known by a rusty wire collar, were discovered
below the effluent pipe of a hot-house, which he could
have reached only by digging under the foundation-
timbers.
The strategists trained in the school of the Corsican
campeador cannot have chosen the moment of attack
with a closer calculation of all circumstances than the
nocturnal prowlers that prey upon our orchards and
hen-roosts. Their practice seems to contradict the idea
that people sleep soundest before midnight : between
one and two a.m. is the ghost-hour, — the time when
most Christians are actually asleep, and foxes, weasels,
and burglars most wide-awake. During a vacation of
my boarding-school years I once helped to watch a
poultry-house whose tenants had begun to disappear in
a way that suggested the agency of a domestic traitor.
From ten till twelve the barking of numerous curs
facilitated our vigils ; soon after midnight the late guest
of the village tavern extinguished his candle; but still
there was in the air that something not traceable to
any single cause and resulting rather from the co-
operation of many small sounds, — the creaking of a
gate, the distant rumbling of a night-coach, a whispered
dialogue. But at one o'clock all was still, and half an
SECRE TIVENESS.
IO5
hour later all but the low snoring of my companion,
when a moving shadow attracted my attention to the
top of a high board fence, and there and then came
RECONNOITRING.
^ the thieves —
two mountain-brook minks, that ap-
proached the hen-house with noise-
less steps and entered by an unsus-
pected aperture between the top of the board wall and
a loose shingle, — the only loose shingle on the roof, as
was afterward ascertained by a thorough examination
of the building. The father of the Wagner-worshipping
monarch of Bavaria often diverted himself by suddenly
lighting the calcium-lamps of the Hof-park after a
public soiree champetre ; and if some nocturnal land-
I0 g ZOOLOGICAL SKETCHES.
scapes of North America could be illuminated in the
same manner, we should find the woods and fields
swarming with animals where not a living thing is to
be seen in the daytime.
Migratory birds, with few exceptions, travel at night :
like terrestrial tourists, they have their favorite routes,
their St. Bernard passes and trans-continental highways,
and in clear November nights the farmers of Paso del
Norte often hear the trumpet-notes of a large flock of
wild swans, marshalling their host at an inconsiderable
height, to judge from their loud rallying-signals at sight
of a conspicuous landmark. Ducks and divers, too, do
most of their flitting after dark, and only the champion
flyer of all aquatic birds, the wild goose, ventures to
travel in the daytime, at an elevation where she can defy
the artilleristic machines of her arch-foe.
There is no doubt that wild birds learn to keep the
run of the weekdays and leave their cover only at the
sound of the American church-bells, while the ringing
of the French and Spanish campaniles sounds a death-
knell to the feathered inhabitants of non-sabbatarian
Europe. The partridges of our Southern States seem
to understand even the meaning of a dinner-bell, since
the proprietor of a south-Virginia strawberry plantation
told me that their depredations absolutely nonplussed
him, till he ascertained that they entered his field during
the noontide hour, while the gardeners were taking their
siesta.
SE CRE TI VENESS.
IO7
Not a grief-deriding goddess on a pedestal but a
rat at the entrance of his hole would be the fittest em-
blem of patience.
Near the river-
warehouses of St.
SUNDAY MORNING.
Louis, Missouri, and
on the docks of Gal-
veston Island, you can
see their patriarchs
mounting picket-guard between sunset and twilight,
— gray old sharpers, not easily to be distinguished
from the surface of the dusty wharves, and still less
I0 g ZOOLOGICAL SKETCHES.
by any voluntary motion, unless you know their haunts
and keep your eye on their holes. There they sit,
tail and hind-legs tucked out of sight, their fore-feet
close together, every muscle braced for an immediate
sally, yet rigidly motionless as long as there are any
boys or dogs in sight. But watch them from* behind a
closed window or from a perch on the cotton-bales : the
moment the road is free, the end of the sharp nose begins
to work, the hind-legs become visible, and with a sudden
rush, in a perfect bee-line, the rat is across the street and
into his subterranean hunting-grounds, perhaps the vault
of a bonded warehouse that has lately received a con-
signment of New-Orleans molasses.
Rats do not like to cross an open street, and mice
avoid the centre of the floor if they can possibly reach
their objective points by running along the walls : instinct
seems to tell them that alongside of a vertical surface
the visibility of a body cannot be aggravated by its
shadow. They also seem to know that monotonously
repeated sounds are least liable to attract attention : the
steady gnawing of a wall-mouse " blends with silence"
as readily as the ticking of a clock. Co-operative mice
keep time: at the end of an interesting chapter I have
often become conscious of the fact that a rodent com-
mittee of ways and means were rasping away vigorously
in my immediate neighborhood and had evidently been
hard at work for some time. I have two such partners
in my bedroom, and in sleepless nights I sometimes enjoy
SECRETIVENESS. jog
the overture of their duet. It begins with a pianissimo
nibble, a tentative prelude that can be nipped in the bud
by projecting a bootjack against the wall, but once fairly-
started they keep at it and scrape away with a wonderful
uniformity of intonation and accent. In the Southern
coast-States, where white pine forms the staple building
material, rats sometimes undermine a house completely
before their presence is as much as suspected; and the
destruction by the late tornado of a sea-side boarding-
house near Brunswick, Georgia, disclosed a colony of
mephites Americancs, — North American skunks, in fact,
— that had lined their basement-quarters with a quantity
of moss and cotton which must have taken them at least
a year to accumulate, during which time they had strictly
refrained from all impolite acts. On being confronted
with their irate landlord, however, they resented his
aggressive conduct in their characteristic way ; and if
such waters as the Mediterranean and the Gulf of Mexico
could be suddenly drained, I believe that the visions of
the Ancient Mariner would be realized.
In well-wooded countries even larger animals can sur-
vive and thrive for years without betraying their exist-
ence, — least of all to their next neighbors, for the fox is
not the only robber who spares the vicinity of his head-
quarters. Only in three of our thirty-eight States —
Indiana, Rhode Island, and Connecticut — have bears
been entirely exterminated ; in all the rest they are either
autochthones of the soil or pay occasional Christmas
no
ZOOLOGICAL SKETCHES.
visits, which, like those of other eupeptic relatives, are
apt to extend to the end of the winter. Panthers are
still found in twenty-six or twenty-seven States, the
doubtful twenty-seventh being South Carolina, where
some of them are supposed to lurk in the highland
gorges of Pickens County. In Texas and the North-
western Territories wolves are still too plentiful to risk
a high scalp-bounty; east of the Mississippi they occur
only sporadically, in North Carolina chiefly, and in the
wild border-counties between Tennessee and West Vir-
ginia. But who would suppose that in the soi-disant
birth-land of civilization — in France — several hundred
of them are killed every year, and not in the Pyrenees
merely, but on the Belgian frontier and in the Western
Cevennes, hardly two hundred and fifty miles from
Paris !
Even in Western Germany the wild fauna of the
mountain-regions is by no means confined to the rela-
tives of the sleek preserve-pets. About fourteen years
ago I paid a visit to the famous Salzbad of Allendorf,
near Cassel, where two of my former school-mates were
surveying a tramway from the salt-works to the coal-pits
of the Kaufunger-Wald. The surveyor and his assistant
were both Hainault men, born and bred in the wilds of
the Ardennes, and on being called to a place in the
woods where a spoor in the fresh snow had puzzled all
their workmen, they at once recognized the track of an
old lynx, — a rather frequent visitor to the sheep-folds of
SE CRE TI VENESS. Y T T
the South Belgian mountaineers. The snow was the
first of the season ; but a few days after, the same spoor
was found in a drift at the foot of a ravine, and a sharp-
eyed lad traced it to a gypsum-cave, the Salpeter Loch,
so called from the nitrous deposits in one of its ramifi-
cations. The news soon spread to the Salzbad and caused
an animated controversy among the sportsmen of the
neighborhood. But in Kurhessen every township has
its Oberforster, the overseer of the government forest
and the supreme authority on all questions pertaining
to woodcraft and venery ; and the Forster of Allendorf
ridiculed the lynx-report. " There are no lynxes in the
Kaufunger-Wald," was his verdict, " except near Alme-
rode, twenty miles from here, and there only in very
hard winters." Besides, lynxes and cats stick to the
trees till after Christmas, when the mountain-brooks
freeze for good ; and the Forster ought to know, being
a graduate of the Austrian Forst-ScJmle of Herman-
stadt in Transylvania, where lynxes are as common as
squirrels.
But the exponent of the Ardennes party was equally
positive, and on the first sunny day (also the first day of
the week, I am sorry to say) we all went to the Salpeter
Loch to settle the dispute of the two zoological dogma-
tists. The ravine being on a government preserve, no-
body was permitted to carry arms but the Oberforster,
who had shouldered his shot-gun in deference to regula-
tions, though without the least idea of having to use it
112 ZOOLOGICAL SKETCHES.
that day. At the entrance of the Loch the boys had
piled up a large heap of brushwood, and upon our
arrival the pile was lighted, — merely to please the stran-
gers. The presumptive tenant of the cave might be
a badger or a Feldkatze, — i.e., a domestic tom-cat run
wild, — said the Forster, who had taken a seat on a tree-
stump, but certainly not a lynx, whose short legs oblige
him to secure his prey by a downward spring, and whose
favorite haunts, therefore, are leafy trees overhanging a
spring or a salt-lick.
But, while the professor lectured, the flames rose
higher and higher, and in the midst of a dissertation
on the habits of the Transylvanian lynx the lecturer
was interrupted by a fat specimen of the indigenous
variety bouncing from the cave and away through the
bush, — taking him so completely by surprise that he
stared after the phenomenon in mute bewilderment, and
even kept his seat on the tree-stump. When the fugitive
had got a start of some eighty or ninety yards, the
Forster stood up and fired both barrels after it, two well-
aimed shots, for the lynx broke down, rather against my
expectation, though the marksman only wondered that
it got up again and continued its flight. But this was to
be a day of surprises : the smoke of the second shot had
not yet cleared off when two more lynxes bounced from
the cave, and, rushing through the underbrush, followed
their predecessor with superfluous haste.
" You give in ?" inquired the surveyor.
SE CRE TI VENESS. 1 1 3
" Yes ; I have to," said the Oberforster ; " but" — after
a pause — " from this day on I won't believe in impossi-
bilities any more. No, sir, not I. Before we get through
with this survey I should not be the least bit surprised
to discover a troop of secret camelopards /"
CHAPTER V.
BATS.
During a foot-tour through the Western Jura I once
saw a crowd of people in a cutting beneath a railway-
bridge, and, clambering down the embankment, found
that the workmen had exhumed the fossil remains of
a gigantic pterodactyl, — a monster with the head of
a crocodile and the wings and claws of a bird. As
bone after bone was picked out of the gravelly de-
tritus, one of the engineers arranged the skeleton in
anatomical order; and I still remember the expression
of a peculiar speechless interest on the faces of the
spectators : even the Savoyard navvies stood around
mute, thrilled with the spell of a by-gone wonder-world.
A similar feeling has often come over me at the sight
of a captive bat, wrapped in the folds of its leathery
wings or wriggling on the floor in uncouth contortions,
and still more vividly in the twilight of an ice-bound
cave where I once saw a mass of winged dormice hang-
ing together in a clump, motionless, and answering my
voice only by a feeble squeak, like the Lemures in He-
siod's Tartarus. A bat is a living anachronism; there
114
BA TS.
115
is something obsolete and paradoxical in every part
of its organization. Skin wings were quite in vogue in
the days of the Devonian monster-period, but have gone
out of fashion among the representative creatures of our
latter-day world ; and it is a curious fact that all winged
mammals have become nocturnal, as if they could not
compete with the talents of their daylight contempo-
raries. The winged lemur {Galeopithecus volans), the
flying fox, and the flying squirrel are all moonshiners,
and dread sunlight as miracle-mongers dread the light
of science ; but they all have the exaggerated optics
of an owl, evening-eyes, that catch every ray of the
fading twilight, while the eyes of the bat proper are
as rudimentary as those of a mole or of the strange
fishes that were discharged from the subterranean tarns
of Mount Cotopaxi.
Its sensitiveness, on the other hand, is developed to
a degree that far transcends the functions of what we
generally call the sense of touch. Spallanzani demon-
strated that blinded bats can fly around a room for
hours without ever touching the walls or ceiling; but
the faculty of guessing, without actual contact, the
proximity of a solid obstacle is shared by other ani-
mals : Canadian night-hunters often hear a moose going
at top-speed through a thick forest ; and a blind horse
will stop within a few inches of a barred gate. A
greater riddle, however, is the question how bats find
their food. Is it possible to imagine that they feel the
U6 ZOOLOGICAL SKETCHES.
approach of a little beetle meeting them in their rapid
flight? — for that they do not hunt at random, like a
whale charging open-mouthed into a shoal of herrings,
is proved by their quick turns and dodges in pursuit
of an individual insect. Nor can their pygmy eyes
help them much. In seizing their prey, the jaws of
a bat produce a peculiar clicking sound ; and I have
heard that same click at midnight in the deepest gloom
of a tropical forest. The long-eared varieties may hear
many things that would escape a human ear, but their
capacity of finding so much food in the dark is still
almost incomprehensible, for most bats are enormous
feeders : the Kalong eats twice, and the common horse-
shoe bat at least four times, its own weight in the course
of the twenty-four hours, and they all have that strange
musky odor that seems a characteristic of so many
voracious creatures, — the ichneumon, the racing beetle,
and the alligator.
As the Euclidean punctum is defined as a point with-
out extension, the voice of a bat might be called a sound
without vibrations, — a shrill, sudden squeak, unlike any
other sound in nature or art. Though piercing enough
to be heard from afar, it is too abrupt to guide the ear
in any special direction : you can put a wood-bat in a
narrow box, and the box on the table, and bet large odds
that the incessant shrieks of the captive will not betray
its hiding-place: to nine persons out of ten the sound
will seem to come from all parts of the room at once.
BATS.
I I
Many of their habits, too, distinguish the cheiropters
from all other
creatures of our
planet. Aris-
totle classed
them with the
birds; and in
onerespectthey
might even be
considered the
representatives
of the class, be-
ing, par excel-
lence, creatures
of the air. All
winged insects
can run or hop ;
the s e a-g u 1 1
runs, swims,
and dives ; but,
with the sole
exception of
the Javanese
Roussette, bats
are completely
" at sea" in the
water and al-
most helpless on terra firma; they eat, drink, and court
CHILDREN OK EREl'.US.
I [ 8 ZOOLO GICAL SKE TCHES.
their mates on the wing, and the Nycteris TJicba'ica even
carries her young on her nightly excursions. Nay, bats
may be said to sleep in the air, for they build neither
day-nests nor winter-quarters, but hang by the thumb-
nail, — touching their support only with the point of a
sharp hook. But this hand-hook connects with muscles
of amazing tenacity : in cold climates, where bats have
to club together for mutual warmth, fifty or sixty of
them have been found in one bundle, representing an
aggregate weight of about fifteen pounds, all supported
by one thumb-nail. The " head-centres" must sleep as
warm as a child in a feather bed; but it is hard to un-
derstand how the outsiders can survive the cold season,
for, in spite of its voracity, the bat accumulates no fat,
and the flying-membrane is a poor protection against
a North-American winter. The only explanation is that
their winter torpor is a trance, a protracted catalepsy,
rather than a sleep : hibernating bears and dormice get
wide awake at a minute's notice, but I have handled bats
that might have been skinned without betraying a sign
of life and needed more than the warmth of my hands
to revive them, for their wings were quite brittle with
rigid frost. Bats prefer a cave with tortuous ramifica-
tions that shelter them against direct draughts, but still
with a wide, though not too visible, opening, as they do
not like to squeeze themselves through narrow clefts.
A dormitory combining these requisites is sure to at-
tract lodgers from far and near: the northern entrance
BATS.
II 9
of the tunnel-grotto of Posilippo and the Biels-Hohle
in the Hartz are tenanted by hundreds of thousands
of bats that avoid all the neighboring caverns ; and our
Mammoth Cave, with its countless grottos, has only two
bat-holes, whose occupants have never been known to
change their quarters.
Canadian bats hibernate from six to seven months,
without food or drink, and without changing their
position by a single inch ; but a trance-sleep may come
natural to a creature of such limited brains ; as a French
lady said of a dying borgne borne, " he hasn't got many
eyes to close, et point d 1 esprit a rendre." Phrenologi-
cally, the cheiropters stand at the bottom of the scale :
the frontal bone of a hog is perfectly fiat, but that of a
bat is dished, — bulged the wrong way : its facial angle
can be measured only by negative degrees. It would
be about as easy to brain a fly as a bat ; but, like flies,
cheiropters can boast of a remarkable presence of what
mind they are gifted with : it is really impossible to hit
a flying bat with a stick ; in a closed room he will baffle
the tactics of a whole broom-brigade for minutes to-
gether : the word subterfuge must have been derived
from his marvellous knack of dodging a blow by a
sudden sideward and downward swoop. It has been
said that the art of flying will ultimately be learned from
bats instead of birds ; but I believe that an artificial
wing would bear a closer resemblance to a callow
feather apparatus than to the sensitive membrane whose
I2 Q ZOOLOGICAL SKETCHES.
net-work of nerves may possibly be the supposed sixth
sense of the artful dodger.
In summer the cheiropters of the temperate zone pass
the day in hollow trees, under the eaves of old roofs,
and even in the interior of open buildings ; the landlord
of the Salzburg Acropolis has a large " bat-rookery,"
not in the old burg, but in the loft of an adjoining
frame house, whose basement is used for a tenpin-alley,
while the loft itself is occasionally smoked out, to treat
visitors to an Acherontic spectacle, — a surging cloud
of flopping and squeaking imps of darkness.
Bats can be domesticated, but never tamed ; in day-
time, especially, their sharp teeth are always apt to
fasten in the hand that feeds them. Children of Chaos,
they love darkness and solitude, and their independence
is a practical satire on the arrogance of the self-styled
autocrat of the animal kingdom : their whole appear-
ance proclaims the alter ens, — creatures that have no
part with us and ours. The natt-backa — " night-bird"
— has never been a favorite of folk-lore : the myth of
the Edda makes it a messenger of Hel, the goddess of
darkness and death ; and in Oldenburg its sudden ap-
pearance in daytime is still considered a fatal omen :
Nat-bor am Morgen
Bringt Ungluck und Sorgen ;
4
and the Frisian flederdyn (Yorkshire " flittermouse")
is a synonyme for a wraith or a night-hag. The bat-
BATS. 12 i
epithets of the Eastern nations are equally opprobrious,
though the Arabian gessim-al-sheytan (" devil-birds") re-
fers exclusively to the ugly Megaderms, or bull-dog
bats. The Chinese admire their own death-head pro-
files, and compare the European nose to the beak of a
vulture ; Captain Baldwin even mentions a tribe of Zam-
besi Caffres who deem it unbecoming to wear front
teeth, and a he-bat may think his mate a winged Venus;
but in the eyes of a Caucasian, at least, the face of a
Megaderm seems a combination and aggravation of
everything we call hideous, — a wide-split mouth, whose
bull-dog lips still fail to cover the greedy teeth ; a pug-
nose, so retrousse that its upward bent forms a twisted
hook ; pig-eyes, with wrinkled lids ; and ears that ex-
aggerate the jackass-pattern by being joined in the
middle, thus forming a sort of hood or scalp-flap.
Compared with such features, a frog's head appears
quite human, a monkey-face almost classic.
The Low-German Speckmaus expresses a wide-spread
superstition. " Bat, bat, fly in my hat, bring me some
bacon-fat," sing our children ; and Good-man Hodge
will have it that the flittermouse visits his chimney in
quest of smoke-meat. But the Spanish farmer adds a
more serious charge : besides stealing bacon, the mur-
ciegalo is a cockatrice, and for fear of her evil eye chil-
dren sleeping in the open air have to cover their faces.
Our Mexican neighbors kill all cheiropters with in-
discriminate zeal ; but farther south that aversion is
j 22 ZOOLOGICAL SKETCHES.
almost justified; the insectivorous achievements of other
bats cannot atone for the sins of the vampire. To many
people the musical preludes of a mosquito seem to
aggravate the hatefulness of its visits; but the abso-
lute noiselessness of a vampire is a great deal worse :
a tickling sensation, becoming gradually stinging and
painful, or the dripping of a blood-drenched hammock,
is the first indication of its presence, and to persons of
a nervous temperament the mere suspicion of that pres-
ence is almost intolerable. Near the haunts of the
ghoul-bat a flitting shadow on a moonlit wall is often
sufficient to banish sleep for the rest of the night. In
the lowlands of the tropics the airiest bedrooms are
generally the most popular, and where people sleep in
the open air the vampire has it much his own way.
Veils and gauze stockings, however, afford at least a
partial protection, by obliging the blood-sucker to use
his teeth instead of his tongue, and thus awakening the
sleeper in time, the painfulness of the preventive being
outweighed by the pleasure of revenge, — " un piacer
che vaglia mil tormentos." I knew an apiarist who
carried business, or Buddhism, to the length of " easing
off" a stinging bee instead of smashing it ; but Uncle
Toby himself would not have spared a captured vampire.
Bonpland recommends an ointment of peppermint oil,
and the Guahiba Indians of the Lower Orinoco post a
sentry, — a watch-dog who has to pass the night in a
basket suspended from the lintel of the open door. To
BA IS.
123
a sleeping dog the winged incubus probably betrays itself
by its teeth rather than by its odor; though there is no
A VAMPIRE-TRAP.
doubt that even the Indians can smell the approach of
a vampire, and the negro servant of my travelling com-
124
ZOOLOGICAL SKETCHES.
panion in Central America often horrified us by mani-
festations of the same faculty. " Ben attention ! — ye sens
un chorussi" (corrupted from chauve-souris\ he would
bawl out in the middle of the night, and the flash of a
nitre-match rarely failed to justify the warning by the
testimony of our eyes.
There are four or five species of vampires in the
American tropics. Azara holds that none of the in-
digenous animals are plagued by these pests, nor by
mosquitoes either. But thereby hangs an enigma :
granting that the fur of a bear and the feather mantle
of a bird are impervious to the sting of a tipulary in-
sect, what do they all live on, the countless gnats that
never get a chance to commit phlebotomy? In the
" Sunken Lands" between Memphis and Little Rock
it would be a moderate estimate to say that there must
be a million mosquitoes to the square mile. What do
they all do for a living? Do they live on hope and
one bite a year, or are they vegetarians whose appetite,
like ours, is subject to sanguinary aberrations? So
much is certain, that the vampire has all the phys-
iological characteristics of an insectivorous bat, and if
his blood-thirst should be nothing but an abnormal
caprice he forfeits the least claim to mercy, since the
act which seems noway essential to the preservation
of his own life often endangers that of his victim : the
wounds of bitten cattle sometimes bleed for days, and
are apt to produce dangerous inflammations. The
BATS. I25
largest variety of the Vampirus spectrum measures
nearly four feet across the wings, but is found only in
Guiana. The smaller Brazilian species are very fre-
quent ; they are most troublesome in the darkest nights,
and develop an almost miraculous instinct in the se-
lection of their victims : in a roomful of sleeping people
the soundest sleeper is always first attacked; and Baron
Spix mentions the case of two drunken sailors who
passed the night in the woods and were found almost
exsangiiis the next morning.
But, after all, the vampire-plague is a mere trifle com-
pared with the Kalong nuisance : there is reason to be-
lieve that the myth of the harpies must have been
derived from the winged gluttons whose countless
swarms infest the forests of the Eastern Archipelago,
and whose ravages would exceed those of the Egyptian
locust if their habitat were not a region of inexhaustible
fertility. The larger varieties are often brought to Hol-
land; and an Amsterdam curiosity-dealer once showed
me a pair of Javanese Roussette-Kalongs (Ptcropus vul-
garis), the only absolutely insatiable creatures I ever
saw, though I have raised young caterpillars and hawk-
owls. Night or day made no difference to them : the
moment their box was opened they thrust out their
fox-like heads and proceeded to gape with jaws that
seemed to open by sections, revealing additional teeth
in the far interior of the skull. Whatever those jaws
could compass went down at one gulp ; larger morsels
I2 6 ZOOLOGICAL SKETCHES.
were mangled rather than masticated, and in my pres-
ence the he-Kalong swallowed three pounds of boiled
carrots in less than twenty minutes. Like maggots,
bats seem to assimilate only a small portion of their
food, as deglutition and excretion are divided by a very
short space of time, and their voracity appears to be a
vague desire to " fill up," rather than an appetite for
any special kind of comestibles. Few soft organic sub-
stances of any kind seemed to come amiss to our Rous-
settes : potatoes, boiled meat, butter, bread, and bean-
pods were devoured with equal greed, though not with
the same rapidity as sweet fruits. By way of trying
them, we once offered them spoonful upon spoonful of
hashed beef, and, after gobbling about twenty ounces
apiece, their swallowing process became somewhat la-
borious ; but a slice of baked apple at once restored
the vigor of that function, and they gaped as wide as
ever. About an hour before sunset they began to get
restless, and if the box was left open the he-Kalong
would soon raise himself above the rim by means of
his wing-hooks and move his head left and right, with
an occasional grin of his foxy teeth. If supper was late,
his mate would join him before long, and, after grin-
ning and bearing it for a while, their impatience gener-
ally resulted in a quarrel : they would hook away at
each other and utter their peculiar cry, a series of shrill
whistles, varied only by prolonging or abbreviating the
pauses. At the sight of a caterer they changed their
BATS.
127
whistle duet into a sort of twittering, and stopped it at
the first mouthful, having now found a better use for
their snouts ; but if the visitor came empty-handed they
expressed their disappointment in a curious way, by
A FOX-CHASli IN THE AIK.
dropping back into the box and scratching themselves
violently with their long hind-claws. If that failed to
propitiate the fates, they scrambled out and prepared to
I2 8 ZOOLOGICAL SKETCHES.
take wing : it was the hour when their Asiatic relatives
get ready for business.
Near Cape Angol, on the southern coast of Java, there
is a small mountain-village, Rydenberg or Rydenland-
Koop, which has become a favorite pleasure-resort of
the Dutch colonists, especially in midwinter, which here
corresponds to the dog-day season of the Northern
hemisphere. In spite of his phlegm, Mynheer is a keen
sportsman and a remarkable shot, as certain neighbors
of his had lately an opportunity to ascertain, and in the
vicinity of Rydenberg large game is pretty well cleaned
out ; wild hogs are getting scarce, and tigers are now
only found on Wynkoop's Bay, some forty miles farther
west. Monkeys, however, are still plentiful, and all new-
comers are treated to the favorite evening sport of the
Javanese Boer, — a " fox-chase in the air."
Rydenberg overlooks the sea, and, some seven miles
southeast, an archipelago of low islands, mostly well
wooded, but uninhabited on account of their pestilential
swamps. From these islands there comes in the evening
a stridulous noise, resembling the distant cries of a sea-
gull swarm, but shriller and wilder, and a few minutes
before sunset large winged creatures rise from the jun-
gle, mounting higher and higher in ever-increasing
numbers, till the example of their leaders gives the
signal to start for the coast. As they approach, their
bird-like forms assume stranger proportions : zigzag-
winged, and with heavy flops, they pass overhead, or
BATS.
129
plunge into the bamboo brake with an impetus that
sways the tall stalks like reeds. Others fly along the
coast toward the marshes of Wynkoop's Bay ; but the
plurality direct their course to the next fruit-plantations.
The natives, however, are ready for them. Every farmer
has from fifty to five hundred square feet of bast nets
of all sizes and forms, roof- and funnel-shaped pieces
for the orchards, and flat ones for the fields, — for the
Roussette attacks corn- and melon-patches as well as
fruit-trees. Judging from the ravenous appetite of the
Amsterdam specimens, I should be inclined to credit
the statement of a Batavian naturalist that a dozen Ka-
longs will strip a full-bearing plantain-tree in a single
night, — i.e., devour from sixty to eighty bananas in about
seven hours. They cling to the fruit-clusters like par-
rots, skin a banana without breaking it off, and eat it
down to the stalk in less than five minutes, and at once
commence operations on the next one, often taking
snap-bites left and right to ascertain the comparative
maturity of the different clusters. Near Rydenberg, at
an elevation of nearly three thousand feet, some tree-
fruits need all the sunshine they can get, and the nets
are therefore taken off every morning and replaced to-
ward evening, which has the additional advantage of
protecting the crop against the heavy thunder-showers
which generally come down after sunset. If a fruit-
tree is left uncovered, the Kalongs find it by the same
unerring instinct that guides rats to an accessible
130
ZOOLOGICAL SKETCHES.
granary, and the sportsman who ambuscades himself
in the top of a guava- or mango-tree is pretty sure to
sight his game before dark. Few other animals are
so hard to kill and at the same time so easy to cripple
as the Luft-fux (" sky-fox"), as the colonists call the
large Roussette. The Javanese Kalong attains the size
of a pug-dog, and in proportion to his weight his wings
are just barely large enough, so that the least injury to
his flying apparatus is sufficient to bring him down.
On terra firma he tries to dodge behind trees and
bushes the best way he can : finding escape impossible,
he becomes aggressive, and attacks the boots and even
the knees of the pursuer with his sharp teeth. I was
shown a thick rattan walking-stick that had been bitten
into splinters by a wounded sky-fox.
But to be fooled with nets or floored with lead is a
sad alternative, and in wet years, when wild berries rot
away before the end of the summer, the Kalong some-
times tries to circumvent the retiaries by turning out an
hour sooner than usual, before the natives have secured
their orchards. It is astounding how fast the hue and
cry spreads on such occasions : men, women, and chil-
dren seem to vie in giving the most audible proofs of
their devotion to the public welfare. " Bhunderyak !"
(" monkey-birds") yells the boy who was climbing a
tree and happened to espy the harpies in flagranti : the
laborers in the field, the women at the spring, take up
the alarum, and soon a posse of villagers rushes forth
BA TS. i 3 i
with slings and stones, bent on revenge, the chance
for prevention of crime being past : the sky-foxes have
already settled on the seaward orchards, and may have
stripped the best trees by this time.
The Kalongs know what is coming, and are all in a
flutter, ready to decamp at a moment's notice, but still
resolved to make the best of the remaining minutes, and
eating away with might and main as they hover about
the ripe clusters. At the sight of them the villagers
approach with stealthy steps, till suddenly the stones
begin to fly, pebbles as big as eggs hurtling through
the tree-tops like a storm of grape and canister. Then
a rush ahead, — the Kalongs have taken wing and are
hurrying off seaward ; but, even as they sail away in
headlong flight, their ranks are decimated by smaller
stones, and more than one sky-fox comes flopping down,
flopping backward also in a desperate attempt to regain
the shore, well knowing that in the water he will suffer
a speedy sea-change in the maw of an Indian shark.
CHAPTER VI.
SACRED BABOONS.
Some fifty years ago, the English naturalist Waterton
conceived the idea of turning his paternal estate into an
asylum for persecuted birds and beasts. He surrounded
the entire domain with a stone wall eight feet high, and
never allowed a shot to be fired on his grounds, in order
to try "how tame kind treatment would make the shyest
children of our All-Father." The wall, however, does
not seem to have been high enough for the mischievous
boys of the neighborhood ; and Charles Waterton's pets
never got rid of that hereditary dread of the bimanous
species to which their ancestors had owed their safety
for perhaps a thousand generations.
But the ideal which the British experimenter failed
to attain has been fully realized in the birth-land of the
human race, in Nepaul and Hindostan, and especially
in the Ganges Valley, where the preservation of primi-
tive habits and the doctrine of metempsychosis have
made man the brother and playmate of his dumb fel-
low-creatures. Nearly all the South-Asiatic vegetarians
treat mischievous animals with a more than Christian
132
SACRED BABOONS. !^
forbearance; but the worshippers of Brahm have, be-
sides, been taught to regard certain species of the brute
creation as half divine, and, consequently, altogether
inviolate and entitled to the active charity of every true
believer, — the most privileged of the zoological demi-
gods being the bhunder baboon {Papio Rhesus), the
Honuman (SemnopitJiccus entellus), the Brahmin cow,
the pigeon, and the common crocodile. In Hindostan
the public spirit of wealthy philanthropists rarely rises
above the orthodox conservatism of the national mind ;
bequests are not devoted to public improvements, but
rather to the maintenance in statu quo of incorporated
societies and multitudes of secular and clerical mendi-
cants ; and Sir Emerson Tennent estimates that the
produce of fully ten per cent, of all the stipends of a
most charitable population of one hundred and sixty
millions is consecrated to the support of lazy or mis-
chievous brutes. The Dheva-Ghee, or purveyance sys-
tem for necessitous animals, comprises some forty or
fifty hospitals and several hundred food-dispensaries,
some of them large enough to maintain a brigade of
able-bodied Sepoys. All the Brahmin temples of the
Bengal Presidency feed pigeons ; many of them both
pigeons and cows. Cows and monkeys enjoy the free-
dom of several wealthy cities, — are permited to camp
in the streets and help themselves to whatever garbage
and surplus fruit the market affords. Near Benares
there are enclosed tanks where sacred crocodiles are
IO
134
ZOOLOGICAL SKETCHES.
fattened upon the meat-offal of the large city. The ma-
hakhunds (literally, "big yards"), or monkey-almshouses,
are found near every town and larger village throughout
the Eastern presidencies ; the honumans have special
establishments where no low-caste monkeys need apply ;
sick and decrepit honumans and rhesus-baboons are
tenderly nursed in several well-appointed hospitals that
derive their resources from stipends or pious contribu-
tions. Wealthy Buddhists, as well as Brahmins, have
often secured a local immortality of glory by the foun-
dation of new mahakhunds, whose charters are some-
times codicilled with peculiar provisions : that vulgar
monkeys and pigs shall be rigidly excluded from the
benefits of the stipend ; that such interdicts shall be
suspended in years of famine ; that the distribution of
food shall always be superintended by a dhevadar of
the charitable race of Sahib Jaghir Shing; that bhunder-
baboons shall be entitled to two full meals a day, the
surplus, if any, to be distributed for the benefit of pil-
grims and low-caste monkeys, with the exception of the
dancing macaques kept by jugglers and infidels; that
legal fast-days must be duly observed, etc., etc.
Besides, the favorites of Brahm find a free lunch at
the house of every true believer. A sacred bull must
never be expelled from the enclosure of a truck-gardener
without a fair compensation, — a sugar-turnip or a hand-
ful of dates. Honumans are rarely interfered with if
they honor the premises of a native with an unexpected
SACRED BABOONS. 1 ^$
visit ; their caprices must be tolerated as the dispensa-
tions of beings entitled to the most respectful deference,
and unbelievers soon learn to consult their own interests
by avoiding an open violation of that rule. It is far
safer to thrash a Hindoo than to kick a sacred baboon;
forgiveness of personal injuries is a duty, but all wor-
shippers of Brahm will risk their lives in defending his
favorites. A Hindoo offering violence to a sacred cow
would be promptly stoned ; an Englishman would be
hooted, pelted, and before long probably waylaid and
killed. If he could defy them, they would ostracize him,
maltreat his servants, and secretly annoy him in every
possible way. When Captain Elphinstone's Scotch gar-
dener crippled a bhunder-monkey, the natives howled
around the officers' quarters for fifty or sixty successive
nights, besides carrying the baboon in procession and
nursing him like a sick prince. In Bengal, baboons
and crocodiles enjoy, in fact, all the privileges which
the bigotry of our ancestors accorded to the monastic
orders, common quadrupeds at least the prerogatives
of a modern clergyman.
The results give a fair idea of the natural disposition
of wild animals before their habits were biassed by the
influence of the Panic emotion, — the terror which man
himself may have experienced in the imagined presence
of a mischievous divinity. Lizards do not dart out of
your way, but just crawl aside to let you pass; a fish-
hawk will alight on your gate and allow you to approach
136
ZOOLOGICAL SKETCHES.
within ten or twelve feet before he betakes himself to
the next tree. A sacred bull won't go out of his way
to please the Governor-General. He encamps all over
the sidewalk on the shady side of the street, letting
saints and sinners take their chances in the gutter. The
vegetable-market is his favorite stamping-ground ; a lit-
tle frolic now and then must be submitted to by the
best of foreign residents as well as natives ; when the
reverend quadruped indulges in a frisk, the bipeds must
pick up their bananas or bones and say no more about
it. The sacred crocodiles bask on the shore and don't
mind it a bit if you should indulge in an uncharitable
remark about their plethoric appearance as compared
with the condition of the human natives; but if one
pelts them with pebbles they will turn their heads with
a vicious snap, though without thinking it worth while
to pursue a fugitive, their digestive powers being pre-
engaged.
But the monkeys commune with their Darwinian
relatives on a footing of equality which the Watertonian
method would probably fail to establish in less than
forty generations. My countryman Dr. Vanjorden went
to Northern India as a scientific attache of Lord Dal-
housie's expedition, and during a residence of five years
in the Punjaub and about three years in Bengal and
Western Nepaul availed himself of several opportunities
to visit the principal mahakhunds of those monkey-
ridden regions. The baboon-asylum of Bhonaghir, near
SACKED BABOONS.
137
Hyderabad, feeds about two hundred regulars and fifty
or sixty occasional guests, the latter being visitors from
the river-bungalows, whose summer vegetation they
THE PETS OF THE MAHAKHUND.
generally prefer to the somewhat arid neighborhood
of the mahakhund. Breakfast is at eight a.m. sharp ;
but the dhevadar beats no gong : his boarders are sure
138
ZOOLOGICAL SKETCHES.
to be on hand. The menu consists of rice, turnips, pani-
cum (a sort of millet), pumpkins, and now and then a
bushel of figs, served in a pile on the floor, between two
troughs full of water. As soon as the gate opens, the
guests crowd in, the old sachems first, the stout squaws
a good second ; but at the sight of any extras the press
for precedence overrides all etiquette, and the dhevadar
himself would be knocked down if he should presume
too far on the deference of his proteges. They are on
the watch for him if he enters the building, and when
he reappears with a bucketful of tidbits they charge him
with a rush, empty his bucket, clamber all over him in
search of hidden sweets, and often use him as a jumping-
board as they chase each other round the yard. In
about four minutes from the first creaking of the gate
the provisions are generally disposed of, — provisionally
at least, Providence having provided each baboon with
a cheek-pouch of such elastic capacities that a day's
rations can be stowed away in one cheek. Lack of
" cheek" is, indeed, no constitutional foible of the Papio
Rliesus : he takes all he can get, and shares with no-
body if he can help it. A fat old poucher, both cheeks
distended with millet and his four fists full of good ex-
tras, will retire into a corner and growl viciously at the
wistful look of a starved youngster. Woe to the low-
caste monkey who should attempt to glean the crumbs
of their feast ! they charge him like bull-dogs, and
somebody at the gate does not fail to take him across
SACRED BABOONS. l -$g
the knee and search his cheek-pouches before dismiss-
ing him.
By dint of much persuasion the doctor once induced
the major-domo of the monkey-castle to postpone the
usual time of the morning meal for an hour and a half;
and the consequences fully justified the reluctance of the
official. A few minutes after eight o'clock the young
baboons became fidgety, and some of the elders, after
strutting up and down in sullen silence, walked to the
gate and began to shake the latch-handle, gently at first,
but by and by with fierce impatience. Then, stepping
back, the sachems held a council of war, chattering at
each other with protruded lips, and grunting indignantly
whenever they looked at the still unopened gate. Some
of the frivolous youngsters were roughly handled, like-
wise the dhevadar's dog, who had mocked their grief
with his ill-timed familiarities. Seeing a man approach
from the direction of the village, they gathered around
him, evidently in hopes of entering the gate in his wake;
but when he pursued his way they vented their dis-
appointment in howls that made the man stop and look
back with surprise. After another consultation, they
tried the gate once more, scrutinized the smooth mas-
onry of the wall, and then made for a high tamarind-tree
that overlooked the yard of the mahakhund. With
some difficulty, but with grim resolution, the fat pres-
byters ascended to the very top-branches and began to
challenge their landlord with louder and louder ac-
140
ZOOLOGICAL SKETCHES.
claims, rising at last to yells that must have been heard
in the distant river-plantations, — for, soon after, a dep-
utation of bungalow-baboons came hastening up the
rocks, and joined in the chorus before they could pos-
sibly have ascertained the cause of the uproar. Boys,
too, appeared on the scene ; and when a fortissimo yell
in the tree-top was answered by a shout from the village,
the doctor himself advised the dhevadar to open the
gate.
In another mahakhund, devoted to " honumans and
pious and continent paupers," the guests, under a simi-
lar provocation, behaved with more dignity, though they,
too, evinced a disposition to wreak their ill-humor upon
the naughty youngsters. But toward low-caste animals
the honumans show all the intolerance of the bhunder-
baboon ; sucking pigs coming within reach of their long
arms are often grabbed and flung through the air with
a suddenness that leaves the squealer no time for a pro-
test till he lands sprawling on the other side of the fence.
In hospitals for promiscuous animals race-prejudices are,
of course, out of place, and under such circumstances
even the honuman communes with his fellow-monkeys
on more familiar terms, and often behaves with great
kindness, — still, however, with a certain condescension,
like a Church-of-England divine in the presence of dis-
senting ministers.
And the record of his caste seems to justify such pre-
tensions. When Ravan, the Prince of Darkness, made
SACRED BABOONS. I4I
war upon the Rishis, says the chronicle of the Upani-
shads, the monkey Honuman offered his services to the
God of Light, and suggested the idea of carrying the war
into the enemy's country by setting fire to the island
of Ceylon. The success of this stratagem brought the
Ravan party to terms and re-established the suprem-
acy of the Rishis, but in the heat of the Ceylon fracas-
a-fcu the faithful ally's tail caught fire, and he would
have expired in his own conflagration if he had not
saved himself by a hurried trip to the Himalaya high-
lands, where he quenched the flame in a sacred moun-
tain-lake, not, however, before his hands and face had
got badly singed. The verity of this miracle is attested
by the scriptural evidence of the Sama-Veda, and, as a
collateral proof, as our theologians would say, the honu-
man's face and hands are soot-black, and a tarn near the
sources of the Jumna is to this day called the Bhunder-
pouch, or Monkey-tail Lake. Nay, the Buddhists of
the Rayanate of Pegu in Ceylon claimed to possess an
eye-tooth of the veritable original Honuman. It is an
historical fact that in 1 58 1 Constantine de Braganza, the
Virey of the Portuguese colonies, captured this tooth,
and that the Raya of Pegu offered him three hundred
thousand cruzadas for the restitution of the sacred relic.
The Virey hesitated, but his confessor insisted that the
tooth must be destroyed, "as its surrender would abet
idolatry, and probably witchcraft."
The piety of the Hindoo shrinks from all familiarities
I4 2 ZOOLOGICAL SKETCHES.
with so sacred a creature ; foreigners who wish to do-
mesticate a honuman must treat him as a guest rather
than a pet. Near the mahakhund of Khunar in the
Nilgiri Hills there is a hygienic hotel where the gar-
rison-officers of the Madras Presidency use to spend the
hot summer months, and Dr. V. gave me an amusing
account of the precautions by which the dhevadar tries
to protect his saints from the irreverent tricks of the un-
believers. He feeds them early in the morning, before
the luxurious Britishers have left their beds, and again
at the very hottest hour of the afternoon, when sanitary
considerations keep the foreigners within doors, and con-
jures them with prayers and lectures to shun the pre-
cincts of the hotel. His mom, however, is rather ascetic,
while the heretics luxuriate in all the delicacies of the
Madras market ; and even saints have a foible for such
dainties as pineapple jelly and preserved mangosteens.
Dinner is at five p.m., and soon after the second gong
the honumans put in an appearance, generally at the
east side of the hotel, where a plantation of young
myrtle- trees screens them from the observation of the
dhevadar. The Semnopitliccus eniellus is naturally a
frugal feeder, but the influence of an evil example is
almost incalculable, and during the absence of the waiters
(all Hindoos, though of doubtful orthodoxy) it appears
that the favorites of Brahm were often induced to par-
take of flesh-food, and, as the dhevadar mentioned with
bated breath, also of alcoholic beverages. The matter
SACRED BABOONS. x *^
would have been less serious in regard to the neophytes
of the flock, but the college of presbyters included an
old grayhead with a milk-white tail, — an infallible sign
of Jana-Ghitra, or canonical dignity of the fifth degree.
And, grievous to say, this dignitarian was afflicted with
an uncontrollable hankering after "jungle cocktails,"
a mixture of rum, sugar, and citron-juice, supposed to
possess a prophylactic value in the treatment of jungle-
fever. In vain did the dhevadar wrestle with him in
prayer, in vain had he loaded him with amulets ; nearly
every Saturday night the whoops of a well-known voice
from the direction of the hotel told him that the old
man had been indiscreet again, — not drunk exactly, for
as soon as the mixture began to take effect the waiters
used to hustle him out. But one idle morning the
officers found him prowling around the fence, and,
guessing at the nature of his wants, took him aside and
treated him to a bottle of Nordhauser's Best, — or worst,
from a moral point of view. Before the waiters could
lay hold of him, the dignitarian, bottle in hand, jumped
out of the window and hastened to the esplanade, where
the officers received him with cheers that soon at-
tracted an astonished crowd of Hindoos and honumans.
The animal of superior sanctity retreated to the top of
a gatepost, and — but the details of the scandal are too
painful to relate, — suffice it to say that two messengers
from the mahakhund were so shocked at the impro-
priety of his conduct that they could hardly muster the
144
ZOOLOGICAL SKETCHES.
courage to summon the dhevadar, who at last sent a
peremptory order for all true believers to withdraw.
The next morning the repentant saint, with his head
thickly bandaged, was seen in the hands of a commit-
tee of Brahmins and Hakims, who nursed him with
devotion, though they seemed to fear that his immortal
part had been hopelessly compromised.
In the neighborhood of populous cities the pupils of a
mahakhund are exposed to grievous temptations ; pious
visitors too often surfeit them with sweetmeats. The
honuman-house of Kirni-ghar near Allahabad is bur-
dened with a number of pensioners who are almost too
plethoric to walk and seem to suffer all the horrors of
dyspepsia. Such invalids are the objects of a special
solicitude, their sufferings being considered as an illus-
tration of the proverbial trials of the just; but in times
of scarcity their lot becomes truly pitiful. Near Ghuya-
por, on the lower Jumna, the scene of Krishna's dalliance
with the milkmaids, Dr. V. saw the remains of a baboon-
institute that had been abandoned during the late famine,
and found the surrounding woods peopled with the ex-
pensioners, now reduced to the sad necessity of work-
ing for a living, gathering berries and rolling logs and
stones in search of coleopterous insects. The young-
sters seemed to enjoy their occupation, but the old dys-
peptics worked with groans, like the exiled aristocrats
after the French Revolution.
During the Sepoy insurrection, too, the reckless
SACRED BABOONS.
'45
guerillas destroyed a good many mahakhunds, whose
inmates were obliged to take refuge in the neighboring
towns; and during the great famine of 1878-79, when
the crops had twice failed throughout Bengal and the
western Carnatic, bands of destitute monkeys roamed
the country in quest of backshish, and were often seen
around the depots of the Great Trunk Railroad, glean-
ing the offal of the grain-cars and appealing to the
charity of the passengers. On the pike-roads holy
honumans used to follow the palanquins at a trot, hav-
ing found by experience that heretical travellers would
sometimes feed them for the edification of the natives.
In that time of great need many baboon-hospitals were
abandoned, and even the jugglers had to discharge their
dancing macaques, leaving them to pick up a living the
best way they could. The poor things used to dance
on the highway whenever they met a human being, and
the Benares Gazette gave a touching description of a
scene at the pier of the boat-bridge where two of the
little Terpsichoreans waltzed around a blind beggar and
every now and then approached him with beseeching
squeaks.
An influx of high-caste monkeys has begun to gravi-
tate toward the larger cities, for, considering the enor-
mous extent of the country, the mahakhunds are, after
all, few and far between, and the charity or the re-
sources of the orthodox landed proprietors seem to
have declined under the influence of the British do-
146
ZOOLOGICAL SKETCHES.
minion. But in the cities the Brahmins can still raise
the wind to the pitch of fanning the fire of religious
enthusiasm ; and while there is flour in the barrel of
a true believer there is always bread for the sacred
baboons. Besides, hunger sharpens the wits of saints
as well as of sinners, and with their four sets of long
fingers the quadrumanous children of Brahm generally
find ways of their own to keep body and soul together.
They congregate at the river-wharves where the bum-
boats of the natives discharge their cargoes, and even
canvass the European warehouses, though with more
caution, on account of the sad irreligion of the low-caste
Briton. In the market they mix with the crowd, and
are apt to mistake spotted apples for offal and sound
apples for spotted ones : after a fast-day they become
semi-nocturnal and prowl around the stands of confec-
tioners who sell their wares by torchlight. They also
have a wondrous memory for faces and the localities
of what our tramps call square-meal houses : a house-
keeper who feeds a gang of baboons at the door of her
residence can count upon permanent custom for the rest
of the season. Subsequent rebuffs are unavailing; the
saints yield to force, but come back the next day : true
followers of their countryman Buddha, they seem to
accept injuries as an earnest of benefits, and give the
offender a chance to make amends.
Like Italian lazzaroni, city-baboons live in cliques, —
clannish communities, very exclusive in times of scarcity,
SACRED BABOONS. x ^y
and always rather disinclined to enlarge their member-
FOUR-HANDKD LAZZARONI.
ship except by natural increase and advantageous alii-
148
ZOOLOGICAL SKETCHES.
ances, as with fat house-baboons of a roving disposition.
Four-handed vagrants are promptly stopped and cross-
examined : no mercy for the homeless stranger suspected
of speculating upon a share of their scanty sportules,
while the household pet with his brass collar and sleek
pouch is merely scrutinized with silent envy. The half-
grown bhunder-monkeys are so pretty that they are
often domesticated, but their relatives dislike to part
with them, — from motives that have nothing to do with
" philoprogenitiveness." The holy children are their
mediators, their apple- and bread-winners. The en-
treaties of the little beggars are not easy to resist : they
will climb you after the manner of pet squirrels, em-
brace you with one arm and beg with the other, ac-
companying their gestures with a deprecatory mumble
that becomes strangely expressive, as if they were plead-
ing extenuating circumstances, if you offer to strike
them. Even the idol-hating Mussulman is thus often
beguiled into a liberality which his conscience may be
far from approving. If the little spongers have struck
a bonanza, they swallow in situ all they can find room
for, well knowing that upon their return the contents
of their cheek-pouches will be claimed by their rela-
tives, for even a mother-monkey has no hesitation in
plundering her own child in that way. To avoid co-
ercive measures, the poor kids surrender their savings
voluntarily and with great despatch at the approach of
the ruthless parent. Like our artist-mendicants who
SACRED BABOONS.
149
keep a beggar-boy ad captandum, old baboons sometimes
kidnap a baby of another tribe, keep a strict watch on
its movements, but urge it with slaps and grunts to
work the passers-by. Crippled baboons, too, are a most
welcome acquisition to any clique. These twice-worthy
objects of charity have their regular headquarters, where
they can be found at any time of the day surrounded by
eupeptic relatives who hope to participate in the largess
of the pious. The poorest huckster will stop his cart
in a gate-way to hand his tribute to a decrepit bhunder-
monkey who supplicates him with outstretched hands.
No true believer must stint his gifts upon such occa-
sions ; and so well does the hairy mendicant know the
stringency of that duty that he flies out into a paroxysm
of virtuous wrath if any passer-by should dare to dis-
regard his appeal. The relatives promptly yield their
aid, and fruit-carts are in danger of being monkey-
mobbed if the driver hesitates to propitiate their resent-
ment by a liberal contribution.
But the new-fangled conveyances of the foreign resi-
dents are thus often surrounded and stopped from sheer
inquisitiveness. The Indian city-baboons have begun
to take an abstract interest in human affairs. They will
gather around a ranting quack, a revivalist, or a broken-
down buggy, without any direct view to backshish. If
a number of people run toward the scene of an accident,
the monkeys race after them like dogs ; if the Brahmins
get up a pageant, the baboons join in the procession.
n
150
ZOOLOGICAL SKETCHES.
They take a curious delight in pressing their snub-noses
against the shop-windows of the European merchants,
and examine the array of novelties with a critical squint.
A knot of strangers standing before a hotel, engaged
in an animated discussion, has often been thrown into
convulsions of laughter by the manoeuvres of a honu-
man, joining them and chattering away with protruded
lips and all the appearance of a personal interest in the
issue of the debate. Fireworks, even long after sun-
down, never fail to attract a crowd of baboons, grunting
their applause and looking at each other with approving
grins. Housekeepers have to watch them carefully ; for
old baboons get very fond of toys. They will abstract
a door-key, pick up a tin plate, a piece of brass, or an
ornamental flower-pot, and run off with a demonstrative
delight in their new plaything. A Delhi, bhunder-mon-
key attracted general attention by parading the streets
with two gaudy shawls, evidently not of legal acquisi-
tion, as his bad conscience made him take to his heels
whenever anybody so much as pointed toward his dry-
goods.
Their long intercourse with the primate of their spe-
cies has developed race-sympathies which often manifest
themselves in an unexpected way. Colonel Lawrence, of
the Agra " Planters' Hotel," keeps a tame leopard, which
once followed its master to the freight-depot of the
railway-station. The shady platform at the north end
of the depot is a great resort for baboons and loafers ;
SACRED BABOONS.
I 5 I
and while the colonel talked to the receiving-clerk, his
leopard strolled out to the platform, where a little street-
Arab had fallen asleep upon a pile of gunny-bags. The
moment he approached that pile a troop of baboons
leaped upon the platform, and, instantly surrounding
the boy, faced the intruder with bristling manes and
menacing growls, evidently resolved to defend their
little relative at the risk of their own lives.
But the trouble is that the Hindoos reciprocate such
sympathies : the foreigners are strong and the natives
weak, but we are few and they a great many, and ex-
perience has shown that it does not pay to hurt their
pets. Lord Clyde ridiculed the idea of punishing a
man for shooting a wild cow: it is now seven years in
the penitentiary. Rough, no doubt, but a lesser evil
than the revolt that would otherwise be sure to follow.
The Sepoy insurrection originated in a quarrel of that
sort : beef-XsMow had been employed in lubricating the
cartridges which the native soldiers were required to
use. And in the eyes of a Brahmin a honuman is quite
as sacred as a cow, and the crime of killing him (though
less easily proved) quite as unpardonable. " Bhara
Nur /" — "Mercy, mercy!" — is a frequent cry in the
streets when a European domestic rushes out of a house
in hot pursuit of a four-handed culprit. " Sahib ! Nenna
san ghatta!" — "We will make restitution, sir!" — they
cry, if it appears that the sacred long-tail has got away
with something; "hold! spare him for the sake of
152
ZOOLOGICAL SKETCHES.
Mahadeo! for Saki-Yam Deva's sake!" etc., etc., till the
fugitive saint is around the corner.
" It isn't that rag I care for," said Dr. V.'s Prussian
servant, whose neckerchief had been captured by a
veteran honuman, " but the impudence of those fellows ;
I would give three months' wages if you would let me
catch that old wretch and give him a Pomeranian twenty-
fiver r
A similar desire has got more than one Englishman
into serious trouble. The naturalist Duvancel had to
hide like a criminal when the rumor got abroad that he
had killed and stuffed a young honuman, and, though
he assured the natives that the deceased had met with
an accident, the Brahmins appointed a committee to
watch his garden day and night. Stuffing a honuman
is almost as bad as killing him : the corpse must be em-
balmed and buried with due rites. The Frankish doctors
are suspected of circumventing these regulations, and for
that and similar reasons the city monkey-hospital of
Benares used to be closed against all Europeans, with
the exception of Lady Dalhousie, a recognized bene-
factress of the institution. Living monkeys are, of
course, hard to watch, and harder to keep out of trouble,
— wholesale trouble, sometimes, when the long-nursed
wrath of an unbeliever explodes against them in some
out-of-the-way place. But woe to the perpetrator of
such a deed ! an immortality of odium will be the fate
of him who manages to evade temporal retribution.
SACRED BABOONS. ^3
" Wicked Harbarat's place" is, and always will be, the
name of a certain estate near Agra, once the bungalow
of a Captain Herbert, who had been tormented with
honumans till he renounced the plan of turning the
estate into a remunerative fruit-farm. But he retreated
with a Parthian shot : the day after his departure some
fifty or sixty martyrs, full of bananas and strychnine,
were picked up in his garden.
Captain Elphinstone's servant, who had crippled a
bhunder-monkey, was repeatedly pursued by a howling
mob, and on one occasion was chased all over Delhi
before he could give his pursuers the slip in the Moham-
medan quarter, where a stout Unitarian kept the rabble
at bay till the fugitive had effected his escape through a
back-door. For the Moslems hate the baboons with an
intense and perfect hatred, and, unlike the Franks, who
are more apt to be reconciled by the comic features
of the superstition, they denounce the monkey-wor-
shippers as idolaters, outrageous provokers of Allah's
threatened wrath. They post special watchmen to keep
the hateful beasts out of their mosque-gardens ; but, even
there, expulsion and a kick a tergo is all they dare re-
sort to: the pressure of public opinion is too much even
for an Oriental fanatic. When the power of the Mogul
dynasty was at its height, Shah Allum's Mahratta Pesh-
war (Maire du Palais) was once returning from his daily
round of inspection when he heard that his youngest
child had been attacked and viciously bitten by a troop
154 ZOOLOGICAL SKETCHES.
of bhunder-baboons. The brutes had been captured in
flagranti, and, as the chief culprit could not be identified,
the incensed Mussulman sent the whole troop to the
Selinghar, or state prison, which joins the royal palace
of Delhi. The sentence was certainly not excessively
rigorous, but before night the whole town was agog
with ranting Brahmins and howling women. They
kept up their lamentations all night, and the next
morning, having ascertained the whereabouts of the
martyrs, they shook hands with them through the
grated windows and perfumed them with attar. The
Peshwar was going to bring the matter before a mu-
nicipal court, but the Shah induced him to enter a nolle
prosequi and release the defendants.
In Agra, where the honumans are a terrible nuisance,
the English Protestants have a cemetery of their own,
and have come to the conclusion that the Sikh Lascars
(discharged Mohammedan soldiers) make the only re-
liable sextons. The Rev. Allen Mackenzie was once
summoned by a frightened messenger, who informed
him that the " niggers" were going to gut the grave-
yard on account of some baboon-difficulty or other,
but upon his arrival at the cemetery he found that the
turbaned sexton had been already reinforced by an
armed troop of his countrymen, who threatened to
impale the first idolater who should presume to molest
the faithful guardian of a government preserve. The
whole fuss was about a couple of honumans who had
SACRED BABOONS.
155
been caught on the wrong side of the cemetery-wall
and by their screams had attracted a swarm of two-
handed and four-handed sympathizers. Some of the
latter had taken refuge in the sexton's lodge, and when
the mob had been persuaded to withdraw the irate
official closed the lodge-door and attacked the intruders
with a fury that defeated its own object, for the horrified
THE LIMITS OF HUMAN PATIENCE.
animals now burst through the windows and escaped
with yells that came very near causing a new revolt.
Muhammed Baber alone was a match for the baboons.
When they plundered his palace-garden he imprisoned
them as fast as he could catch them, till the Brahmins
volunteered to surround the garden with a high wall
of smooth and absolutely perpendicular masonry. That
156 ZOOLOGICAL SKETCHES.
is about the only remedy; for Brahm's favorites are too
conscious of their immunities to mind a curse or the
explosion of a blank cartridge. Human patience has
its limits, and the holiest Brahmin would not see his
last piece of bread snatched from his mouth without
reaching for a boot-jack ; but all fruits of our Mother
Earth he would readily share with the eupeptic demi-
gods. You may prevent the baboons by anticipation, —
gather your fruit in time ; but you must not expel the
holy marauders, nor even forestall them altogether:
pious farmers always leave a tenth of the grain-crop for
the pigeons and monkeys. If a sacred crocodile takes a
free lunch out of the calves of a true believer, it is guilty
of misdemeanor, but it must be tried by its peers in
holiness, — a court of true and accepted Brahmins. Un-
less the plaintiff prefers an indemnity, the sportive
saurian may be found guilty, and is liable to be ex-
pelled from the stipend-pond. Under no circumstances
must the layman take the law in his own hands; even
secular magistrates have no competent jurisdiction in
cases of that kind. On the cow-question casuists differ,
but they agree that the animals must never be kicked
out. You must try persuasion first, and gentle force
only as a last resort. " Oh, my son, oppress not the
poor!" Von Orlich heard a Hindoo farmer adjure a
voracious bull. " Come, my child, I will feed thee with
honey if thou wilt follow me." The bull continued to
help himself. " Provoke not the weak," resumed the
SACRED BABOONS. r c7
Hindoo. " Brahm is just; come, repent in time." The
bull never budged, and the farmer at last summoned two
companions. " Oh, my son !" they began again, but
at the same time two of them seized the bull's horns
left and right and thus trotted him out, chanting a pas-
sage from the Upanishads, while their assistant enforced
the quotation by hammering a board with a sort of
mallet.
Honumans cannot be disposed of in that way ; you
have to catch them first, and if you drive them over one
fence the odds are that they will come back across an-
other. They know their enemies, though, and keep a
sharp lookout if secular reasons oblige them to visit the
premises of an unbeliever. Only the brown face of a
Hindoo encourages them to make themselves quite at
home; and only the Hindoo farmer is ever treated to a
full display of their gymnastic abilities. To see a swarm
of honumans at play is a treat even for an East-Indian
sight-seer familiar with the miraculous performances of
the native acrobats. The evolutions of the boldest dis-
ciple of the Turner-hall would appear tame compared
with the feats of the four-handed champion, for among
the monkey-gymnasts of the Old World the Semnopithe-
cus entellus has no superior and only one rival, the
equally long-armed black gibbon. Haeckel seems to
be right, — this earth must really be very old. Only the
accumulated experience of many thousand generations
can have developed such accomplishments. Without
158 ZOOLOGICAL SKETCHES.
wings agility could hardly go farther ; from the stand-
point of a practical anatomist it is almost inconceivable
how muscles and sinews, apparently so very similar
to our own, can execute such movements. Without
the least visible effort, the marvellous half-bird darts
through the air in a wide zigzag, merely touching a
branch here and there, upward suddenly with a series
of mighty swings, regardless and apparently forgetful
of obstacles, down with a gradationed spring that looks
like a single leap, up again with a flying rebound
through a tangle-work of branches, yet at the same time
watching his comrades, aiming and parrying slaps or
dodging a shower of missiles ; then a sudden grab, a
quick contraction of the hind-legs, and the acrobat sits
motionless on a projecting branch, watching a move-
ment in the grass that has not escaped his eye during
his headlong evolutions.
The young baboons, too, make their summer life a
perpetual circus-game, and if panis and circcnses com-
prise the essentials of human happiness, the Hindoo
farmer need not complain, and may, after all, enjoy his
life quite as much as if he had exterminated the merry
saints in order to save their tithe of the rice crop.
CHAPTER VII.
ANIMAL RENEGADES.
Moral philosophers incline to the opinion that all the
arts of Despotism have never yet succeeded in produc-
ing a perfect slave. Behind all the masks of non-resist-
ance, under the thickest varnish of subordination, there
is always a substratum of rebellious instincts ; the love
of independence is perhaps the most inalienable gift of
Nature. It will re-assert itself after centuries of bond-
age, — even in brutes. No training and selecting has
ever evolved a breed of absolutely domesticated ani-
mals ; the tamest of them will now and then avail
themselves of an opportunity to resume the life of their
free-born ancestors. Household pets, that could not pos-
sibly profit by the change, have at least intermittent fits
of independence. Only night-walkers know how much
secret gadding our dogs are guilty of. On moonlight
fields, on lonely mountain-meadows, one meets them,
pair-wise and in troops, in quest of gallant adventures,
but also singly, on strictly private business. Near the
sheep-folds of the Southern Alleghanies sleek watch-
dogs have often been shot as much as twenty-five miles
from the homes they used to protect by their deep-
i59
jgo ZOOLOGICAL SKETCHES.
mouthed barks, — till the inmates were asleep. Utter
darkness, too, is apt to silence the voice of our faithful
ally, and the next morning the people will wonder what
makes the dear fellow so tired : the explanation might
surprise them still more, if the Night could speak.
Domestic cats often absent themselves for weeks to-
gether, and return as lean as a rake, but unrepentant,
till the dangers of vagrancy are brought home to them
by boot-jack and gunpowder arguments. Many old vil-
lage tomcats take regular summer vacations. Orchards
and the extensive grain-fields of our Northern States
supply them with young birds enough to keep soul
and skeleton together, and the vicissitudes of roughing
it seem to count for nothing against the pleasures of
independence. The woods of the Mississippi Valley
are full of half-wild hogs. They are just tame enough
to answer a repeated dinner-call, but rarely come home
of their own accord, though their adventures in the
wilderness are rather over-spiced with danger: "bush
pork" is generally full of buckshot. Goats, too, are
apt to lose their way whenever they get a chance ; and
the hunters of the Tyrolese Alps often hear their bells
in the inaccessible heights of the Ortler range, where
they have to pick their food from the clefts of icicled
rocks till the November storms drive them back to the
valleys.
But where emancipation would be a change for the
better, only constant vigilance can prevent a declara-
ANIMAL RENEGADES. x 6i
tion of independence. In Eastern Europe, Southwest-
ern Asia, and the Southern prairies of our own continent,
millions of animals have permanently renounced their
allegiance to the lord of creation. Wild dogs are not
confined to the suburbs of Stamboul ; legions of them
infest the mountain-ranges of Armenia, Persia, and
Turkestan, and prowl over the vast table-lands between
Asia Minor and Northwestern India. They are found
in the deserts of all intertropical countries ; in America,
especially on the arid plateaus of Peru, Paraguay, and
Western Mexico. In Mexico and South America there
are about sixty millions of wild horses and horned cattle
whose freedom is bounded only by the limits of their
speed. The Cabras pardas of the Sierra Madre are
descendants of the Spanish goat, but as shy as big-
horn sheep and nearly as hard to shoot. In all our
Southwestern States there are utterly wild hogs, deni-
zens of the river-jungle, and unapproachably shy. At
the sight of a dog they stampede with snorts of horror
and hide in swamps where few hunters dare to follow
them, though the chase is perfectly legitimate. Their
favorite haunts are the South-Georgian cypress-swamps ;
sporadically they are found as far north as Pamunkey
Bay in old Virginia. The German hunters distinguish
the Wild-Katrc from the somewhat smaller Feld-Katze,
the former the genuine wild-cat, the latter one-fifth
smaller, and often with the fine fur of the ancestral
tabby, but with all the fierceness of the genuine Felts
j 5 2 ZOOLOGICAL SKETCHES.
catiis. The alleged existence in the Ghobi Desert of
a special kind of wild dromedaries (supposed to be
the Camelus primogenitus) lacks confirmation ; but there
seems no doubt that the mountains of Balkh (the ancient
Bactria) are the haunts of ownerless camels, that can be
captured only by regular circle-hunts, for a month after
birth their young ones are already too fleet for the
dromedaries of the Bokhara nomads. The " wild asses"
of the Old Testament, like the Abu Gliibr of Arabia
Petraea, are probably survivors of a starved caravan, or
deserters from the train of a defeated army, for in deserts
where a horse would hopelessly perish his long-eared
relative seems able to shift for himself; and Burckhardt
asserts that the wars of Abd-el-Wahab have peopled the
Arabian peninsula with herds of wild asses, resembling
the shaggy Bulgarian variety. East of El Medina they
roam in herds over the stony mountain-ranges, and
generally give the city a wide berth, though in clear
nights they pay an occasional visit to the pilgrim-camp
of Bab-el-Musree to glean the waste provender of the
caravans.
Near the precincts of the Eastern cities such four-
legged independents are often merely domestic animals
out of employment ; but in sparsely-settled regions it is
curious to observe the reappearance of their old race-
habits. The Klielp el Khamr (" dog of the wilderness")
of Asia Minor hunts in packs, and rivals his wildest rel-
atives in the art of making night hideous with the true
ANIMAL RENEGADES.
163
lupine ululat'us, the long-drawn howl of his obstreperous
primogenitor. In very cold nights they are apt to be-
come d a n-
gerous, and
a few years
ago the in-
habitants of
the vilayet
of Khus a-
bad rose en
mass c to
BACTRIAN CAMELS.
avenge the death of an old sheik whom the Khelpies had
killed and eaten in the neighborhood of a populous village.
164 ZOOLOGICAL SKETCHES.
The most interesting of my Mexican pets was a young
perro pelon, or " tramp dog," whose mother had been
imprudent enough to quarter her litter under the porch
of a sacristia, or wayside chapel. But the child of the
sanctuary had all the instincts of a young highway-
robber. As soon as he could walk he waylaid the
guinea-pigs and began to take a suspicious interest in
the roosting-places of the landlord's chickens. The
neighbors' boys brought him all the young rabbits they
could catch, and he had a curious way of playing with
them, — not like a sportive puppy, but like a young fox
practising for business purposes. He would cripple
them just enough to equalize the chances of the game,
and then give them a fair race for their lives, taking
care, however, to suppress any signs of excessive vi-
tality. He never killed anything outright, but deferred
his feast till incidental injuries had disqualified his vic-
tims for further sport. One half-grown coney, however,
managed to get away from him, and would have es-
caped if the boys had not recaptured it ; and when they
restored it to him he massacred it on the spot, probably
for having abused his confidence. Well-to-do house-
dogs generally content themselves with eating their fill
at the regular meal-times, but the pelon would never
trust the chances of the next day, and invariably re-
moved the remnants of his dinner, even potato-chips
and tortillas. He had caches all over the farm, but es-
pecially in the rear of an old garden-wall, where he
ANIMAL RENEGADES. ^
buried his bulky valuables ; and the hogs that used to
take their siesta near his treasury were always chased
away and out of sight when he was going to make a
deposit: he wanted no witnesses at such times. If I
happened to surprise him at a grand interment, it was
enough to make him nervous for the rest of the day:
once in a while he would run back to the garden to
see if I had not realized on my discovery. Of carrion
he was so fond that he seemed to view the existence
of his fellow-creatures from an ultra-Buddhistic stand-
point, considering the speedy separation of soul and
body as the chief object of their lives. Horses, espe-
cially, he regarded only as so many carcasses endowed
with an annoying power of locomotion. He would
often yelp atf a big mare of somewhat frolicsome pro-
clivities, eying her antics with disgust and with a mien
of severe disapprobation of her frivolous delight in the
vanities of life. The landlord's turkeys made him wag
his tail ; he was pleased at their fatness and the reflec-
tion that their vital propensities were far less incurable.
The presence of man he accepted as a practical necessity,
though perhaps with a secret leaning toward the view
of the Encratian Gnostics, — that the removal of the
bimanous species would at once restore the pristine
glory of the globe. He seemed to " shun, not hate,
mankind:" his favorite retreat was a gravel-hole be-
neath the old garden-wall, and nothing short of a four-
teen-inch soup-bone would induce him to leave that
12
l66 ZOOLOGICAL SKETCHES.
place of refuge ; appeals to his sense of duty were an-
swered only by a stolid growl. I never heard him bark ;
his voice was an indescribable sort of half-howl, some-
what resembling the bay of a hound, though he used
it rather as an expression of anger and pain. He was
an incorrigible thief, and when the cook attempted to
improve his morals with a broom-stick he transferred
his headquarters to a neighboring mesquite grove, and
finally evanished altogether, but continued to utilize his
topographical knowledge, to judge from the frequent
coincidence of dark nights with the disappearance of
chickens and ducks. One evening I met him on the
road to Fresnillo, and, recognizing my voice, he fol-
lowed me as if nothing had happened till we reached
the outskirts of the town, where he began to hesitate,
and finally slunk off into a ravine, and that was the last
I saw of him.
It takes several generations to eliminate the savagery
of a "tramp dog." The Peruvian pampa cur {Canis
Azarce), though evidently the descendant of some do-
mestic mongrel, is almost incurably shy. By dint of
persistent kindness Rengger succeeded in gaining the
confidence of a young pampa dog ; but at the approach
of a stranger he never failed to dart under his master's
bed, howling as if he had a cramp in the stomach if the
visitor so much as looked at him. The Mexican sierra-
goats are less misanthropic and cannot be reproached
with false modesty of any kind, but it is next to im-
ANIMAL RENEGADES.
167
possible to keep them near a farm. In winter-time
they appreciate the advantages of a warm stable ; but
the advent of spring makes them restless, till one fine
day they are off to the Sierra, sometimes in spite of
wooden collars and drag-ropes. The kid-season, too, is
apt to excite the migratory propensities of the dams ;
they do not like to bring forth in a land of bondage ;
some instinct seems to tell them that the Sierra is their
proper home.
By a sort of spontaneous reversion, a similar instinct
sometimes awakens in domestic pets ; the mere neigh-
borhood of a great wilderness seems to tempt them to
desert. Among the wild cattle of the Brazos Valley
the prairie-squatters often see a cow with a bell and an
ornamental strap, perhaps the gift of a Missouri farmer's
wife who advertised her pet as " strayed or stolen."
One of the most vivid recollections of my childhood
is an encounter with the bidet sauvage, the wild pony
that had roamed the Sambre highlands since the earliest
memory of such little men as my companions. We
were out after huckleberries, and had scattered among
the high broom-corn and hazelnut-thickets of the plateau
de Vence, when one of my comrades grabbed my arm
and pointed toward a little knoll where a solitary horse
was picking its way between the grass-fringed boulders.
We crept nearer and nearer till we reached a ledge of
cliffs on a level with the knoll, when my companion
clutched me once more. " Go slow !" he whispered ;
T 6S ZOOLOGICAL SKETCHES.
"oui, c'est lui, le bidet, the very pony: I know him by
that stump ear. Stop ! get down !"
We crouched behind the cliffs, but the pony had
already seen us or somebody behind us : he started,
stood still for a moment with his head high erect, then,
leaping back with a snort, he wheeled around and flew
over the plateau like a deer, down into a wooded dell
and up the opposite mountains, where we saw him gal-
loping along the ridge toward the head-waters of the
Rouge- Air.
That same pony outwitted the hunters and herders of
the Belgian Ardennes for more than eight years before
he was finally shot near the Col de Grappe in Northern
Lorraine. He seemed to know every pass and trail in
the wide highlands, and even the favorite haunts of in-
dividual hunters ; the game-keepers of Chateaumil had
seen him more than twenty times, though never within
shot-gun range and rarely without attracting his atten-
tion. During the hunting-season he was all suspicion
and fled at the first echo of a shot, but in midsummer,
when every wood was a hiding-place, he became more
confident, and sometimes ventured into the lower val-
leys, where a cow-boy once saw him browsing peace-
fully among the parish cattle. The lad slipped away to
summon his father, but when they came back with a
musket the bidet was gone, — warned perhaps by one
of those strange forebodings by which human outlaws
have sometimes been saved from impending danger.
ANIMAL RENEGADES.
169
Upon another occasion a company of hunters had
cornered him on a treeless ridge and opened fire as
they contracted their circle, but when they had all but
surrounded him he leaped down a cliff of twenty feet
into the gorge of the Font-au-Loup Creek and disap-
peared among the broken crags. One deponent averred
that he had watched him in the act of uprooting the
bushes and weeds on a promontory he wanted to use
as an observatory point ; another had seen him drive
a stray cow from his hill-pasture for fear that her ab-
sence would lead to a chase ; and many other stories
of that sort proved that we thought him capable of
almost anything. That he was bullet-proof nobody ven-
tured to question : it would have been an insult to all
the foresters of the Sambre Valley. The antecedents
of the old bushwhacker were somewhat obscure, but
it was known that he had once been in charge of a
farmer who kept a pasture for the saddle-horses of the
Alleville hotel, and I suppose that the contrast between
the green wilderness and the dusty pony-track so im-
pressed his manly soul that he decided to secede. His
forage-excursions were too well planned to get him into
trouble, but at certain seasons of the year he was in the
habit of visiting the lowlands on more risky business,
and that habit finally proved his ruin. He thrice stam-
peded the mares of a large stock-farm, whose owner at
last offered a prize of sixty francs for his skin. That
started a hue and cry, and two weeks after the bidet
170
ZOOLOGICAL SKETCHES.
met his fate in the form of a Lorraine poacher, who had
seen him in the woods and who availed himself of that
first chance to use his rifle upon legitimate game.
In a sparsely settled but tolerably fertile country
animal refugees soon accustom themselves to the vicis-
situdes of their wild life. The ten months' drought of
1877, which almost exterminated the domestic cattle of
Southern Brazil, was braved by the pampa cows, whom
experience had taught to derive their water-supply
from bulbous roots, cactus-leaves, and excavations in
the moist river-sand. Solid food is only a secondary
requirement; with a good supply of drinking-water
many animals would beat Dr. Tanner's time. But how
the Syrian Khamr dogs manage to make out a living
only the gods of the desert know. They rough it in
regions where no human hunter would discover a trace
of game and where water is as scarce as in the eternal
abode of Dives ; nay, they multiply, for the Khamr
bitch, like other poor mothers, is generally overblest
with progeny : six youngsters a year is said to be the
minimum. A sausage-maker would probably decline to
invest in Khamr dogs : the word leanness does not begin
to describe their physical condition ; strappedness would
be more to the purpose, if an Arkansas adjective admits
of that suffix, — skin and sinews tightly strapped over a
framework of bones. I saw their relatives in Dalmatia,
and often wondered that they did not rattle when they
ran ; but Dalmatia is still a country of vineyards and
ANIMAL RENEGADES.
171
sand-rabbits, while the Syrian desert has ceased to pro-
duce thorn-berries. Without moisture not even a curse-
can bear fruit.
Where food is plenty, wind and weather seem to
modify the physique of a tramp animal. Most wild dogs
MUSTANG COWS.
are bushy-tailed, gaunt, and fox-headed, and for some
occult reason almost invariably black-muzzled. It is
their clan-mark: judging from the snout alone, few
naturalists would be able to distinguish a tramp dog
172
ZOOLOGICAL SKETCHES.
from the pampa cur, the Khamr hound, the dog-wolf
(Cam's Anthus), or the Abu Hossein (Canis Lupastcr).
It does not improve their appearance ; in connection
with their wolfish eyes it reminds one too much of a
hyena-head. Wild horses generally bear a strange re-
semblance to the ponies of the Russian steppe, and some
of their characteristics may be recognized in the shape
of the mustang cows, as the Texans call the half-starved
cattle of the Mexican frontier. These horned mustangs,
like their equine namesakes, are lean, knock-kneed, and
thick-headed, besides having a rougher coat and a smaller
udder than our domestic milch-cows. They are good
fighters ; their natural weapons resemble the terrible
bayonet-horns of the Javanese wild cow and the more
than half-wild toros Galcgos that often turn the joke
against the Madrid bull-fighters.
A singular character-trait of all animal renegades is
their hostility toward their servile relatives. Travellers
on the Rio Grande have to be very careful in picketing
their saddle-horses, for if they stray into the prairie they
are sure to be " mobbed" and cruelly kicked by the
wild mustangs. A Bokhara courier, it appears, would
rather meet a panther than a troop of w r ild camels ; the
mere sight of the gaunt monsters will frighten a drome-
dary out of its wits, and, unless the rider has much gun-
powder to waste, the renegades, in spite of their timidity,
come nearer and nearer, the cows stretching their long
necks inquisitively, while the old males prance around
ANIMAL RENEGADES. l j^
with snorts that leave no doubt of their evil intentions.
This rancor seems to be aggravated by a sort of esprit
de corps, for in private life wild and tame beasts of the
same species agree well enough and even pair, voluntary
alliances between a dog and a female dingo, wild and
tame hogs, mares and mustangs, etc., are by no means
rare, but en masse their caste antagonism promptly as-
serts itself; just as a man may be the bosom friend of
a partisan whose greeting in a public assembly he would
hesitate to acknowledge : during the fever-heat of our
sectional feud more than one dweller in Dixie thought
it his duty to ku-klux his own brother. The only
animal I ever saw torn literally into shreds was a
Mexican butcher-dog that had followed us across the
Bolson de Mapimi, the rocky plateau between the plain
of Durango and the valley of the Rio Grande. The
dog's owner, a poor Chinaco, had tried hard to sell him,
but finally decamped with my partner's saddle-blanket,
leaving his mastiff in lieu of payment; and, in accordance
with a queer but well-known law of human nature, the
poor quadruped then became the target of retributive
attacks both verbal and practical ; but, apparently mis-
taking our tent-wagon for the lurking-place of his miss-
ing master, he followed us with the resignation of a
martyr. The Bolson is a ravinous country, and on the
day after the Chinaco's departure we passed a precipi-
tous gully at a place where a broken wheel and a lot of
scattered boards marked the scene of a recent accident.
l j 4 ZOOLOGICAL SKETCHES.
It looked like a slippery place, and, sure enough, down
in the gully, some forty feet below the road, lay the
carcass of a big mule, half buried in debris and sur-
rounded by a swarm of tramp dogs. They had just
begun their feast, and most of them were evidently in
need of it: there were about twenty of them, two of the
youngsters with a faint resemblance to half-grown shep-
herd-dogs, but all the rest of a more than wolfish lean-
ness. Famine never reduces the body of a wolf beyond
a certain point; his chest-bones make him look stout
in spite of his starved belly; but the skeleton of a dog
seems to shrink together with his bowels : some of the
tramps in the gully looked as if their ribs had been
strapped back upon their backbones, — " all legs and
spine," like spider-monkeys. The shrinking of the lips
had bared their teeth and gave them an unspeakably
savage appearance whenever they leered at us with their
deep-set eyes. Something or other seemed to excite
them, and, looking around, I saw our friend the mastiff
standing at the very edge of the ravine and looking
down with a sort of pensive interest. " That's what
folks come to who lose their masters," he might think
to himself as he gazed upon the hungry tramps. But,
while he gazed, one of the muleteers approached him
from behind, lifted his foot, and in the next moment the
mastiff's reflections were cut short by a kick that sent
him head over heels through the air into the abyss be-
low. What we call presence of mind is often nothing
ANIMAL RENEGADES.
175
but an instinctive impulse, — one of those instincts which
a mortal danger awakens even in the human soul. Dogs
are half human, guided partly by principles and preju-
dices, but in critical moments they act rightly from in-
tuition. When the mastiff landed in the gully he picked
WILD DOGS.
himself up and stood still, rigidly still, facing the tramps,
who had scattered in every direction but now gathered
around him with ominous looks. They approached
within ten or twelve yards and then came to a halt,
watching the intruder with a steadfast gaze, silently,
and with a gradual contraction of their haunches, like
^6 ZOOLOGICAL SKETCHES.
panthers crouching for a spring. Where the first move-
ment is sure to be a signal of attack, even great strate-
gists somehow prefer to let the enemy strike the first
blow and thus betray his tactics, — " forewarned, fore-
armed," — but circumstances are apt to disconcert such
plans. A thing not larger than a hazelnut, a pebble
thrown from the top of the rock, made the mastiff start
just for a moment, but in that moment the pack leaped
upon him with a simultaneous rush, and two seconds
after the sound of cracking bones announced the end
of the unequal struggle. They had borne him down
at the first onset, and when they finally ' dragged him
into the open gully I do not believe that there was an
unbroken joint in his body. Three of the big tramps
had done most of the killing, but now the whole pack
laid hold, and in less time than it takes me to write the
words they had torn him into pieces, not in the conven-
tional but in the literal sense of the word, — limb from
limb and rib from rib, — with a fury and a rage of de-
structiveness which plainly showed that hunger had
nothing to do with their motives. It was evidently an
act of revenge, provoked proximately by his uncer-
emonious intrusion, but chiefly, without doubt, by the
odium invidice, the pariah's deep-seated and long-cher-
ished hatred of the privileged caste whose representa-
tive had dared to beard them in their den. What right
had he to wax fat while they starved, — to fatten in the
service of the arch-usurper of all the good things of this
AXIMAL RENEGADES.
177
earth and then mock the leanness of virtuous liberals ?
" La mort sans phrase /"
Besides, dogs do not like to be interrupted in their
meals, and a carcass-feast makes them especially touchy.
I believe they are ashamed to be caught in an act of
that sort; they seem to feel that there is something de-
grading about it. Carrion-eating is always more or less
a last resort of famine : well-to-do quadrupeds leave such
things to the maw-worms. The chief carrion-eaters are
desert-dwellers, animals in peduced circumstances; for
I am sure that even hyenas and jackals prefer fresh meat
if they can get it. Vultures, on the other hand, have
a natural preference for their ugly diet : I once caged a
young galinasso, or Mexican king-vulture, and convinced
myself that his cadaverous predilections were incurable.
During my incidental absence he once remained a week
without food or drink, and when I came back, having
nothing else on hand, I gave him a young chicken, two
handfuls of bread-crumbs, and a bowlful of water. He
emptied the bowl to the last drop before night, but went
to sleep without having harmed the chicken. They
were together for the next four days, during which time
the gallina ate all the bread, while the galinasso starved
heroically; and when I killed the chicken he waited
another twenty-four hours before he touched it.
The history of communistic insurrections shows that
the chief wrath of the rebels is apt to explode against
the tools of tyranny, while the sovereign can generally
i 7 8
ZOOLOGICAL SKETCHES.
save himself by sacrificing a favorite minister. Four-
legged mutineers, too, are mostly illogical enough to
spare the Padisha of the animal empire, while they mob
his pashaws. In stress of circumstances they recognize
his superiority by claiming his protection ; in America,
especially, their independence has been too short to efface
the traces of so many centuries of servitude. In Hindo-
stan, where our black cattle come from, they are kept
only for the sake of their milk and their sacredness ;
centuries before Herodotus visited the temple of the
Egyptian god-bull, the Hindoos treated the cow as a
privileged being, and it takes rather rough evidence to
convince her that man is her enemy. The greatest
North-American slaughterer of horned cattle is per-
haps Captain J. Kellerman, proprietor of the Fronteras
matanza, or beef-packery, near Matamoros, Mexico.
He kills them and skins them by thousands, both at his
establishment and in the open prairie, where his steeple-
chasers wage unremitting war against all unbranded
cows ; but the survivors once proved that they trusted
him, after all. He had pitched his camp near Agua-
deras, in the midst of a big chaparral, when, just before
nightfall, the crashing gallop of a cow-herd put his
butchers on the qui vive. They made a rush for their
horses, but there was no need of them : the cows headed
straight for the camp, and by no means accidentally, for
they only accelerated their career when they saw the
camp-fires. When they had approached within a hun-
ANIMAL RENEGADES.
179
dred yards, the captain saw that they were pursued by
a troop of gray wolves, whose leader at last wheeled to
the left about, while the cows kept right on, and, rush
ing into the camp, crowded, snorting and trembling,
around the tethered horses. They were mostly cows
and yearlings, some thirty altogether; and a Hindoo
would probably faint to learn that the butchers " bagged"
about twenty of them.
The Fronteras chaparral swarms with wild dogs,
and during my stay in Matamoros the captain made a
curious experiment with a " tramp bitch," whose puppies
had been captured in the neighborhood of the matanza.
The beef-packery is guarded at night by a dozen ugly-
looking mastiffs, and the tramp dogs generally give the
establishment an extensive berth ; but in the hard winter
of '76 they put in an appearance, at least in daytime,
when the mastiffs were chained up. They used to sit in
groups on the slope of a little hill near the matanza,
appealing to the charity of the proprietor by yelping in
chorus every now and then. There was so much waste
stuff around the place that the captain concluded to
grant their petition, and, by way of encouragement, sent
them a car-load of beef-bones and " rippings," instruct-
ing the driver to scatter the scraps between the hill and
the bone-pit. The tramps took the hint, and soon visited
the pit every morning, in spite of the furious protest of
the chain dogs. All went well for a couple of months:
the tramps enjoyed their bonanza discreetly, and the
j8o zoological sketches.
chained mastiffs became hoarse and more tolerant. But
in the horse-stable, behind the packery, a mastiff bitch
had been quartered with her litter of puppies, and one
evil day the door was left open, and the bitch at once
made a rush for the pit. If she wanted a bellyful she
missed her object, for the tramps killed and disembow-
elled her before the rescuing-party reached the scene of
the conflict. Profanity is doubly heinous when it cannot
mend matters : the bitch had been imported from Cuba,
and her five little ones were all blind yet ; but there
seemed no help for them; there was no milch-cow on
the place, and hand-fed puppies are a terrible nuisance.
They were just going to drown them, when a Mexican
boy-of-all-work suggested a better plan. He had seen
a wild perra, a tramp bitch, that could be utilized as a
wet-nurse. Whenever the perros entered the pit, she
snatched up a bone and hastened back to the chaparral,
and always in the same direction ; once or twice she had
come back within five minutes, so her lair could not be
very far off. A promise of two dollars created a general
interest in the enterprise, and before night the exploring
party returned with the perra and eight perritos : they
had tracked her to a hollow in a ravine and captured
her with a common flour-bag.
Nursing animals do not like to adopt orphans while
their own children are alive, and killing the perritos
might make the mother still more intractable : so the
matter had to be managed by stratagem. They chained
ANIMAL RENEGADES. x % x
her up in the stable and left her alone with her own pup-
pies, but after an hour or so, one boy slipped a bag over
her head while another substituted a young mastiff for
one of the perritos, and so on, till she had five change-
lings and three legitimate puppies. The perra was as
snappish as a trap-caught panther, yelled, howled, and
made desperate attempts to break away ; but the main
point was reached, — she suckled the puppies, both her
own and the mastiff's; nay, like the foster-mothers of
young cuckoos, she seemed rather partial to the big sub-
stitutes. After a week or two her temper, too, improved ;
and when the puppies began to waddle around with open
eyes she seemed reconciled to her captivity, as long as
the youngsters did not crawl out of reach. But when
they did, she often jumped after them with force enough
almost to break the strap, and on one occasion not only
almost, but quite, enough, for when the door was opened
she darted out, and, clearing the fence with a single
bound, whisked across the field and disappeared in the
adjoining chaparral. She must have been very anxious
to get away, for in the floor of the stable, close behind the
door, she had dug a hole by tearing out a loose plank and
excavating the stamped loam underneath, first outward
and then upward, — so far up that another night's work
would have liberated her anyhow. She had answered
the purpose of her capturers, though ; the puppies were
a month old and had begun to eat alone : so the captain
detailed a boy to feed them, and said no more about it.
13
!82 ZOOLOGICAL SKETCHES.
The next morning one of the packery hands happened
to pass the stable, and noticed a big hole, that seemed to
have been dug from the outside in a way to communi-
cate with a tunnel under the stable-boards. He informed
the groom, his first impression being that the puppies
were gone; the bitch must have fetched them during
the night. But no ; there they sat in their basket, all
eight of them, munching away at some strange-looking
object, which upon examination proved to be the body
of a young gazapo, or mule-eared rabbit. There was
only one possible explanation, though it seemed almost
incomprehensible how the bitch could have dug a hole
of that size in a single night, — a short summer night at
that. And, moreover, how had she managed to elude
the mastiffs? They had been unchained at sundown,
and always patrolled the premises in every direction.
The groom slept in the stable the next night, but nothing
stirred ; the night after, however, he was awakened by
the yelping of the puppies, and, lighting his lantern,
found that they were fighting over the remains of a big
prairie-cock which some inaudible caterer must have
brought them before midnight. It was now decided to
recapture the bitch, if it could be done without hurting
her, and the best plan seemed to be to catch her in her
own trap by fastening a slip-noose over the entrance of
her tunnel. But she was up to such tricks: five differ-
ent times, at intervals varying from two to four days, did
she visit the stable on her errand of love and get off
ANIMAL RENEGADES.
I8 3
safely; only once the groom heard her scratch and fuss
around, as if she had got into a tight place, but before
he reached the trap all was still, and when he opened the
door he thought he saw her skip over the moonlit yard.
The lariat was drawn back into the hole, as if she had
caught herself and slipped the noose off her neck. She
always brought something or other, either game or a
choice bone from the pit, and the puppies became so
used to their nocturnal banquets that they whined all
night whenever she omitted her visit.
The groom at last concluded to change his tactics.
The stable had a loft with a separate door that could be
reached by a rough-hewn stair of fifteen or sixteen steps.
If the puppies were quartered in the loft, the bitch might
try to reach them, and, finding the door locked, would
probably dig and scratch, and thus awaken the groom.
The plan was tried, and the puppies whined all night,
but the perra returned no more. The love of liberty,
after all, limited her maternal devotion, and within those
limits she had done what she could.
CHAPTER VIII.
PETS.
There are instincts the study of which gives one a
curious insight into the methods by which Nature at-
tains her objects. Self-preservation is said to be her
first law, and it is easy to see how " natural selection"
could enforce compliance with such a decree : creatures
that had mastered the art of taking care of themselves
survived, the others perished ; and the obvious neces-
sity of that result still fills the school of life with eager
pupils. But there are non-egotistical instincts whose
real purpose has been carefully concealed. The in-
amorato blindly sacrifices his interests to those of the
species. The ostentatious nabob becomes a patron of
art and industries. "Vanitas," says Burton, "is a far
better almoner than Caritas." The hobby-rider, the col-
lector, the curiosity-monger, tug stoutly in the harness
of science. Nature, it seems, rather mistrusts our sense
of duty, and thinks it safer to bait a task with the
semblance of a pleasure whenever she wants to engage
our services on behalf of our fellow-men.
With the same trick she overcomes the still greater
184
pe rs.
185
difficulty of employing the abilities of a superior species
for the benefit of an inferior one. Against the resources
of the constructive two-hander some of his poor fellow-
creatures are unable to hold their own, and they would
lean on a brittle reed if they had to rely on his Christian
forbearance or on his recognition of their, perhaps some-
what recondite, usefulness. But the pet-mania solves
the problem, — an instinct with an egotistical mask, but
all its caprices shrewdly calculated to offset the effects
of our destructive propensities. Helpless creatures can
hardly be useful ones, but their dependence flatters our
self-esteem, so we protect them, and Nature's purpose
is answered. Finely organized animals need more care
than others ; we make them our special favorites, ap-
parently on account of such incidental qualities as their
playfulness and intelligence. We prefer rare pets, plaus-
ibly because of our fondness for out-of-the-way things,
esoterically because they probably represent a species
in danger of extinction. For instance, when the ur-ox,
the ibex, and the bustard {Otis tarda) were on the point
of being exterminated, they became such favorites with
preserve-owners that their survival is now abundantly
insured. There is a strange virtue in rarity. I suppose
that our buffaloes, too, will become objects of vertu in
time to save them from utter extirpation.
Curiosity-hunters sometimes dote upon creatures that
would rather dispense with that honor ; but, on the
whole, protectors are in greater demand than proteges ;
^6 ZOOLOGICAL SKETCHES.
hangers-on are less often sought than found. Young
animals are naturally submissive. The " myth-making
propensity" of Monsieur Du Chaillu has perhaps been
exaggerated, but I cannot help thinking that the stories
about the uncompromising ferocity of his gorilla-babies
must be apocryphal. The one that died last year in
the Berlin aquarium-building was as playful as a child,
and far more long-suffering and resigned, — "placid as a
Hindoo," as Herr Behrens expressed it, and as, indeed,
all analogies would lead one to expect in an animal
whose anatomy, diet, and habitat are those of the vege-
tarian chimpanzee. Old orangs and chacma-baboons
are churlish customers, but their young ones make most
amiable pets ; young tapirs, in spite of their pig-like
stupidity, are by no means intractable; and I have often
wished to try my luck with a young grizzly, for I am
sure that jaguar-cubs can be made as tame as kittens.
I raised one whose diet had certainly nothing to do with
his gentleness, for I had nothing to give him but rats
and beef; but I kept him nearly a year and a half before
I ever knew him to hurt anybody intentionally; children
and strangers could tease him with impunity, and I
noticed that he always retracted his claws when the
house-dog engaged him in a sham fight. The young
of many animals, and especially of the feline species,
have a curious way of parading their submissiveness
by crawling to their master's feet, purring, and rubbing
against his knees, or turning over on their backs, — a
rETS.
symbolic expression of unconditional surrender
seem to feel their defici-
ency in useful qualities,
and try to make amends
by an appeal to our af-
fections. The develop-
ment of their natural
weapons does not
always awaken the m^
disposition to em-
ploy them against a
despotic master, un-
less circum-
stances as-
sure them
that his pro-
tection can
187
They
' JUANITA.
be dispensed with ; captive baboons ot an advanced age
X 88 ZOOLOGICAL SKETCHES.
still treat their keeper with a filial affection whose demon-
strativeness fluctuates with the quality of the menu. For
similar reasons danger often effects the sudden conver-
sion of an infidel pet. The post-trader of the Fortin
de San Pablo, near Mazatlan, is the nominal proprietor
of an old ocelot that has long ceased to recognize
his authority. Juanita' absents herself for weeks to-
gether, and visits the post only as a guest, or rather
as a privileged member of an inspecting-committee, for
she rummages the premises, appears and disappears
without asking anybody's leave, and resents every
familiarity on the part of her former patron. But one
evening she had just entered his store, when a troop of
horsemen alighted at the gate, and a minute after a
government scout with a big wolf-dog stepped up to
the counter, while his comrades deposited their saddle-
bags near the open door. Juanita cast an uneasy
glance at the blockaded door, and in the next instant
caught sight of the dog, and he of her, when the
attitudes of both parties became so disagreeably sug-
gestive of an impending set-to that the scout reached
for a stick to chase his dog out. But Juanita either
misconstrued his motive or had already made up her
mind to secure a vantage-ground, for just when he
faced about she leaped upon the counter, and with
the next jump upon the shoulder of her old master,
and there proceeded to " get her back up," growling
viciously and bristling up into twice her natural size,
PETS. 189
— exactly like a frightened kitten on top of an easy-
chair.
Professor Brehm had a similar experience with a
truant chimpanzee. The little scamp had the run of
the Hamburg menagerie, and one day had managed
to squeeze himself through the bars of the bear-rotunda,
when one of the rightful tenants sallied from his den
with a growl that made Jacko scramble up the centre-
pole in wild haste. He found, however, that more than
one could play at that game, for the bear espied him
and came up the pole hand-over-fist ; but when he had
nearly reached him, Jacko jumped off, and clear out-
side of the enclosure, and then rushed into the arms
of a by-stander, whom he hugged in a transport of
tenderness, — " as a person saved from drowning would
embrace his rescuer."
As a general rule, the spontaneous tameness of a
creature depends on the degree of its helplessness, and
the young of the most intelligent animals, being, with
few exceptions, the least able to shift for themselves,
are naturally the most anxious to secure a protector.
Pigs can run and root almost as soon as they are born,
and are remarkably independent cadets; puppies are
cringingly submissive, and young monkeys not only
accept but demand human protection. A young ma-
caque, exposed in the middle of the market-square, will
tackle the first passer-by, mount him, and cling to him
as to a responsible relative, and fly out into a fit of
190
ZOOLOGICAL SKETCHES.
exasperated jumps and screams if the stranger should
decline the trust. One night I lost a little bonnet-
macaque, together with a pet squirrel, and thought I
had seen the last of them, as they had both been bitten
by a savage cur whose owner had entered the garden-
house by mistake. The squirrel had escaped to the
woods, and never returned ; but the next morning, as I
was going toward the town, I saw my little macacus
sitting in the middle of a cross-road, Micawber-like,
waiting for something to turn up. The moment he saw
me coming he made for me, but hearing a wagon ap-
proach from the other side, he turned around, jumped
aboard, and took a seat by the side of the astonished
driver. It was evidently not a case of personal attach-
ment, but of philanthropy in general : like Madame de
l'Enclos, he loved man in abstracto.
Billy Hammock, a mountain-squatter near White Cliff
Springs, Tennessee, and supposed to be the champion
fawn-catcher of his native State, informed me that most
of his speckled pets had been caught by his little son
in the huckleberry season, — i.e., quite incidentally. It
puzzled me how the little lad could have brought them
home from the distant mountain-ranges he mentioned as
his chief hunting-grounds, till he assured me that they
followed him, after having been carried for a quarter of a
mile or so ; and, judging from the importunate tameness
of an all but new-born specimen, I had no reason to
doubt his statement.
PETS. igi
The European stork seems naturally so fond of human
society that he prefers the roof of a Dutch farm-house
to the best nest-tree, and where he can be sure of good
winter-quarters he has even been known to forego his
yearly trip to the tropics, though his powerful wings
would carry him in four days from North Holland to
the rush-meadows of the Senegal. All intelligent birds
can be domesticated, and the most intelligent of all, the
common crow, is one of the kw creatures that can be
equally well tamed at any age. The old ones are harder
to catch than any other birds of our latitude, but once
boxed up they forthwith surrender at discretion, and in
a day or two follow their captor all over the house and
treat rival pets with vigilant jealousy. I have often won-
dered how tame crows and monkeys would probably be
if they had been under civilizing influences for as many
generations as some of our domestic animals, — chickens,
for instance. The dawn-heralding cock is mentioned in
the Sama-Veda; but sixty centuries of domestication
have only half cured the innate shyness of his tribe.
" Rushing around like a scared chicken," is an often-used
phrase of the German language : corner a barn-yard fowl
in a narrow lane, and see how it will illustrate the fitness
of the simile. A tame crow under such circumstances
would probably hop on your shoulder or step aside and
let you pass. Anatomists could suggest one reason for
the difference : in proportion to its size, a raven has about
five times as much brains as a gallinaceous fowl.
192
ZOOLOGICAL SKETCHES.
The question whether there are any untamable animals
requires a nearer definition of the somewhat ambiguous
adjective. Untamable, in the sense of undomesticable,
I believe there are none. With the proviso of a guaran-
tee against socage-duty or a change of their natural
habits, few animals would decline the hospitality of the
homo sapiens, especially in countries where the sapient
one has become the monopolist of all the good things of
this earth. Let any one sweep the snow from his bal-
cony, scatter the cleared space with crumbs, and put the
balcony-key where the children cannot find it, and see
how soon his place will become the resort of feathered
guests, — not of town-sparrows only, but of linnets, tit-
mice, and other birds that are rarely seen out of the
woods. A little discretion will soon encourage them to
enter the window and fetch their lunch from the break-
fast-table, — by and by even in the presence of their host,
for the fear of man is a factitious instinct, unsupported
by the elder intuition that teaches animals to distinguish
a frugivorous creature from a beast of prey. With so
simple a contrivance as a wooden box with a round hole,
starlings, blackbirds, martins, crows, jays, and even owls,
can be induced to rear their young under the roof of a
human habitation ; squirrels, hedgehogs, and raccoons
soon find out a place where they can get an occasional
snack without having to pay with their hides.
Hamman, the famous German sceptic, used to feed a
swarm of sea-gulls, often the only visitors to his lonely
PE7S.
193
cottage on the shore of the Baltic. The neighbors sus-
pected him of necromantic tricks, but he assured them
that his whole secret consisted in never interfering with
STRANGE MESSMATES.
his guests, — keeping a free lunch on hand and letting
them take their own time and way about eating it. The
same magic had probably bewitched the pets of Miss
194
ZOOLOGICAL SKETCHES,
Meiringer, the daughter of a German colonist of New
Freyburg, Brazil. Her father was a self-taught natu-
ralist, and his collections have been described by several
South-American travellers ; but in the opinion of the
natives his curiosity-shop was eclipsed by the menagerie
of his daughter, who had tamed some of the wildest
denizens of the forest, though evidently on the suaviter
in modo plan, since most of her pets boarded themselves
or only took an occasional breakfast at the fazenda.
Among her more regular guests were a couple of red
coaties, or nose-bears, several bush-snakes, and one large
boa, a formidable-looking monster with the disposition
of a lap-dog, for at a signal from his benefactress he
would try to curl himself up in her apron, with a super-
numerary coil or two around her knees.
There may be something, however, in personal mag-
netism. All menagerie-keepers know that there are per-
sons who exercise over wild animals an influence which
it takes others years to acquire. The chronicler of St.
Renaldus tells a rather tough story about a troop of
wild deer attending the saint's funeral ; but the testimony
of Moslems and Giaours seems to confirm the tradition
that a Santon, or Mohammedan hermit, near Buda-Pesth
had tamed the hill-foxes of the Bakony-Wald, and on
his mountain-rambles used to call them from their bur-
rows. Wordsworth's legend of the " White Doe of
Rylstone" may also be founded on an actual occurrence,
for that some attachments of that sort have had other
PETS.
195
motives than hunger and fear seems proved by many
curious and often very circumstantial accounts of ancient
and modern naturalists. Saxo Grammaticus speaks of a
bear that kidnapped a child and kept it a long time in
his den, and Burbequius, in his account of the Turkish
embassy, mentions a lynx that had taken such a fancy
to one of his men that his mere presence produced " a
sort of intoxication" and his absence despair and finally
the death of the animal. (" Legat. Turk.," chap, iii.)
Pliny, the Roman Humboldt, mentions a tradition of a
cow that followed a Pythagorean philosopher in all his
travels ; but where did he come across that strange story
of the love-lorn dolphin that had been the playmate of a
child, and, when the child died, came ashore in search of
him and thus perished?
The tale of the Roman she-wolf, however, may be
something more than a myth. In Dr. Ball's late work
on Eastern Hindostan ("Jungle Life in India") there is
the following curious account of two children in the
orphanage of Sekandra, near Agra, who had been dis-
covered among wolves. " A trooper sent by a native
governor of Chandaur to demand payment of some rev-
enue was passing along the bank of the river about
noon, when he saw a large female wolf leave her den,
followed by three whelps and a little boy. The boy
went on all-fours, and, when the trooper tried to catch
him, he ran as fast as the whelps and kept up with the
old one. They all entered the den, but were dug out by
jg5 zoological sketches.
the people with pickaxes, and the boy was secured. He
struggled hard to rush into every hole or gully they
came near. When he saw a grown-up person he became
alarmed, but tried to fly at children and bite them. He
rejected cooked meat with disgust, but delighted in raw
flesh and bones, putting them under his paws like a
dog."
The other case occurred at Chupra, in the Presidency
of Bengal. In March, 1843, a Hindoo mother went out
to help her husband in the field, and while she was cut-
ting rice her little boy was carried off by a wolf. About
a year afterward, a wolf, followed by several cubs and a
strange, ape-like creature, was seen about ten miles from
Chupra. The nondescript, after a lively chase, was caught
and recognized (by the mark of a burn on his knee) as
the Hindoo boy that had disappeared in the rice-field.
He would eat nothing but raw flesh, and could never be
taught to speak, but expressed his emotions in an inar-
ticulate mutter. His elbows and the pans of his knees
had become horny from going on all-fours with the
wolves. In the winter of 1850 this boy made several
desperate attempts to regain his freedom, and in the fol-
lowing spring he escaped for good and disappeared in
the jungle-forest of Bhangapore.
Muhammed Baber, in his memoirs, speaks of a fugitive
Afghan chieftain who was fed by a tame mountain-wolf ' ;
and there is no doubt that many pets of the larger species
have voluntarily supported their owner instead of being
PETS.
I 9 7
supported by him, — especially where their employment
agreed with their natural habits, though in animals, as in
some human beings, there seems to be a certain esprit
THE GER-EAGLE.
d' office which in the service of an imperious master makes
them do what they would not dare to do for themselves.
14
198
ZOOLOGICAL SKE TCLIES.
The last Rajah of Oude had a pack of hunting-panthers
(" cheetahs"), that often took the field of their own
accord, and used to deliver at least a portion of their
prey, even if the expedition had not been successful,
enough to satisfy their own hunger. Nearly every
Mexican cazique kept a trained eagle, whose value, ac-
cording to Devega's chronicle, was often estimated at a
sum representing the price of ten slaves.
That eagles can be utilized as well as falcons is proved
by the experiments of the Forster Althofer, the overseer
of an imperial game-preserve near Judenburg in Styria.
He has trained both the Lammergeyer and the Stcinadler
(golden eagle) of the Styrian Alps, but prefers the latter,
and estimates that his pet ger-eagle saves him each year
from twenty to thirty florins' worth of powder and shot.
It is strange that the " gentle art of falconry" has gone
so utterly out of fashion : on our Western prairies and
in the water-fowl headquarters of Southern Florida it
would be rare sport to slip a winged retriever, and, if the
rush of our business life should leave us no time to do
the training ourselves, we could get ready-drilled birds
from Western China, where every landed proprietor
keeps a pair or two.
But not only pretty or useful creatures find protectors;
Vishnu has other pensioners on his list :
For ugly things
He findeth friends and food.
PETS. lgg
Some people seem, indeed, to select a pet on the prin-
ciple that it is not likely to find other friends. St. An-
thony's fondness for pigs may have endeared him to the
hearts of his countrymen, but Lady Hester Stanhope's
curs were such an eyesore to her Mussulman neighbors
that they made wide detours rather than pass her home
in the daytime. She kept leprous mongrels and tame
jackals, as well as hunting-dogs. But her caprices were
far surpassed by the eccentricities of Lord Rokeby, whose
country-seat at Mount Morris seems to have been a pro-
miscuous menagerie of the free-and-easiest kind. Dogs,
pigs, monkeys, and young bears galloped up- and down-
stairs ; a troop of fallow deer had their headquarters on
the veranda and their parade-ground in the lower hall.
The rooks had spread from the park to the turrets and
garrets of the mansion, and defied the housekeeper, my
lord being their helper. He, too, seems to have followed
Hamman's plan of never touching his pets, merely giv-
ing them their board and their own way. Dr. Brehm's
pet hyenas were long the marvel of his Hamburg fellow-
citizens ; but Frank Buckland's fondness for rats has
been unjustly ridiculed, — they are really as playful as
squirrels, and get wonderfully tame. Useless dogs are
generally the most affectionate, and the same rule holds
good of other animals : the most unprofitable pets are
the most demonstrative in their attachments. Tame rats
will lick your hands like little spaniels. Monkeys gener-
ally try to ingratiate themselves by entomological re-
200 ZOOLOGICAL SKETCHES.
searches or by guarding the door against an imaginary
foe, — listening and starting with well-feigned excitement,
like a barking lap-dog simulating wheeziness by way of
signalizing his official zeal. It may be real gratitude,
though : a disinterestedly beneficent and, as far as they
can perceive, omnipotent being must be a god in their
eyes. Munificence charms even a quadruped savage, —
unselfish munificence, at least. For it quickly alters the
matter if we expect any services in return, especially
such as involve a loss of personal liberty. In this sense
a good many wild animals are not tamable, or only
apparently so. It is curious after how many years of
seeming resignation the involuntary recluses of our
menageries will avail themselves of the first opportunity
to escape. In the winter of 1875, Professor Rentz, the
German Barnum, lost one of his lions during a freight-
train collision near Furth, on the Frankfort and Ratisbon
Railroad. The deserter had been one of his performing
animals, and during the last six years his keeper had
often permitted him to leave his cage ; but this had been
his first chance for an out-door ramble, and he certainly
made the best of that chance. Five weeks afterward he
was shot near Villach, in Carinthia, having evidently
tried to rejoin his free relatives, for in that interval he
had travelled nearly a thousand miles southeast, or rather
as nearly due south as the Alps would let him.
Monkeys can never be trusted in summer-time. The
mere sight of a snow-storm is enough to scare them
PETS. 20 1
from an open window; but in the dog-days they cast
many a wistful glance at the outer world, with its groves
and apple-trees: man lives not by bread alone, and a
velvet collar cannot reconcile him to a wire chain. Pas-
sive obedience is all one can expect from old-caught ani-
mals, and with those of the naturally pugnacious species
it can be enforced only by a reign of terror. The wild
representatives of the genus Cants will snap at your
hand whenever you give them a chance. I once asked
a German zoologist if there was no way of curing a
jackal of that habit. "Oh, yes," said he: "measure
him for his life, and thrash him twice a day within an
inch of it." The devotion of the so-called pets of our
travelling shows is often a sort of devil-worship : the
panoply of the TJiicrbdndiger (" beast-compeller") of
Rentz's circus reminded me of the inquisitorial appa-
ratus in the Nuremberg armory, — goads, nose-wrenches,
leg-wrenches, spike-collars, hot-iron prods, pincers, .chok-
ing-straps, whips, and knock-down clubs.
But there are pets that defy even such arguments.
The most expert trappers of the Old World are prob-
ably the hunters of the Rhaetian Alps on the border of
Switzerland and Italy. They catch bears and foxes,
kill thousands of squirrels, and visit the Swiss watering-
places with cargoes of living pets boxed up in the
smallest possible receptacles. Marmots form the staple
of these peddling cazatori, but they keep also larger
animals; and during my sojourn at Fluelen, on the Lake
202 ZOOLOGICAL SKETCHES.
of Lucerne, a travelling marmottier sold my landlord a
big mountain-lynx, warranted live and sound, though
his temporary cage — a plank box with small air-holes
— did not give him much chance to display his liveli-
ness ; but before the landlord paid the money he trans-
ferred the prisoner to a big chicken-cage of strong
boards and faced with a door of stout woven wire.
Darkness seems to cow wild animals, for in his new
quarters the lynx soon began to snort around in a way
that left no doubt of his warranted qualities: so the
bargain was struck, and the Rhaetian exile became a
permanent boarder at the Black Bear tavern.
Some very ingenious bird- and fly-traps have been
constructed on the principle that captive animals always
try to escape lightwards, probably from an association
of daylight with the outer air and liberty. For the first
three days our pet concentrated all his efforts upon a
certain corner of the door where the meshes were a
little larger, and by grim perseverance actually suc-
ceeded in breaking one of the wires. But the only
point thus gained was a sharp iron prong which lacer-
ated his jaws in a frightful way, till the landlord pried
the wire out and replaced it by a ten-penny nail. The
prisoner then changed his tactics. Somehow the con-
duct of his jailers had led him to infer that their object
was not to eat and skin him, but to retain him in per-
petuo for his supposed amiable qualities : so he con-
cluded to make himself as disagreeable as possible.
PETS. 2 Q3
He would double himself up in a corner of his cage,
looking unutterable things, and as soon as anybody
came near the door fly at, or at least in the direction
of, his face with an impetus that bent the wires, sug-
gesting dire consequences if ever the door should give
way altogether. These demonstrations he accompanied
with a peculiar yell, something between a* hiss and a
howl, and in the night-time he often uttered that same
cry, at uncertain intervals at first, but afterward with
the regularity of a minute-gun. The guests complained,
and the Bear landlord resolved to silence the serenader.
He procured a big horse-syringe, filled it with absinthe,
and made the hostler conceal himself behind the cage.
Whenever the prisoner raised his voice, the hostler
raised his syringe and drenched him with wormwood
extract till he could not doubt that his laments only
increased the bitterness of his situation. But despair
is as inspiring as hunger, and somehow the lynx found
out that the wood-work was the least impenetrable part
of his cage, — nay, that the rear board in particular was
of a less obdurate texture. This board he now attacked
with tooth and nail, to which he superadded a concus-
sive force by stepping back every now and then and
leaping head foremost against the centre of the panel.
The landlord watched his manoeuvres, and finally got
uneasy. " He's a Grison," said he, "and his countrymen
are a headstrong set. We shall have to forestall him."
He rummaged his garret and found just what he wanted,
2Q4 ZOOLOGICAL SKETCHES.
— an old oven-grate, that converted the imperilled board
into a heavy-barred window with a wooden shutter.
But the Grison found a road to freedom in spite of
iron bars. He retreated to the rear of his cage, with
his face toward the darkest corner, and thus remained
motionless, day after day, though the disappearance of
his provisions seemed to prove that he must spend his
nights in a less pessimistic way. His serenades, at least,
had never been resumed, and the landlord flattered him-
self with the hope that he was going to accept the situa-
tion, when the hostler discovered that his last two weeks'
provisions had been hidden under the straw, and that the
prisoner was in articulo mortis, to judge from the glassy
appearance of his eyes, and from the feeble groans which
the cover of his straw couch made almost inaudible.
" I'm up to that game," laughed the landlord. " I had a
fox that tried that same trick on me. We'll soon make
him eat: all we have to do is to chuck out his straw; if
he sees the meat, he won't resist the temptation."
But before the cage was opened the groans became
lower and lower and finally ceased, and when we re-
moved the straw we found that the Grison was already
beyond worldly temptations : he had solved the problem
of Gautama in a way of his own.
Miracles usually end where the Age of Reason begins,
and it has been pointed out as a suspicious circumstance
that snake-charmers are the almost exclusive product of
semi-barbarous countries. But Dr. Grotius reminds us
PETS. 205
that the discovery of a new law of nature would enable
any man to work apparent miracles ; and there is no
doubt that the out-door life of such long-headed barba-
rians as the Chinese and Hindoos has put them on the
track of some useful zoological secrets. Observation
and invention are two widely-different faculties ; the
crude empiricism of our forefathers has led to sundry
discoveries which our analytical methods might have
failed to achieve. Besides, the East-Indian beast-
charmers belong to a special caste, a corporation that
has carefully preserved its trade secrets. For, in Hindo-
stan, snake-charming is a branch of a regular business
that includes horse-breaking, rat-catching, monkey-train-
ing, and other occupations that must give their adepts a
peculiar insight into the faculties and foibles of animal
nature. A tame snake is only a side-show of the Guru-
walla, or travelling vermin-destroyer; or, so to say, a
living diploma of his mastership. He uses a trained
cobra as a business-advertisement.
Jugglers with dancing snakes are seen on every Ben-
gal market-place, but the grand masters of their craft
exhibit very different tricks. Lord Dalhousie's guru-
walla-en-chef used to call rats from their holes in broad
daylight, and had a water-snake that followed him like a
dog and could not be driven out of the room as long as
its master was present. He had evidently established
some hold on the affections of his strange pet, for he
never failed to bring her back by a single whistle after
20 6 ZOOLOGICAL SKETCHES.
flinging her into the middle of a pond where she could
easily have escaped if her subjection had been an invol-
untary servitude. His favorite trick was to get a lot of
the common black tree-snakes {Coluber dry as) and by a
mere word make them engage each other in mortal com-
bat, — snakes which but a minute before had lain coiled
together in a sluggish repose from which no other human
voice could rouse them even for a moment. By a slightly
different sound he would inspire them with a panic that
sent them darting out of the room, and out of the house
if the doors were open ; nor did he trouble himself on
such occasions to recapture them, for, after a few hours'
manipulation, a batch of fresh-caught snakes would serve
his purpose as well.
The professional jugglers prefer the cobra only as the
least expensive of all sensational animals, for crocodiles
and pythons are equally tamable. The wardens of the
sacred crocodile-ponds near Benares keep their pets under
perfect control, and, as Captain Godwin Buchanan assures
us, through influences among which hunger is only a
minor item. His opinion seems confirmed by the state-
ments of a famous Spanish beast-tamer, proprietor of a
cockpit and pulque-shop in Tampico, Mexico. The
effluent canal of the Tampico Laguna is well stocked
with alligators, whose services to the health-police have
made them a sort of public proteges. They live upon
the offal of the slaughter-houses, and are so well fed that
they can afford to spare their two-legged fellow-citizens :
PETS.
207
they mind their own business and give bathers a wide
THE ALLIGATOR-CHARMER.
berth. But the cockpit landlord has a negro-of-all-work
208 ZOOLOGICAL SKETCHES.
who for a couple of coppers will convoke the caymans
as a farmer would summon his pigs, — nay, often without
any audible signal, by merely going to the water's edge
and standing with uplifted hands till the alligators throng
around him in crowds. He declines to divulge his modus
operandi, but his employer is positive that he never feeds
or touches his pets. About his private theory the pul-
quero, too, is somewhat reticent ; but when my former
colleague, Dr. Landgrebe, of Tampico, once asked him
a home question, — " What could possibly induce the
caymans to gather around a person who never feeds
them?"— "No se" ("I don't know"), he replied: " se
cogan los castores con cl r astro" ("beavers are baited with
a scent").
In Europe the rat-catching business is monopolized
by the gypsies, who may have imported their methods
from their native country, for it is now an established fact
that their race are the descendants of a tribe that left
Hindostan during the reign of the first Mogul dynasty.
In Austria, where the zigeuner are as frequent as tramps
in New England, a rat-catcher will take a contract to
expurgate a farm for ten kreutzers (about eight cents) a
house, and twenty kreutzers the whole premises ; and he
certainly earns his fee. He uses both traps and poison ;
but the peculiarity of his bait is its instantaneous effect.
With poisoned cream-cheese a man might kill a good
many things in the course of a year; but the zigeuner
will lock himself up in a stable, and after an hour or so
PETS. 2Q g
come out with a bagful of mice, live or dead, at the
option of his employer. Their incantations are con-
fessedly a " blind," a sham imitation of an art which the
masters of their guild reserve for themselves, for the
exploits of the Oriental jugglers leave no doubt that
musical instruments form the essential tools of their
trade, and I have often wondered if the story of the
Pied Piper, and even that of Orpheus, may not be some-
thing more than an allegory. The undoubted ability of
the professional guruwallas to convene a troop of rats in
broad daylight is not a whit less marvellous : the tricks
of the crocodile-wardens might be founded upon a char-
acter-study of individual saurians; but the exorcism of
a swarm of wary and timid domestic parasites seems to
imply the discovery of a key to a generic peculiarity of
such creatures.
Much less miraculous is the tameness of an old house-
hold pet, no matter of what species, for the daily inter-
course with human beings has an almost incalculable
effect in transforming the character of a captive animal.
Next to the love of liberty the love of life is certainly
the master-instinct of every living creature ; yet domesti-
cation has subordinated this instinct to the wholly arti-
ficial sentiment of man-worship. At the bidding of a
revered master, dogs, gerfalcons, horses, camels, and
even elephants, will rush to certain death, and not
blindly, either, but open-eyed and with a persistent sup-
pression of the horror naturalis and a disregard of well-
2IO
ZOOLOGICAL SKETCHES.
known dangers that must be called a deliberate self-sacri-
fice. Major Keogh's old roan, the only survivor of the
Big-Horn massacre, was found limping about the battle-
field with eleven bullets in his body, yet every now and
then hobbling back to the place where his rider had
fallen ; nay, during Mehemet Ali's campaign against the
Wahabees a troop of baggage-camels broke away from
their captors and followed their comrades through the
fire of a burning village.
Conscience, too, in one sense of the word, is, properly
speaking, factitious instinct : as a synonyme of remorse
it implies a post-facto feeling of compunction, — a feeling
unknown to the creatures of the wilderness : instinct-
guided, they act in conformity with their only standard
of right, and have nothing to reproach themselves with.
But the artificial circumstances of domestication alter
that standard, and the instincts of a captive animal
may betray it into actions which on second thoughts
appear to be at variance with its true interests. Where
a fox has once robbed with impunity he will try to rob
again, unable to realize to what degree his actions may
provoke the resentment or sharpen the wits of the in-
jured farmer. If a mischievous puppy is not punished
on the spot, it will expect to go scot-free. But an old
dog knows that the prerogatives of man include the
faculty of nursing his wrath. I knew a pointer bitch
whose contrition quite disqualified her for business for
the rest of the day whenever she had been guilty of a
PETS. 21I
mistake. The herders of the Transvaal often leave their
flocks in charge of the dogs, and upon their return to
the pasture perceive at once if anything is wrong, if a
sheep has been crippled, etc., for at the sight of his
master the responsible dog will break out into a howl
of abject terror. But the most curious instance of the
power of conscience in animals is recorded by Profes-
sor Schomburgk in a communication to the Bilder aits
dem Thierleben. He had taken charge of the zoo-
logical department of the Adelaide City Park, and
was almost nonplussed by the inveterate mischievous-
ness of a female bhunder-monkey. In solitary con-
finement she would alarm the neighborhood with her
piercing shrieks; but the name of the happy-family cage
became a misnomer whenever she was restored to the
companionship of her relatives. Not content with teas-
ing the young macaques, she would aggravate the old
ones in every possible way, and had a dreadful talent
for raising a general row ; but thus far her offences had
always been condoned by the intercession of her old
keeper. One evening, however, this same keeper ap-
peared with his arm in a sling and stated that the
bhunder had tried to bite his hand off. His arm was
dreadfully mangled, and the laceration of the wrist-
sinews made it doubtful if the man would ever regain
the full use of his hand. Schomburgk at once ordered
the bhunder to be shot. Early the next morning one
of the assistant keepers loaded a shot-gun to execute
212 ZOOLOGICAL SKETCHES.
the sentence. The monkeys were quite familiar with
the sight of this gun, which had frequently been used
to shoot the rats that infested the premises, and when
the keeper approached the cage they continued their
several occupations with perfect unconcern. But with
one exception : the moment the bhunder caught sight
of the fateful implement she came down from her perch
like a shot and darted into a back room, — the sleeping-
apartment of the cage. It was near the breakfast-hour,
and the keeper bided his time. Breakfast came, and
the monkeys charged in like a lunch-brigade. But not
the bhunder. Contrary to all her habits, she kept out
of sight till her comrades had picked out the tidbits,
and only when the keeper had stepped round the corner
she slipped out, grabbed a piece of bread, and rushed
back into her hiding-place. The keeper then tried a
stratagem. The door of the sleeping-cage could be
shut with a spring-bolt, and, after connecting the spring
with a long strap, he posted a boy in the opposite corner
of the hall while he crouched down below the platform
of the main cage. After a full quarter of an hour, he
saw the boy raise his hand, pulled the strap, and heard
the door shut with a click. He now had the bhunder
at his mercy, and her behavior showed that she knew
it. When he pulled the strap, she made a rush for the
door, and, finding her retreat cut off, began to " rage
around like a wild-cat possessed," up and down the
cage, with piercing screams, while her companions
PE TS. r _
eyed her with mute astonishment. Finally, feeling her
strength fail, and seeing no possible way of escape, she
flung herself into a corner, where a much-deserved fate
at last overtook her.
Intelligent animals rarely resent the severity of a
trainer who once has made them feel his power ; but
that their forbearance must require a great deal of self-
control is proved by the fact that they sometimes re-
venge themselves upon a proxy of the tyrant, — his
friends or a favorite pet. After a knout-drill some
hunting-dogs have an ugly way of falling upon their
comrades, or even upon their own puppies, resolved
to " take it out" of somebody. Sick horses often kick
the stable-boy by way of getting even with the farrier ;
and I remember an amusing instance of an animal's
appeal to the code of the lex talionis. During the winter
season the Botanic Garden of Brussels is used by the
proprietors of various peripatetic menageries as a zoo-
logical depot, where the caged travellers can recuperate
and enjoy the hospitality of the city on condition of
exhibiting their charms gratis. Sick animals often stay
the year round ; and a few years ago the managers took
charge of a baby elephant whose constitution had all but
succumbed to the rigors of the climate. In the course of
the summer, however, Micheline got on her legs again,
— so much, indeed, as to become positively rampant,
especially when her keeper indulged her in an out-door
ramble. On account of the supposed sensitiveness of
15
214
ZOOLOGICAL SKETCHES.
her lungs she wore a woollen couvrette, or shawl-saddle,
to which for some reason or other she had taken such
a fancy that she would readjust it herself whenever it
slipped down. But one morning she sauntered toward
an open gate where the laborers had unloaded two big
vats full of pickerel-spawn, and, finding the mixture
pleasantly cool, she upset one of the vats and began to
welter like a pig in a puddle. She had just upset the
second tub when the enraged gate-keeper fell upon her
with a cow-hide, and after belaboring her till her grunts
changed into pitiful squeals, he snatched away the soiled
couvrette and dismissed the culprit with a fifty-pound
kick. Micheline had not offered the least resistance,
but when she walked away she uttered a series of pe-
culiar gutturals, sounding almost like muttered threats.
She walked toward the orangery, and one of the gar-
deners who had watched the rumpus from a window of
his lodge then became the witness of a curious scene.
In the orangery the gate-keeper's children were at play
among the trees, and, without the least provocation on
their part, Micheline suddenly charged them, and, sing-
ling out the biggest boy, began to thrash him with her
trunk just as the old man had thrashed her with his
cow-hide. After dodging left and right between the
bushes, the little lad ran screaming toward the gate;
but the superior speed of his pursuer obliged him to
take refuge in a tree, and before he could clamber out
of reach Micheline grabbed his breeches — a worn-out
PETS.
215
pair, luckily — and tore them off with a single jerk.
When the pitchfork brigade rushed to the rescue, she
was strutting up and down with her trunk proudly aloft,
waving the spolia opinio, over her head.
'52k
SSvkV x 1. /v^"^ 1 "
,<■-■-
•-'■■
A DANGEROUS PLAYMATE.
But only hunters can realize the influence of education
in controlling the passions of an impulsive animal. The
Mongol Tartars hunt with trained panthers ("cheetahs"),
2i6 ZOOLOGICAL SKETCHES.
and Kohl assures us that hunger itself will not tempt
these cats to tear their prey before the arrival of the
hunter. After the return of the Saracens from the Per-
sian conquest the cattle of friend and foe got mixed, and
the Commander of the Faithful is said to have identified
the Arabian horses by the following test. He kept them
three days without a drop of water, and then let the
slaves drive them toward a river-bank. But in the
moment when they saw the water and rushed ahead to
quench their thirst he ordered the trumpeters to sound
an assembly call, and one-third of the famished beasts
actually wheeled around and galloped back to the camp.
The word ennui docs not begin to express the misery in-
door life must inflict on dogs whose souls, like the Scotch
exiles', are roaming through the Highland fells. But
how resignedly do they await the pleasure of the com-
placent master who beguiles his leisure with page after
page of printed adventures which his dumb companions
can enjoy only in their dreams ! No words can be more
eloquent than the occasional inquiring look of a hunting-
dog, sick with hope deferred, but whose only protest
against martyrdom is his unbounded joy at the termina-
tion of it, when his master at last reaches for his hat and
takes down his shot-gun.
The Hindoo fakir who fills his mouth with gall in via-
jorem Dei gloriam cannot suffer more for Buddha's sake
than many a town dog has to suffer in the service of a
master who keeps a tan-yard or a chemical laboratory.
PE TS.
217
To a creature whose nose can distinguish the " cold
trail" of a rabbit at a distance of sixty yards, odors which
offend even our blunt olfactories must be as irritating as
the continuous screech of a steam-whistle would be to
the human ear or the sound of a fiddle to the ear of a
bat. The upper story of the Salzburg Acropolis is in-
fested with innumerable horseshoe bats, and the steward
often uses them for a curious experiment. He claps one
into a wire cage, puts the cage on top of a desk, and on
a lower shelf of the desk a Hackbrctt, or Styrian zither.
At every twang of the zither the bat will start as if a fine
needle had pierced its body, and a prolonged perform-
ance will throw it into a fit, a convulsive twitching of the
whole flying-membrane. This same nervous twitching
I sometimes believe I recognize in the grimaces of a town
dog averting his head with a sort of shudder or rubbing
his nose against the ground. Life would be a curse to
some dogs if nature had not mitigated their martyrdom
by blunting their senses. The effluvia of the sheep-fold
have made the shepherd-dog almost scentless, though
his form most unmistakably betrays his descent from the
sharp-nosed jackal.
Arthur Schopenhauer maintains that the development
of artificial faculties weakens our natural instincts; but
it is likewise true that in lieu of lost instincts our do-
mestic animals have gained several new faculties. If
domestication has spoiled the nose of the average house-
dog, it has certainly improved his ear. Dogs and horses
2i8 ZOOLOGICAL SKETCHES.
have but scanty means for expressing their emotions,
but their power of apprehending spoken words and other
sounds far surpasses that of the parrot. A cavalry-horse
learns to distinguish about fifty different commands, be-
sides their equivalent bugle-signals. People who will
content themselves with looked and acted answers can
carry on a regular dialogue with an intelligent dog. A
poodle will distinguish an exclamation from a command,
a question from an invitation, a compliment from a per-
suasive coax, a warning from a taunt, and even a banter-
ing taunt from a real reproof. The memory of an old
hunting-dog is stocked with a regular glossary of vena-
torial slang, and the inability of animals to discern the
elements of articulate speech only increases the wonder:
they seem to depend exclusively upon the differences of
intonation which a speaker somehow adapts to the sense
of the essential words. Domestic pets will recognize
their master in almost any disguise, but it is still more
difficult to deceive them by a dissembled pronunciation :
in the darkest night dogs and monkeys identify an old
acquaintance by a single word, or even by the mere
sound of his voice.
It is a strange fact that in night-time an unknown sound
will scare monkeys almost out of their wits. The creak-
ing of a wheelbarrow, a whisper, the rustling of a win-
dow-curtain, is enough to throw them into a fit of horri-
fied screams and contortions ; capuchin monkeys rush
wildly through their cage, macaques try to force their
PETS.
2IQ
prison-doors, the little marmosets huddle together like
the princes in the Tower, all about a matter they would
disdain to notice in daytime. The old males of the
anthropoid apes are about as hard to scare as any living
creature, but after dark the veriest trifle will inspire them
SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST.
with an almost supernatural fear; and it may be a mere
fancy, but I cannot get rid of the notion that this night-
horror of our hirsute relatives must be the origin of
the spectre-dread of savage nations, and indirectly, per-
220 ZOOLOGICAL SKETCHES.
haps, of mediaeval demonism and modern spiritualism,
— " ghost-mongery," as the sceptical Germans call it.
Monkeys are not very sharp-scented, and have to rely
on their eyes, and in night-time, therefore, are almost at
the mercy of their enemies, jaguars, panthers, and leop-
ards, whose owl-eyes enable them to hunt by moonlight,
and in the virgin woods of the tropics the constant dread
of mistaking the approach of a murderer for the rustling
of the fitful night-wind would be enough to make a Ber-
serker nervous. " It is not books or pictures," says
Charles Lamb, " nor the stories of foolish servants, which
create these terrors in children. They can at most give
them a direction. The stories of the Chimaeras and
Gorgons may reproduce themselves in the brain of super-
stition, but they were there before. They are transcripts,
types : the archetypes are in us, and eternal." May it not
be that those archetypes are the prowling ferce of the
tropical forests ?
There is a story about an ex-railroad-conductor who,
in the fever-dream of his last disease, called out the forty
stations of his route, in due succession, and at correct
intervals, and the fortieth at the terminus of his life ; but
the power of habit manifests itself quite as strangely in
the " second nature" of our domestic animals. The
trapiches, or cog-wheel mills, of the Mexican planters
are turned by horses, which have to make several thou-
sand rounds in the course of the day ; and in the soli-
tudes of the chaparral it is nothing uncommon to see a
PETS. 221
revolving object which upon nearer investigation turns
out to be a spavined old horse walking the rounds of an
imaginary trapiche. Animals seem to get actually fond
of such occupations. I remember an old billy-goat
whose reluctance to furnish the motive-power of a baby-
carriage had changed into such a passion for that employ-
ment that he would tolerate no rival on the track, and
once killed a poor huckster's dog who, unintentionally
enough, had excited his jealousy by drawing a larger-
sized vehicle.
In process of time our four-footed ally may come to
relish city odors, for his power of adaptation rivals that
of the human species. In China, dogs eat rice ; in Green-
land, dried fish; in Siam, bananas; on the Pampas, car-
rion ; and one of the Solomon Islands is inhabited by a
race of half-wild curs that subsist entirely on crawfish.
This plasticity of the canine species is almost enough to
account for its infinite variety of forms : in the course of
two or three thousand generations artificial selection may
have turned a jackal into a mastiff, or a wolf into a pug-
dog. It is strange to think what the continued operation
of the same agency might have done for other animals,
what marvels of beauty " in-and-in breeding," as our
stock-raisers call it, would have developed from the
gallinaceous tribes of the Old World, not to mention
American parrots.
And what about the moral capabilities of such animals
as monkeys and raccoons? Considering their intelli-
222
ZOOLOGICAL SKETCHES.
gence, their faculty of imitation, and the mental superi-
ority of a wild monkey to a wild dog, one cannot help
thinking that the Darwinian theory might admit — not of
an excuse, of course, but perhaps of practical demon-
stration.
CHAPTER IX
TRAPS.
Man has been called a tool-making animal, and the
first tool was probably a trap. I do not believe that our
primogenitors were carnivorous. Long before they
began to covet the flesh they probably hankered after
the eggs and milk of their fellow-creatures, and had to
devise means for catching them alive. They had no
need of elaborate contrivances. Experience makes sav-
ages the best hunters, and it alone can explain their suc-
cess in capturing animals whose cunning defies the best
inventions of the amateur sportsman. With the simplest
of all imaginable traps — an elastic stick with a noose —
the Patagonian nomads catch hares, foxes, wolves, and the
shyest of all American quadrupeds, the mountain-vicuna.
Von Tschudi made the acquaintance of a Chilian farmer
who had passed several years in the Andes before he
succeeded in capturing a live vicuna. He had imitated
the traps of the Indians, their method of fixing them in
the sand of the river-banks, their precaution in obliter-
ating the traces of their footsteps, but all in vain, till an
Indian renegade revealed the secret, — namely, that the
vicunas invariably select their drinking-places where
22"?
224 ZOOLOGICAL SKETCHES.
there is an audible ripple in the current of the river, —
perhaps for the same reason that cows prefer a brook to
a pond, and a running spring to a sluggish creek. The
murmuring of the stream seemed to suggest the idea of
purer and cooler water ; and where the current was slow
the Indians contrived to produce a ripple by an artificial
obstruction.
Nearly every animal has some peculiarity or other that
may be utilized for its capture. Minks have a queer pas-
sion for rummaging a pile of dry leaves, and the wild
turkey can be taken in an open trap, because, for some
reason, the idea of going backward never suggests itself
to his mind. A Kentucky " turkey-pen" is simply a
ditch with a roof of logs and ending in a cul-de-sac^ but
open at the other end. To this opening the turkeys are
allured by " sprinklings" of corn or cranberries, and,
entering the ditch where the bait is scattered more liber-
ally, they follow it till they reach the nc plus ultra end ;
and it is a decided fact that such half-captives will poke
around their pen for weeks without discovering the
means of exit.
The female puma has a marvellous talent for hiding
her lair, but the trapper knows enough if he discovers a
place where she has torn her prey, for to that place she
will return again and again, even after the carcass has
been gnawed into a smooth skeleton. Jackals, too, are
fond of revisiting the scenes of their former revels:
some animals would seem to be endowed with the gift
TRAPS. -, e
that supported Cardinal de Retz in his exile, — the faculty
of "luxuriating on recollections." In Europe, where
new preserves have often to be stocked with game-birds,
hundreds of partridges are sometimes caught alive by
the following simple device. Near the haunts of the
game a brush-hedge with an opening here and there is
set across a field, and on either side of the transit-holes
the trapper fastens a wire noose. No bait is needed :
partridges never fly over a hedge if they can crawl
through, their motive being probably their general reluc-
tance to betray their whereabouts by taking wing in an
open field. Hunted conies, as well as rats and mice, are
likewise almost sure to make for the next hole, incurring
any risks for the sake of momentary concealment. In
chasing a rat about a room, much trouble can be saved
by twisting an old newspaper in the form of a sugar-loaf
bag and placing it on the floor alongside of the wall. If
the outlaw can be induced to approach it from the open
side, he will dash in with a squeak of delight and can be
captured before he discovers that his harbor of refuge
has been blockaded.
Fear, however, is not the only motive of this mania
for shelter-places. Of all animals, rodents are the most
domestic. More than bees and swallows, and far more
than man himself, they love to have " a roof overhead."
They are fond of building a house within a house. The
dryest corner of a dry-goods box in a snug old garret is
the favorite dwelling-place of a house-rat, and even a
226 ZOOLOGICAL SKETCHES.
church-mouse, the emblem of poverty, manages to find
the wherewithal of feathering her little nest. It must be
a poor place, indeed, where our sharp-toothed guests fail
to make themselves comfortable. In the " Paradise of
the Netherlands," the Elysian bog-meadows of Helvoet-
sluys, an acquaintance of mine built himself a model
dairy with glazed brick walls and fire-brick foundations
that seemed to defy the colonizing attempts of all rodents,
but before the end of the first summer he found that all
the same a pair of black rats had located and raised a
family in his store-room. They must have clambered in
through the window ; but it puzzled him how they had
managed their nest-hiding, till after a long search it
appeared that they had excavated a forty-pound Dutch
cheese, lined it with shreds of the tegumental canvas,
and retired from the world, like friars into a fat convent.
The fish-otter burrows in the root-tangle of solitary
river-banks, and hides the entrance so carefully that her
nest can be discovered only by the sheerest accident ;
but she is often victimized by another foible which seems
to be a peculiarity of the species. Otters are fond of
sliding. In winter-time they scrape the snow from the
top of a steep bank, and warm themselves whenever the
sun comes out, but every now and then they fling them-
selves down, spread their legs, and shoot down-hill with
all the delight of a school-boy trying a new sled. At
the first sign of danger they disappear like a flash, for
the end of their inclined plane communicates with a hole
TRAPS. 22;
in the ice ; but if you can watch them unobserved you
may see them whisk up and down hill with evidently no
other motive but fun. Their pastime, however, ceases
to be funny if the hunter discovers their slide. After
setting his trap near the foot of the slope and covering
it with loose snow,, he is almost sure of securing his
game on the first sunny morning. Otters are also caught
in traps smeared with oil of anise, for the smell of which
they evince a queer passion. The olfactory predilections
of different creatures are, indeed, almost as contradictory
as their musical preferences. Chinamen confess that
they can find neither system nor euphony in what we are
pleased to call music ; and beavers can be baited with
assafcetida as readily as with castoreum. It is by no
means impossible that our favorite perfumes, rose oil,
cologne, and orange-water, may be downright torture to
the noses of our domestic animals, — which would partly
explain the ill humor of lap-dogs and similar pets that
have to endure such luxuries all day long. Wild-cats,
that disdain all other baits, can be trapped with valerian
roots, and muskrats with stinkwort (Antliemis fcetidd).
But it is a strange fact that such " medicines" serve
their purpose only at their first introduction to a new
district. After a certain number of muskrats have been
victimized with stinkwort, the rest seem to arrive at the
conclusion that the enjoyment of perfumes is one of the
pleasures that kill. There is hardly any doubt that
animals must possess some means of communicating
228 ZOOLOGICAL SKETCHES.
their ideas. Arsenic has no perceptible taste or odor,
and an ounce of it mixed with a bushel of cornmeal will
destroy a cartload of sewer-rats in a single day; but all
professional vermin-killers agree that such receipts lose
their efficacy in a very short time. Somehow or other
the survivors manage to trace the mischief to its cause ;
and old rats have been watched in the act of driving their
young from a dish of poisoned hash. When the British
first effected a settlement in Singapore, the traffic in
monkeys soon became a regular branch of industry.
The ubiquitous Chinamen used to go on trapping ex-
peditions to the hills, at a time of the year when the
mountain macaques were rather hard up for provisions
and could be baited with " fuddle-cakes," — i.e., rice-bread
soaked in a mixture of sugar and rum. The trapper
used to hide behind a tree and let the monkey assem-
blage enjoy his bounty till their antics suggested that it
was time for him to rush in, like Cyrus into the banquet-
hall of Belshazzar. Experience, however, soon taught
the little mountaineers to change their tactics. Instead
of devouring the fuddle-cakes on the spot, they learned
to gather them up and defer the feast till they reached a
retreat where they could hope to be left alone in their
glory. But the trappers, too, have since changed their
plan. They manufacture a sort of narrow-necked jars,
about the size of sarsaparilla-bottles, and, after filling
them with a melange of syrup and alcohol, they tie them
firmly to the root of a tree and withdraw out of sight.
TRAPS.
229
The monkeys come down and sip the nectar, a little at a
time, till many a mickle has muddled their perceptives
to the degree which the founder of Buddhism would
have called the first stage of Nirvana, — indifference to
THE WAGES OF SIN.
earthly concernments in general. The trapper then
approaches and collects his guests, whose exalted feel-
ings often manifest themselves in a peculiar way. Some
16
230
ZOOLOGICAL SKETCHES.
receive their captor with open arms, some hug their
bottles with approbative grunts, while others lie on the
ground, contemplating the sky in ecstatic silence.
In Mexico, monkeys are generally caught in box-traps.
The Mexican farmer rarely kills a capuchin-monkey :
man can afford to bear with his poor relatives where
nature has been so kind to all, and in some districts of
Oaxaca the monitos are as petulant as the sacred apes of
Benares. Still, it is possible that this Hindoo-like for-
bearance of our next neighbors has something to do
with their indolence, for I suspect that north of the Rio
Grande the propensities of the long-fingered four-handers
would "severely strain our tolerance," as Mr. Evarts
said of the peculiar ethics of the Salt Lake Saints. Nor
does the monkey-ridden ranchero object to their extermi-
nation by proxy : wherever maize is cultivated in the
neighborhood of the river-forests the trapper is generally
welcome. The box-trap method can be successfully em-
ployed only where the haunts of the game are well
known, for the capuchins won't go out of their way
without very special inducements, and in a field where
monkeys have been caught before, their relatives become
as circumspect as pickpockets in a metropolitan opera-
house.
I once watched such a field for a whole afternoon
before we caught one of the pilferers, — probably an out-
sider who had strolled in on the chance of getting a free
lunch. The trapper had taken us to the loft of a corn-
TRAPS. 2 J x
bin, where we could survey the garden and a portion
of the adjacent woodlands ; but our visitors gave the
trampa a wide berth, though their sidelong glances
showed that they had not forgotten the place. They
nosed about in the stubble, but the gleaners had been
beforehand with them, and, after an apparently aimless
ramble among the furrows, one gray-headed old brigand
happened to fetch up right in front of the box, perhaps
much to his own surprise, though, by a strange coinci-
dence, five of his relatives reached there at about the
same time. The gray-head raised himself on his hind-
legs, surveyed the field in every direction, and then
began to tack, — i.e., approached the box in a roundabout
way, lowering his head with every step, till he reached
the trap-hole, where he settled down on his haunches,
but with one hand in position for a sudden back-spring.
With the other he explored the sand for maize-kernels,
— in iitriimqae paratus. His manoeuvres seemed to have
reacted on the imagination of his companions, for two
youngsters took to their heels, but presently returned,
and, with a bravado-flourish of their tails, advanced to
within a few inches of the trampa. Turning half round,
to let the by-standers witness the proofs of his heroism,
one of them stretched out his hand till it all but touched
the suspicious apparatus, but then, as if struck with a
sudden horror at the thought of possible consequences,
they both fled more precipitately than before and
rushed into the arms of a motherly old capuchina,
232 ZOOLOGICAL SKETCHES.
whose caresses at last composed their overwrought
feelings.
Their comrades in the mean time encroached upon the
old man's claim till he got up to reconnoitre the rear of
the tram pa. Not a crumb was in sight, but his sense of
smell seemed to reveal the riches within, for, after a care-
ful examination of the bottom-board, he raised his head
with an impatient jerk and a glance in the direction of
the farm-house : " A sad comment on modern hospitality
and Christian civilization !"
The party at the other end crowded around the
entrance and grinned at each other with excitement.
The trampa had been baited with mcladas, — ripe corn-
ears boiled in treacle : the corn alone would have been
enticing enough, but the syrup made it so nearly irresist-
ible that every now and then one of the tempted capu-
chins had to ease his nerves by a rush to the rear or
a spring against the picket-fence. The return of the
sachem saved them from greater indiscretions, for some
of them had already begun to measure the depth of the
box with their outstretched arms. Before long, how-
ever, their impatience revived: the junior members of
the conference seemed to advocate an attack en masse,
but before matters came to a crisis a new-comer appeared
on the stage, — a lank and hungry-looking stranger, who
seemed to have emerged from an elder-coppice behind
the fence. For a minute or two he watched the pro-
ceedings in silence, and then marched straight upon the
TRAPS.
233
box, evidently resolved to astonish the natives. He
" JN FUR IT.
squeezed himself through the trap-hole with the success
234 ZOOLOGICAL SKETCHES.
that often attends a bold enterprise, and easily obtained
possession of ten select meladas, — a monopoly, in fact,
for in the next moment his pre-emption was rati-
fied by the fall of the tail-board. The sachem turned
round with a coughing grunt, — " I told you so," — then
took to his heels, and, seized with a sudden panic, the
whole troop fled, shrieking, in the direction of the high
timber.
Monkeys caught in steel-traps are wildly obstreperous
and can hardly ever be tamed : their first experience of
man's inhumanity to man seems to have left an indelible
impression. Steel-traps make their captives ferocious.
There is something in the arrangement and modus oper-
andi of the treacherous implement that appears to aggra-
vate the horrors of the result and excite the wrath of a
naturally savage animal to the raging pitch : the strug-
gles of a captured wild-cat sometimes liberate her at the
cost of a limb, and, if the iron has not collared her at the
very middle of the neck, she will tear herself out at the
risk of leaving her scalp behind.
Pitfalls have the opposite effect : they cow their prison-
ers ; the darkness and mystery of the predicament and the
uncertainty of the result seem to paralyze their energies.
In Abyssinia, where all our principal menagerie-men have
an agent or two, sand-foxes, jackals, and even hyenas are
often caught in pits and taken alive by a very simple pro-
cess : the hunter goes down, lariats his quailing captives,
and, while his partner draws the rope tight, he ties their
TRAPS.
235
four legs, gags them with a thong of raw-hide, and the
dive ferce are dragged out like butcher-calves.
Practical naturalists are generally the most successful
DECOY OWLS.
trappers, for Lord Bacon is probably right, that observa-
tion is quite as prolific a mother of inventions as necessity.
236 ZOOLOGICAL SKETCHES.
Only observation could have revealed the fact that little
song-birds can be attracted by the sight of a bird of prey.
A common chicken-hawk will serve that purpose. Fasten
a tame hawk to a bush, and before the end of an hour all
the finches and thrushes of the township will find it out
and meet in general convention, — an indignation-meeting,
perhaps ; though it is hard to understand what they can
hope to accomplish against an enemy who could kill a
score of them in ten minutes. A priori, their proceed-
ings would seem as incredible as an assembly of mice
around a chained cat. But the experiment never fails :
a hawk, an eagle, but especially a ferocious-looking old
horn-owl, will allure birds at a time when they would
disdain to neglect their domestic business for the sake of
any tidbit. An owl-riot they seem to consider as a sort
of public duty which must take precedence of all other
affairs, for even migratory birds will stoop from their
flight through air and light to screech around an old
night-spectre. In Northern Italy, where game is scarce,
every farmer has a tame buba and a potful of birdlime,
and thousands of Northern songsters, hastening fondly
home from their winter-quarters on the Mediterranean,
fall a victim to their ruling passion and perish in exile, —
" butchered to make a Roman holiday."
CHAPTER X.
FOUR-FOOTED PRIZE-FIGHTERS.
In Anglo-Saxonclom circus-combats have gone out of
fashion. The efforts of Bergh & Co. have promoted the
introduction of less destructive, if not more instructive,
amusements, though, as Herbert Spencer observes, all
our more exciting pastimes are still prize-fights in dis-
guise. But in the lands of the Latin races the undis-
guised form of the sport is still too popular to be illegal,
and frequent enough to enable even unwilling spectators
to convince themselves of one curious fact, — viz., that
death in the arena must, on the whole, have been the least
disagreeable way of crossing the Styx. It is the easiest
death. The old Berserkers knew what they were about
when they prayed to die in battle rather than in bed : in
the heat of combat wounds are actually unfelt ; excite-
ment operates like an anaesthetic, and the fighter reels
into Nirvana as in a trance. A rough-and-tumble fight is
far more exciting than the machine-war of our modern
armies, but even modern soldiers know that, in battle,
injuries not involving the demolishment of a motive
organ often remain unnoticed till they announce them-
selves through exhaustion or such external symptoms
237
2 3 8
ZOOLOGICAL SKETCHES.
as swelling and hemorrhage. After the repulse of Tor-
res Vedras, Massena congratulated the survivors of his
staff and vaunted himself bullet-proof, when the remark
of a by-stander caused him to put his hand to his
wounded forehead: " Chien de Notre Dame ! qu'est-ceque
ga f" said he with unfeigned surprise. Count Ranzau,
the StreitJians, " Rowdy Jack," as his comrades called
him, once received three stabs before he knew that he
was hurt; and in the battle of Ostrolenka, Kosciusko led
his " scythe-brigade" till his horse was shot down, when,
dismounting, he found himself crippled by a shot that
had struck him an hour before, — merely through the
boot-leg, as he had thought at the time.
Not all soldiers are volunteers, and cowards, as Shake-
speare says, " die many times ;" but a circus-manager
would have no difficulty in raising a regiment of bullies,
from a count to a cock-bantam, not only willing but
impatiently eager to try conclusions, with or without a
referee. Marcus Aurelius provoked a fierce revolt by
trying to compel the gladiators to fight with blunted
swords (Xiphilin., 1. xxi., 29), and four-footed champions
with a rival in sight often fall upon the biped who tries to
restrain them. Warfare is the normal medium of natu-
ral selection, and captive wild animals, of the carnivo-
rous species particularly, need very little encouragement
to accept a challenge.
An instinctive recognition of these facts, rather than
of our ethical objections, seems to prevent semi-civilized
FOUR-FOOTED PRIZE-FIGHTERS. 230
nations from seeing anything wrong in a prize-fight.
" Volenti 11011 fit injuria!' They might think it disgrace-
ful to plague a peaceful creature, but can see nothing ob-
jectionable in witnessing a display of natural combative-
ness. " Que idea /" exclaimed a Mexican whom Bishop
Riley had taken to task for his cock-fighting proclivities.
" Que dano hay f They volunteer performances on every
dung-hill : are they any the worse for having spectators ?"
The historian of " European Morals" (vol. i. p. 290) ob-
serves that in Spain an intense passion for bull-fights is
quite compatible with a charitable disposition ; and the
Hindoos, with all their Buddhistic prejudices, are en-
thusiastic votaries of the cockpit. Beast-fights were the
most popular amusements among the ancients. King
Porus of India, who was probably either a Buddhist or
a Brahman, entertained his conqueror with what the
Spaniards would call a gran matanza of trained elephants.
Nebuchadnezzar had his famous lion-pit ; Prusias, the
King of Bithynia, imported Indian tigers ; and Antiochus
Epiphanes kept a lot of fighting-bulls. But these private
sports were dwarfed by the public circenses of Imperial
Rome. Three hundred bears were let loose during the
games of Claudius, three hundred lions and five hundred
bears at the triumph of Hadrian, and at the dedication
of the Coliseum by Titus five thousand wild animals
on a single day! (Magnin, " Origines du Theatre," pp.
449-453.) Tigers, elephants, rhinoceroses, hippopotami,
giraffes, and lions were imported in numbers that must
240
ZOOLOGICAL SKETCHES.
have employed an army of hunters and trappers. The
Numidian satraps were ex-officio agents for the Roman
menagerie-depots (Friedlander, pp. 141-145), and the
African proconsuls were specially instructed to keep a
lookout for novelties, " quidquid novum ex Africa .•" the
big snake of Bagradas or an able-bodied unicorn would
at once have made the fortune of its captors. Pliny's
" Natural History" abounds with arena statistics, min-
gled with curious anecdotes and still stranger supersti-
tions, though certainly no other zoologist had ever such
opportunities for studying the nature and habits of wild
animals.
During the Middle Ages the Spanish Moriscoes were
the best naturalists. Their intercourse with the Eastern
Caliphate filled their cities with outlandish curiosities,
and some of the princes of Cordova were great sports-
men : Abu Abdallah and Abdel Zagal used to import
African lions and bait them with a special breed of mas-,
tiffs. Their Christian successors seem to have inherited
that passion, and when the African fcrce became scarce
they found a good substitute in the half-wild bulls of the
pastoral Sierras. The Andalusian toros bravos were at
first baited with dogs, but the kings of Aragon intro-
duced trained swordsmen, and bull-fighting then became
a national passion. Saragossa, Malaga, and Madrid vied
in the splendor of their matanzas, and at the end of the
fifteenth century all the towns and larger villages, and
even the wealthier convents, had their special bull-rings.
FOUR-FOOTED PRIZE-FIGHTERS. 2 . Y
Four successive popes tried in vain to stop the game.
Some of them threatened excommunication ; but they
found that their bulls did not scare the toreros, and
Gregory XIII. had actually to revoke his own edict :
nay, the clamors of the Spanish clergy obliged Clement
VII. to pass a special ordinance legalizing bull-fights on
church festivals! (Lecky's "History of Rationalism,"
vol. i. p. 308.) In the cities the matanzas went on as
merrily as ever: Seville had a special school for toreros,
and Philip the Second kept a torero guard and a chief
court matador. Three hundred years of monk-rule and
misfortune have not tamed this passion. Cadiz, Cordova,
Toledo, Medellin, Cartagena, and Alicante — mere beggar-
towns, compared with their former splendor — still man-
age to get up a weekly matanza. No saint can hope to
rival the popularity of a successful matador: the French
publisher Hallerman made a fortune by chromotyping
the portrait of the torero Perez. Jose Maria Perez
began his career as a Cartagena canallon, or circus-
sweeper, and, in spite of his dissolute habits, died the
richest man of his native town. His arrival in a bull-
ring city produced a regular furore : merchants closed
their offices and teachers their schools,* disguised monks
* Natura si furca expellas, etc. Last August [1881] a Georgia moon-
shiner captured a wild-cat and brought it to Birmingham, Alabama. The
dignitaries of that city assembled at the court-house and resolved by ac-
clamation, — 1st, to pit the cat against a certain town-dog; 2d, to celebrate
the event by a general holiday. On the following morning all work was
242
ZOOLOGICAL SKETCHES.
escaped from the convents and mingled with the lowest
rabble to enter the arena unperceived, paupers pawned
their last coat to raise the requisite real. A similar en-
thusiasm often gathers round a victorious bull. The
chief advantage of the torero is not the clumsiness or
the good nature but the stupidity of the average toro.
A Catalan bull can dodge and turn like a cat, but, for all
that, can be taken in by tricks that would not fool a pig.
Practice, however, makes him a ticklish customer, and a
bull who has killed his man is in a fair way to become
himself a matador. " If bulls could be trained," says
the naturalist Azara, " they could be made as dangerous
as a horseman armed with a pitchfork. But some toros
contrive to train themselves, and the public love of ex-
citement is then gratified with a vengeance. In 1835, in
the midst of the civil war, a Barcelona bull became a
municipal idol, the object of a regular Apis-worship.
When he had killed five men and ten or twelve horses,
the yard around his stable was thronged with devotees,
though his keeper, fearing foul play, would admit no
stranger to the interior of the sanctuary. After his last
victory on the festival of San Antonio, the crowd went
almost crazy with excitement, under deafening cheers
and a continual shout of " Bollos por el toro /" — " Cakes
for the bull ;" a libation of reals came down like a shower,
suspended, and the population of Birmingham formed a ring, while the
mayor held the stakes. The cat won in two rounds." (JVew York Weekly
Herald.)
FO UR-FO TED PRIZE-FIGHTERS.
243
and when the victor was dragged out of the gate, a
young girl, who had got a prize in a pantomime, leaned
over the balcony and, at the risk of being impaled,
crowned the gory brute with her own garland. This
Apis was at last vanquished by the Aragon matador
Zorilla, who boasted that he had never invoked the aid
A RELUCTANT TRIUMPHATOR.
of the chulos nor permitted any beast to reduce him to
defensive shifts.
Such matadors might change their tactics in Burmah,
where wild elephants are pitted against horsemen and
cornacs (elephant-riders) and often rout their trained rela-
244 ZOOLOGICAL SKETCHES.
tives by the reckless fury of their attacks. A comae's
office is no sinecure : he has to stick to his seat while
his hutti squirts and careers around like an exploding
locomotive or encounters his adversary with the force of
a catapult. Fighting elephants guard their trunks by
doubling them up like a clinched fist, while using their
heads like battering-rams, or they stand shoulder to
shoulder, after the manner of fighting boars, and, after a
prelude of sidelong pushes, suddenly hew away at each
other with their tusks. There is not much danger of a
general breakdown, for the legs of a full-grown elephant
will sustain him in a collision that would ditch a four-
horse team ; but there are greater perils: the wild ele-
phant may get the upper grip and pull the rider from his
seat, or the trained hutti may "get mad." No elephant
can be entirely trusted : the tamest of them are subject
to tantrums, often most malapropos. During the pro-
gress of the duel the hutti seems to forget or ignore his
rider; but if he has received a fatal wound the cornacs
have to jump off and run for their lives, experience
having shown that wounded elephants generally expire
in a paroxysm of rage. The feeling of approaching
death seems to inspire them with a sudden fury against
the authors of their misfortune. A similar outbreak of
savagery in articulo mortis has been observed in other
animals : chacma baboons and tame panthers in their
last hour often drop the mask of allegiance, like Lucius
Vanini, "determined to die free."
FOUR-FOOTED PRIZE-FIGHTERS. 2 A'
Since the abolition of their cruel religious ceremonies,
beast-fights seem to form the chief pastimes of the Hin-
dostan princes. The largest walled circus of modern
times is in Baroda, where the Guicowar has a special
park with elephants, panthers, and rhinoceroses enough
to get up a bi-weekly fight, — and no sham fight, either
(Louis Rousselet's " India," chap. vi.). He has a troop of
drilled matadors, — " elephantadors," as Rousselet calls
them, — besides trainers and hunters, and has paid as
much as eight hundred dollars for a good hutti.
Domesticated elephants, however, have to be fuddled
with bangh to excite their combativeness, and their train-
ing is so expensive that rajahs of moderate means pre-
fer prize-fighters per naturam, — panthers and wild boars.
Ranjit Sing, the Maharajah of Dholepore, used to keep
a park of picked tigers that were fed on live dogs and
pitted against all the wild beasts his hunters could lay-
hands on. One of these tigers, an enormous brute with
a head like an ogre, was presented to General Havelock,
and thus found its way to Lucknow, but it was finally
sent back to the maharajah's successor, who had set his
heart on having the best fighting-tigers in India. The
last Nizam of Hyderabad had a tame cheetah that fol-
lowed him in all his campaigns and enjoyed all the privi-
leges of a court favorite ; nay, Aga Muhamed, the Gui-
cowar of Guzerat, kept a carnivorous horse, an unnatural
brute, which once, in the presence of Professor Schla-
gintweit, knocked down a goat and devoured its udder
17
246 ZOOLOGICAL SKETCHES.
before he could be driven off. Only his old acquaintances
could manage him ; strangers he was very apt to assail
with his teeth, and the dogs which were sacrificed to his
appetite he tore to pieces with the energy of a ravenous
wolf. But a still more famous fighter was Black Jan, the
pet of the Rajah of Samarang in Java. Jan was a Sunda
panther, born in captivity, whose constant practice in the
arena had endowed him with the nimbleness and blood-
thirst of a ferret. His matchless skill in defending him-
self against adversaries of superior size often attracted
the planters of the neighboring Dutch settlements, and
even visitors from Batavia. A Batavia journal describes
him as rather under-sized for an adult specimen of the
Pardus javanensis, but remarkably stout-limbed, and " not
agile but agility itself." Experience had acquainted him
with the weak points of all possible antagonists. A wild
boar he demolished by leaping upon his back and be-
laboring his head with his claws, a bull by fastening his
teeth in his throat. Dogs he fought in the regular cat-
fashion, — by striking at their eyes and collaring them at
the first opportunity. If a pack of them tackled him at
the same time, he would retreat to a corner and keep
them at bay till he saw a chance for a head-spring, his
favorite trick on an enemy with a dislocable neck. Jan
was the idol of Samarang ; but the peasants of the
neighborhood suspected his owner of witchcraft, and in
the circus the restive visitors often broke out in groans
when the " pet" made his appearance.
FOUR-FOOTED PRIZE-FIGHTERS.
247
During the Middle Ages the nations of Europe vied
in bull- and bear-fights and badger-baitings; but those
times are past, and only on the lower Danube can such
circenses still be carried on in public. In Eastern Hun-
gary, where landed proprietors are permitted to select
recruits and appoint their own tax-collectors, feudalism
:•!» :
THE RAJAH'S PET.
has still
vitality enough to
make every noble-
man the king of
his domain, and even in the neighborhood of Buda-Pesth
the government does not interfere with national pastimes
as long as the magyars will forbear the more dangerous
game of national politics. A two-horse kutschc with a
trio of cavaliers crossing the Buda bridge of a Sunday
morning generally means that there is etwas los, — some-
thing up, — some fun ahead on one of the up-river coun-
try-seats. The Carpathian Mountains still abound with
248
ZOOLOGICAL SKETCHES.
wolves, and in the Bakony Wald wild-cats and wild boars
are caught every week in the year. Konok-Derescli, or
wolf-baiting, is a sport which has perhaps been imported
from the region where the ancestors of the Magyars
hunted the jackals of Imaus. They use a sort of lariat
of untwisted strands of hemp or horse-hair that sink
between the teeth of an animal trying to gnaw it. With
a rope of that sort the wolf is fastened to a picket-stake
by means of a ring that permits him to run round and
round without entangling his tether. On the Danube
curs are cheap, and if the wolf proves a good fighter he
may hope to live and fight another day, or even to ad-
vance to the rank of a household pet. If he turns tail,
his fate overtakes him at the end of his tether, and his
carcass is used to instruct young shepherd dogs in the
higher branches of their profession. Near Pesth, where
wolves are rare, the wild boars of the Bakony Wald act
the leading role in the game of Derescli. On account of
the peculiar formation of his neck, Lord Bacon cannot
be tethered, so they turn him loose in a corral with an
amphitheatre of hay-bales and reserved seats on the
wood-pile. An old boar is by far a more dangerous
customer than a wolf. A well-aimed cut of his knife-
like tusks will rip a dog from neck to stern ; but trained
hounds checkmate that game by the " catch and vault"
trick, — i.e., they grab the tusker's ear and jump over his
back, and thus keep his head in chancery till hunters or
comrades come to his assistance. Even in Hungary a
FOUR-FOOTED PRIZE-FIGHTERS. 2 AQ
good boar-hound is worth ten florins ; but the Magyars
are a magnanimous race, and if the boar contrives to
vindicate the dignity of nature they are apt to reward
him by an unconditional pardon, — i.e., to open the gate
and let him depart in peace.
Now and then one of the Nagy Tassar, or " Big
Squires," manages to get hold of a bear; and during my
last visit in Buda Dr. S took me out to the Raitzen
suburb, where a champion of that sort was on exhibition.
We found a big, fat he-bear, whose owner had sent him
down from Komorn, but, having neither a fit locality nor
an opponent worthy of his prowess, they were not going
to fight him, but merely to exhibit his fencing skill. The
pest of Pesth is the brown rat. Legions of rats infest
the 'longshore quarters, and every Roskam (livery-stable)
has ratters for sale, — a sort of shaggy pinchers, — as ag-
gressive as any bull-dog. Of these curs our host had a
whole brigade, and nearly every one of his visitors had
brought a recruit or two. We picked out eight of the
pluckiest and ugliest, — worth about forty cents apiece.
Before we let them loose they had smelt the bear and
scratched savagely at the door ; but their simultaneous
appearance did not disconcert Bruin in the least. He
was taking his breakfast in the corner of an empty
chamber, and when the door opened he did not even
interrupt his meal, but with the utmost good humor
flung the puppies against the wall as fast as they came
on. They charged him again and again, but they did
250
ZOOLOGICAL SKETCHES.
not " rile" him a bit : whenever we called his name he
looked up with his mouth full of corn-cake or responded
with a complacent grunt, while he attended to the dogs
in a sort of absent-minded way as a man would to a
swarm of flies. But, with all his nonchalance, he knew
exactly what he was about : nearly every slap was a hit,
and every hit did the business for that particular pincher.
When four of them lay howling and grovelling in the
opposite corner of the room, the rest became meditative
and waited for special instructions before they renewed
the combat. Like the victims of the Minotaur, they
bayed him from a distance, jumping left and right, with
an occasional advance whenever he licked the bottom of
his breakfast-pail, for, though he could have routed them
by a mere gesture, he did not think it worth his while.
He sat down and began to lick his paws, till we were
going to leave the room, when he got up and followed
us to the door. The moment he turned his back the
dogs made a dash, and one of them nabbed him from
behind, but in the same instant, almost, he went spinning
through the air and with a crash against the board of
the opposite wall. The bear had turned like a shot and
struck his assailant before a man could have lifted a stick.
No boxer could have parried the electric suddenness of
that blow, which was nevertheless delivered with the
force of a sledge-hammer stroke, for the cur was at least
a twelve-pounder, and his collision with the wall actually
made the windows rattle. We whistled off three of the
FOUR-FOOTED PRIZE-FIGHTERS. 2 ~ I
dogs, while their disabled comrades were left alone with
their conqueror. But his was evidently not a rancorous
soul : when we opened the door half an hour after, he
was sitting near the window licking one of the curs as a
bitch would a lame puppy.
Even our big grizzly does not deserve his ferine repu-
tation. A fellow combining the strength of an urochs
with the claws of an ant-bear is naturally not disposed
to put up with insults, but his habits in captivity prove
that he prefers sweetmeats to flesh ; and, though in stress
of circumstances he stills his hunger without fear or
ceremony, he never indulges in the wanton destructive-
ness of the panther. In the summer of 1879 a grizzly
bear entered the enclosure of Alexander Pressvvood's
farm, near Jacksboro', Texas, and helped himself to a
quarter of venison that was hanging on the shady side
of the farm-house. Near the back door a little boy had
fallen asleep on a pile of wool, while his still younger
sister was playing at his feet. Seeing the child move,
the bear came up and examined it, and then sniffed
around the head of the sleeping boy, who, suddenly
awakening, started up and slapped the grizzly in the face.
The bear retreated and trotted off toward the fence,
closely followed by the boy, and, to the horror of his
mother, whose attention had been attracted by his angry
exclamations, the little fellow raised his foot and dis-
missed the brute with a farewell kick as he squeezed
himself through the narrow gate.
252
ZOOLOGICAL SKETCHES.
The most truculent of all carnivorous animals is per-
haps the little pine-marten or martern {Mustela martes),
a creature about the size of a fox-squirrel, but capable
of killing ten times his own weight in poultry before a
squirrel could eat a nut. If one of them gets into a
pigeon-house he is apt to make a night of it ; i.e., he will
butcher away till daylight interrupts him. Charles Seals-
field, who built himself a chalet near Brunnen, in Switzer-
land, once caught a pine-marten in flagranti, and, on in-
specting the loft of his poultry-house, found forty dead
turkeys and half a hundred chickens and pigeons. The
murderer had contented himself with tearing their throats:
some of the short-necked hens showed no visible injury,
and all were in what a poulterer would call a marketable
condition. Such wholesale destructiveness can some-
times be explained by the needs of a burrowful of
hungry whelps; but pine-martens leave their victims
where they drop ; the female suckles her kittens till
they can shift for themselves, and never brings any
meat home. The little wretches can be trained to fight,
and will attack kids, hares, and even pigs ; but, with all
their bloodthirst, they are arrant cowards whenever they
meet a less helpless creature : the mere sight of a dog
is enough to scare them into a mouse-hole. In March
the males fight with such a craziness of rage that they
tumble from the trees and roll around in the grass,
where they have sometimes been killed with a com-
mon cudgel. Sealsfield describes a combat of such
FOUR-FOOTED PRIZE-FIGHTERS. 2 t>\
duellists. They chased each other round and round a
tree, through hollow roots and bushes, squeaking, hiss-
ing, and barking, and every now and then clapperclaw-
ing and snapping away like little wild-cats. His re-
peated intervention merely caused them to confine their
scuffles to the higher branches, but after each round
they raced up and down the tree and often whisked by
within two or three yards of his feet. Fighting-cocks
are even more tenacious, and the Alpine ruff, or rock-
plover [Tringa pugnax), is often captured during the
progress of his desperate monomachies. But birds
lack the vindictiveness of four-footed prize-fighters. If
a fighting-cock gets killed, it is mostly on account of
his own obstinacy in preferring death to the alternative
of saving himself by flight ; but a marten has to fight
it out willy-nilly, — the victor generally kills his rival.
Besides answering the purposes of natural selection,
such honeymoon combats may serve to check the in-
crease of noxious creatures that have no natural enemies
to pay them in their own coin. Being semi-nocturnal,
and excellent runners, swimmers, diggers, leapers, and
climbers, martens are very hard to exterminate, and
would become a worse nuisance than rats if the pro-
genitors of the species did not attend to each other.
Their relatives the European ferrets are the implacable
foes of the whole rodent species. The formation of a
ferret's body is wonderfully adapted to facilitate its
special business. It attains a length of two feet and a
254
ZOOLOGICAL SKETCHES.
weight of five or six pounds, but the whole body can
be drawn through a napkin-ring. The legs are very
short and remarkably far apart ; the occiput tapers
toward the neck, and the rump toward the tail; a full-
grown ferret can squeeze its head through a rat-hole,
and where the head goes the rest of the body follows
like a caudal appendage. No other mammal bears such
a striking resemblance to a snake. In proportion to
his size, an old ferret is an amazing tough customer,
and can be trained to clean out a whole rabbit-colony
and drag the settlers out of their holes ; and that seems,
after all, his proper vocation, for in the rat-business he
is rather liable to " get stuck," — i.e., to squeeze himself
into a hole with a tight place where he can neither
advance nor retreat, and thus risks falling a prey to his
intended victims, which are not slow to take advantage
of his " fix."
Like bears, dogs are by nature far less savage than
the fclidcs, and yet it is from the canine species that
artificial selection has evolved the ultra-type of reckless
ferocity. The boldness of a bull-dog is different from
that of any other wild beast : courage is not the word
to describe his disposition : he is not satisfied with
defending himself or his master, he is not stubbornly
valiant merely, but blindly aggressive, combative from
a sheer love of combat, without the least regard to the
merits of the cause or the advantages of the result.
The mere sight of a stranger — biped or quadruped — is
FOUR-FOOTED PRIZE-FIGHTERS.
25:
enough to throw him into a fit of that fury which Jiash-
isli is said to produce in the human animal ; he is in a
chronic state of furor litis, ready to run amuck at the
first opportunity. Under a real provocation this trucu-
lence rises to a perfect frenzy : in his efforts to break
his tether, an angry bull-terrier will tear the hide of
his neck into shreds or snap his teeth on an iron chain,
and, if he can break loose, danger will count for nothing
against the rage of glutting his revenge. The prospect
of certain death may be said to have no terrors for a
thorough-bred fighting-dog. Spanish wolf-dogs will
successively rush upon a bear whose paw has smashed
every comer at the first blow. A Danish mastiff will
go headlong upon a man with a levelled shot-gun.
Nay, Baron Gaisner, a well-known Vienna sportsman,
laid a wager that his rat-terrier would tackle a big blood-
hound; and at the word of command the little dog won
the bet by losing his life.
Some farm-dogs do not even wait for commands to
fly at every stranger passing their premises. Three
years ago a large panther escaped from a menagerie-
man who had pitched his tents near Lansing, Michigan.
Toward evening the deserter appeared at the door of a
wayside smithy some three miles south of Lansing.
The smith flung a piece of coal at his head, and the
panther trotted off, and was passing the fence of an
orchard, when a vicious-looking cur leaped over the
enclosure and without a moment's hesitation fell upon
256 ZOOLOGICAL SKETCHES.
the refugee, who was peacefully jogging along toward
Ann Arbor. " Three seconds later," says the Detroit
Press, " any liberal man would have given five dollars
to know what that dog thought of himself."
Old fighters, however, generally know what they have
to expect, and go it headlong, —
Den Baren gleich, die keine Wunde scheuen, —
taking and giving wounds with equal recklessness.
There are animals of such thick-headed stolidity that
their fortitude needs not much stoicism ; but next to a
monkey a dog is nearly the most sensitive of all verte-
brate creatures, and his power of endurance under cer-
tain circumstances can be explained only by the anaes-
thetic influence of excitement. Maimed, blinded, and
disembowelled, a boar-hound will yet stick to his foe
with the tenacity of a snapping-turtle, and an English
bull-dog will fight while he can stir, resolved to yield
only in yielding his life.
Dog-fights are represented on the bas-reliefs of Per-
sepolis, and formed probably the earliest pastime of the
pastoral Aryans. Huiid (hound) was a favorite cogno-
men of the ancient Germans, who prized valor as the
supreme virtue ; the four-footed fighter par excellence
became the companion of the biped warrior, and only
among the Semitic nations the aversion to the uncleanli-
ness of man's truest friend outweighed this partiality.
The Saracens shared that prejudice; on the treeless
plains of their native country, where every herder is a
FOUR-FOOTED PRIZEFIGHTERS. 0-7
horseman and hunters can sec their game from afar,
dogs are, indeed, less indispensable; but the Spaniards
valued a stanch dog above a fleet horse, and were the
first to breed those big blood-hounds that proved their
terrible efficacy in the conquest of the New World.
The race of the Caribs that inhabited the east coast of
Central America and the larger islands of the West-
Indian Archipelago was almost exterminated by these
domestic beasts of prey. Davila Pedrarias invaded
Panama with three hundred troopers and forty mastiffs
that had been trained to fight in ranks and used to
charge in the van of the squadron; and Navarete quotes
as the lowest estimate that, in Cuba alone, the blood-
hounds of Victor Holgar killed four thousand natives
in a single year! Balboa's famous "Adjutant," Leon-
icico, was a gigantic butcher-dog that could kill an In-
dian as a terrier would despatch a rat. This monster
wore a coat of mail, and, in the opinion of his master,
was worth any ten cuirassiers in the Spanish army, for
in the three campaigns against the Honduras hill-tribes
he had rid the " king's dominions" of more than two
hundred rebels. During the last year of his eventful
career he drew the pay of a color-sergeant, and used
to be carried on horseback to economize his valuable
strength. The Indians hated him like a were-wolf, and
their cazique had offered a large prize for his head, but
that cursed cuirass always saved his life till a well-aimed
arrow hit him in the eye; and if he went to where he
258 ZOOLOGICAL SKETCHES.
belonged, his brother Cerberus could apply for a fur-
lough.
The " Aragon hounds" of Northern Mexico are sup-
posed to be the descendants of this breed. Their
wild life in the Sierra has added something wolfish and
outlandish to the savageness of their appearance, but
they lack the stubborn courage of their ancestors, and
I have seen one of them beaten by a common tramp-
dog. Among the Mexican sportsmen the excitement
of a dog-fight is enhanced by a subjective interest.
They all bet. Bets, moreover, have to be paid on the
spot, and the backers of a losing brute often revenge
themselves after the manner of true savages, though
they would probably call it the old Roman fashion. In
a Puebla museum I was once looking at a panorama of
the famous circus-scene, where the spectators, pollicc
verso, are clamoring for the death of a fallen gladiator ;
but a Mexican caballero, after listening to the com-
ments of my companion, suggested that these clamors
might be justified by the disappointment of the heavy
betters, — for the prostrate hero looked really twice as
large as his victor. Two months after, I realized the
meaning of the caballero's remark. The burghers of
Medellin had got up a gran fimeion between a young
bear and a butcher-dog. The bear, being more than
half grown, was largely the favorite, but, after an obstrep-
erous scuffle of ten or twelve minutes, skill prevailed
over brutal strength, and the backers of the vanquished
FOUR-FOOTED FR1ZE-FIGHTERS. 2 ^Q
plantigrade avenged their loss by giving him a terrible
beating.
Dogs do not eat their conquered foes, as bears, and
" VJE VICTIS.
even boars, are apt to do ; but it is a curious fact that
they fight best after a long fast. It whets their mettle,
2 6o ZOOLOGICAL SKETCHES.
as sportsmen express it. Frederick the Great found
one consolation in the vandalism of the Russian in-
vaders, — it exasperated his men ; and a bona fide fast
seems to produce a similar effect. In the Rhamadan
season strict Moslems eat only every other day, and
Burckhardt advises strangers to approach them on those
other days : starving, instead of improving their temper,
puts them into an aggressive mood. The famished an-
chorites of the Nitrian Desert were dreaded like so
many wild beasts ; " maceration," as they call it, may
have answered its purpose in subduing some other pro-
pensities, but it certainly excited their combativeness ;
and I have often wondered if it would not be a good
plan for a commanding officer on the eve of a battle to
order a general fast-day, with a promise of double rations
after the Te Dcuni. The well-fed Medes were beaten
by the starved Persians, six Roman generals by Sparta-
cus with his hungry outlaws, the Visigoths by the Sara-
cens, the Austrians by the Sans-Culottes. The heroes
of the Crimea were perhaps too outrageously starved,
but the feat of Balaklava would hardly have been
achieved by a full brigade; and I cannot help thinking
that even the efficiency of our Dixie mamelukes had
something; to do with the deficiencies of their commis-
sariat.
In North America, too, " dog-fights in a ring" are
still very popular, and more frequent than Mr. Bergh
may imagine. But the most passionate devotees of the
FOUR-FOOTED PRIZE-FIGHTERS. 2 6l
sport are the burghers of the Dutch seaport towns.
"A sad comment," etc.; but, as Mr. Bruce's boy re-
marked, " People wants to have some fun." North
Holland is getting rather barren of out-door sports; in
a land of truck-farms fox-hunts are out of the question,
wild ducks are getting scarce, and every game-preserve
is watched like a young ladies' seminary. And, besides,
though the Hollanders have ceased to be a conserva-
tive nation, many of their by-laws still date from a time
when prize-fights were patronized by princes and priests,
and the Amsterdam jonkers need not go very far out of
town to indulge in things which in England could be
explained only by the sheriff's " connivance with both
eyes."
"Sog, wo zal hij stryten?" ("Where is he going to
fight, I wonder?") is a frequent remark on meeting a
fair specimen of the gryffhond, a sort of mastiff, — no-
body doubting that the hond is kept for fighting pur-
poses. A rendezvous in Muidenhaven means generally
an invitation to a dog-fight. Northeast of the main
harbor extends a long line of private wharves, flanked
with promenades and villas and here and there with
public restaurants. A special variety of these restau-
rants is the gardenhuys, — a tavern licensed to dispense
refreshments, but without a sign-board, and therefore
safe against the intrusion of unintroduced strangers, — a
sort of club-house, with a factotum president. The pro-
prietor of a gardenhuys generally keeps a ten-pin alley,
iS
2 62 ZOOLOGICAL SKETCHES.
often a cock-pit, and sometimes a pigeon-shooting-gal-
lery, but nearly always a dog-ring. He keeps fighting-
dogs of all kinds, gryffhonds, terriers, and pinchers,
but permits his guests to make his ring the arena of
their private honds. Some of these fighting-dogs have
achieved a national reputation. The competition for
the puppies of a favorite gryffhond rivals the wrangle
over the bulbs of the famous tulips of old, and the pro-
fessional fanciers keep regular blue-books of dog-pedi-
grees. A fighting-dog does not lose caste by being
overpowered in one or two rounds: only death, a per-
manently disabling wound, and the refusal to " come to
the scratch," constitute an absolute defeat. Even a
defeated bond, though his rank is lost, may recover a
quasi prestige by killing his adversary in the next fight ;
but there are dog-dynasties that have preserved a clean
record for five or six generations ; and in Amsterdam
my brother once procured me an introduction to the
most invariably triumphant warrior of his age, — Klaas,
the Koning, a mastiff of doubtful descent, but of a most
indubitable superiority over all his living rivals. His
owner, a choleric old skipper, had inherited him from a
relative who took no interest in pedigrees, but the Ro-
lling's victories had founded a new peerage, and his
descendants began to eclipse the ci-devant aristocracy
of the neighboring towns. The " King" deserved his
rank. He had never lost a fight. His owner had pitted
him against boars, bulls, and several of the outlandish
FO UR- FOOTED PRIZE- FIG II 7 E RS.
263
brutes which the Dutch colonies inflict on the mother-
country, but he had never failed either to kill or to rout
his foe. His triumphs became such foregone conclu-
sions that the bets were chiefly against time, — wagers
on his ability to crush his foe in more or less than so
many minutes. In 1875, Klaas had been king for three
years, and his courtiers became so numerous that his
master got tired of their visits and sent him every Sun-
day to an inn on the Prinzengraacht, where he received
callers from nine to eleven a.m. No pasha of nine tails
could have displayed more conscious dignity. At home
Klaas had the reputation of being the laziest dog in
North Holland, but in the hotel he declined to sit down.
He seemed to know that the guests had come for his
sake, and kept walking up and down with a leonine
strut, now and then vouchsafing to accept the homage
of a new visitor or to acknowledge the greeting of an
old acquaintance. Strange dogs he received with a stiff
grandezza. He refused to permit them any familiarities,
but sometimes scrutinized the big ones with a sort of
professional interest. They took care to give him a
wide berth. Klaas weighed two hundred pounds, but
there was not an ounce of superfluous tissue under his
hide, unless a number of welt-like scars could be con-
sidered expletive. Toy-terriers, though, will rush in
where not angels only but bull-dogs would fear to tread,
and there were cases on record of several puny yelpers
having done their utmost to provoke the King's wrath.
264
ZOOLOGICAL SKETCHES.
On such occasions his majesty would pretend to be
asleep ; but if his assailant insisted on waking him, he
would look up, not at the cur, but at the cur's master :
" Couldn't you save me the necessity of demeaning
myself?"
Down-town he had sometimes been attacked by a
junta of street-dogs, but it wasn't quite easy to scare
him. When he crouched for a spring there was some-
thing in his look that rarely failed to make the front
ranks unpopular, and the allies generally retreated in
time to save their vertebrae. " I wouldn't mind pitting
him against any two dogs in Holland," his master told
me, " but there is one thing I am afraid of: he has a
weak spot, a bad scar under his left jaw, and by the way
he fights I see that he knows it. Against one dog he
can hold his own in spite of that, but two — if one of
them should manage to collar him from the left, I do
not know what mightn't happen. There is a dog in
Groningen, they say, can beat him," he added in a confi-
dential whisper, " a butcher-dog from Helderdam, but,
unless he is the devil himself, I guess Klaas knows a
trick or two that will stop their bragging."
At home the Koning passed the larger part of the
day behind the Kacheloven, the great brick stove that
still warms the dwelling of the orthodox Hollander, and
burglars could have abstracted the rugs from under his
very nose. Klaas never interfered in domestic affairs,
and even disdained to beg for soup-bones : he knew
FOUR-FOOTED rRIZE-FlGUTERS. 265
they could not afford to starve him. But on the day
of battle he was a changed dog. They used to take
him out in an open cart, and from the moment they
left the stable Klaas would stand bolt upright, uttering
now and then a deep-mouthed bark that became fierce
and defiant as the cart approached the gardenhuys. In
the arena he seemed to act on Prince Eugene's principle,
— that " there is profit in offensive operations." He
never waited for an attack, and, being himself a con-
summate master of that art, never permitted his adver-
sary to take an unfair advantage. Generosity and fear
were equally foreign to his nature. A stumbling foe
was promptly overthrown, a prostrate one at once torn
into pieces. He knew no mercy. He was a perfect
beast of prey, and nothing else. And, with all his au-
dacity, he had not the foolhardiness of a bull-dog. Un-
known animals he studied before he attacked them.
They once pitted him against a wanderoo, or Cingalese
baboon, a brute with the face of a gargoyle and the
mane of a lion. Klaas kept as still as a mouse, and,
with his tail stiffly erect, walked round and round the
ring and scrutinized the phenomenon. He did not like
the cunning eyes of the half-man. but somehow or other
he made up his mind that, whatever the creature might
be, he was no fighter, and, slowly contracting his circle,
he suddenly and without the least warning sprang upon
the stranger and massacred him on the spot, though the
monkey nearly pulled the ears out of his head.
2 66 ZOOLOGICAL SKETCHES.
Klaas fought about once a month. He did not always
come off unscathed, but, though he got sundry des-
perate rips, he somehow contrived to preserve his ana-
tomic integrity. Three years ago he was as popular as
ever, and, unless that Groningen hond has managed to
collar him from the left, he probably still holds his levees
on the Prinzengraacht.
THE END.
1 1
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UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO LIBRARY
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Oswald, Felix Leopold
Zoological sketches
BioMed
