XXIX Exit the Hunter
1. Up to Date
Why are there so few heroic tales of our brave boys a-hunting with breechloaders, may be asked. The truth is that, with modern weapons, hunting is as unromantic as work in a slaughter-house.
Men may still be wounded by teeth or claws, as I have known one who lost an arm to a tiger, and every now and then a man is killed, although he has modern weapons in his hand; but it is mostly by accident or stupidity, and nearly always by preventable accident, like getting wounded on a railway. It is painful, and may be fatal; but so rare and so preventable that to take the risk needs no more courage than to step into a train.
That is why so many lies are told. The truth is bald. I have witnessed some, and credibly heard of hundreds of hunting adventures, in the most dangerous corners of the world; and read of thousands more. To see the truth, one has to allow for the many events that seem too commonplace to remember, as well as for all the tricks of slippery memory. Statistics are not available, which is helpful in a thing like this; for statistics are misleading, and can be quoted to prove anything. So every man has to generalise from what he knows; and, doing so, I concur in the opinion of those judicious persons who think that the most dangerous kinds of modern hunting are safer in every way than common coal-mining. The percentage of mortality is almost certainly a great deal smaller. Not once, so far as I have been able to believe, not once did any man, with modern weapons in his hands, do anything very heroic, or need to do it. The grit was often there; but there was no real opportunity, for it is not the mere taking of risks that makes the hero. The gambling spirit is equal to that. The hero rises above selfishness as far as above fear, and does what he sees to be right, unheeding consequences. In our long war with the beasts, which has lasted so many millenniums, we needed such men at the start, but not now. The brunt of the battle is over, and anyone can finish it.
That is why there is little to tell in our anecdotes of modern adventures, unless when something happens under primitive conditions. Never did any modern hunter have to face such danger as was faced by a bereaved old Burman grandfather in a village near Rangoon when he took a spear in his hand, and, with other old men, ran after the tiger that was carrying away his grandchild, and closed with it. These old fellows showed a spirit that makes one think better of humanity. But what are we to think of the idle men with breechloaders and servants? What drives them to the field or forest? The heavy burden of life-weariness, the Nemesis of idleness and plethora. The best of them are seeking a relief from real worries, perhaps, and the others killing time, or seeking amusement. Why not? It is nonsense for any man to dictate the pleasures of another; but let us have no cant at any rate, no make-believe heroics, as if the killing of cats needed particular bravery on the part of a man with a battery.
There are few more genuine pleasures in life than that of a European officer, who is at hand to help villagers in India against leopards or tigers, and feels his gun of use; and the wounds, if any, received in that way would leave honourable scars. But such a coincidence of duty and pleasure is rare, and seldom to be got by seeking for it. It is altogether a different thing from the experience of sportsmen in search of sensations.
2. The Lion in Death
Here is a cutting from a friendly review of a recent book in the Westminster Gazette of 5th December 1908.
“Our author, we have said, got no lions. Other game came to him in plenty, but the lions always evaded his gun. Yet he gives us a living picture of a lion hunt, when the harried animal, which has been trying to slink off, at last turns to bay and determines on the fight to a finish:
“‘Death is the only possible conclusion.
“‘Broken limbs, broken jaws, a body raked from end to end, lungs pierced through and through, entrails torn and protruding—none of these count. It must be death—instant and utter for the lion, or down goes the man, mauled by septic claws and fetid teeth, crushed and crunched, and poisoned afterwards to make doubly sure. Such are the habits of this cowardly and wicked animal.’”
Since Goldsmith described how
“The dog, to gain his private ends,
Went mad, and bit the man,”
there has been nothing to equal the humour of this imputed wickedness. A simple person might suppose that the lion paused to spit in poison, or at least deliberately poisoned his teeth and claws; whereas, of course, he merely does not clean them properly. Having to live in the backwoods of Africa, and support himself somehow, he cannot command the toilet requisites of Belgravia. Is not that wicked? And his cowardice, in not standing to be shot at, is uncommonly like that of the Boers. Why should he not avoid the enemy’s fire?
In truth, it is plain that the author, as indeed he tells us, was not describing what he saw, but repeating what he was told. His words are not a “living picture,” but, if he will allow me to say it, a bloody blur, which no more gives an idea of the real fight than the hospital beds give an idea of a battle. In the supreme hour of conflict, both sides “see red,” but not in that way. Neither thinks of wounds. There seems to be no time for that. The only thought is how to kill; and in the glad excitement the manifold details of life and all its conventions, which seem so real in cold blood, are crumpled up like stage properties in a conflagration; and all seems fair in war, and all is fair; and the issue lies with the God of battles, and not with the elderly lawyers at The Hague or anywhere else.
So much the worse is it then for the lions, and so much the worse for any man or nation found unready, unprepared. Ah, if we could only regulate battles like law-courts, how different the world would be! But God knows best. It somehow must be better as it is.
If this Englishman or any other man would meet the lion on equal terms, as knight met knight in the Middle Ages, I am sure there is not a lion, young or old, in Africa, there is not a tiger in India or Burma, that would not accept the challenge with pleasure. As the challenged party would have the choice of weapons, and a sportsman could not object to fair-play, we may be sure that “Nature’s weapons” would be the lion’s choice, and the victory swift and certain for the lion, even if it rained Englishmen, to say nothing of other people.
This is an old, old story. Hercules himself had to use a club and poisoned arrows. It is by tools and co-operation that we master the other beasts. The cats are a particularly easy conquest, as they are bigoted individualists. But let us not add insult to injury, and call them cowardly because they dodge us. When next our author is at Lucerne, let him step aside into the garden there and look at Thorwaldsen’s lion, cut in the living rock, and see whether it does not lift his thoughts above the shambles. The wounded lion he described, according to the reviewer, was “trying to slink off.” Thorwaldsen shows what it was seeking to die in peace. Why chase and torture him more? To get his hide? The lion-hunter, whoever he was, although he risked his life gratuitously, was like a silly child pulling a cat’s tail and a thoughtlessly cruel child, for this big cat was in mortal agony.
Machinery-murder, for beasts of every kind, including men, is now a fact inevitable, and, like everything inevitable, it bears a blessing in it, if only we submit to the will of the Almighty, and recognise what He has brought to pass. The blessing latent in this apparent affliction, perhaps, is that we may cease to admire the business of slaughter; and if so, what a stream of blessings may flow from that one.
“For ever since historian writ,
And ever since a bard could sing,
Doth each exalt with all his wit
The noble art of murdering.”
3. Killing Tigers and Apes
I have just been invited to invest in an electric apparatus, to be installed upon the tree one sits in, when waiting over a “kill” for the return of the tiger. The difficulty at present is to see to shoot in the dark; and this invention enables you to press a button and flood the place with electric light. If then you are moderately quick, you can shoot the beast while he is blinking at the light, as easily as if it were day. You are as safe in the tree as in a bedroom and very nearly as comfortable on your platform. You can sleep there all night—four nights out of five at the least—when nothing happens. When the great night comes, that is to say, when the tiger comes, even then you need not lose more sleep than most passengers do in a sleeping carriage on a railway. The swing of the tree in the breeze and the rustling of the leaves make your platform a superlatively soothing bed; and as you lie back and look up at the drifting clouds, and the moon or the stars, you can feel you have the excitements of savage life, combined with all the comforts of Charing Cross; for at your side is a good fellow, willing, for a consideration, to keep watch for the tiger, better than you possibly could, and to watch you, too, and take care that, in waiting, you do not roll over on your back and snore, and finally wake you when it comes. What a dramatic whisper it is in your ear—“Tiger come! Tiger come!” Nothing in any theatre can equal it! Do not be in too big a hurry to fire. There is no need to hurry, if you take care to make no noise at all, and it is well to take time to waken thoroughly, so as to aim your best. If then you fire and kill, you are contented for an hour or two. There might then even be a little danger for you, if you had made a bargain with the Devil like Faust’s (see Goethe’s text, Scene iv)—
“If e’er you find me quite content,
And bidding time stand still,
To Hell you then can have me sent,
And bind me as you will!”
But even in that case, the danger would be momentary. “Another” and “another” you would want; and the Devil himself could not provide them—at any rate in Burma, where the many ineffectual days and nights become intolerable, unless you have something else to do as well.
Accordingly it is the Forest officers, whose work is in the woods, who can hunt to most advantage. There was one I knew who killed many scores of tigers, mostly by “sitting up over a kill,” in the manner described. I doubt if he knew the exact figure himself. It must have been over a hundred. Besides the tigers, the same man killed perhaps every kind of wild beast in the Burman forests, except only the big ape.
Here, it may be noted, for the information of those who deny the existence of that animal on the Continent, that the writer knew a Mr Bruce, Deputy Conservator of Forests, and a completely credible man, who found his camp-followers attacked by a big ape. To save human life, he shot it, and on laying out the corpse he found it little smaller than the orang-outang. This was in the Upper Chindwin, in the north of Burma; and the villagers, who professed to know it well, called it the “wild man of the woods,” which is what orang-outang means in the Malay language.
“I would have done something else,” said the man of many trophies to me. “I would not have shot the big ape—at least not within many years past. I once did shoot a monkey in a tree. I used small shot that lacerated its bowels. The poor little beast sat on the bough and held its protruding entrails in its hand and looked at me. I felt as if it was asking me ‘Why did you do that?’ I swore I’d never kill a monkey again, and never did, and never will.”
This reminds one of the common report, which one would like to believe, that a great man of science is occasionally haunted by the ghosts of the apes he has slain. The generous man is prone to remorse. But it is vain. “You can’t cure the wounds your arrow has made by merely unbending your bow.”
What most needs to be told, however, for it is least suspected, is that with modern weapons and a little skill and nerve, the hunter never has to face much danger. Even accidents are rare, and mostly avoidable. There is little to fear, except monotony and malaria; and green mosquito-nets have long been available for hunters to diminish the malaria. How to diminish the monotony is a problem that remains unsolved.
In India there is less of it—I mean of the monotony. The patchiness of the forests makes the killing of cats more expeditious in India than in Burma. The poor labourers who “beat” have a little involuntary excitement. There is some real danger for them; but for nobody else. The potentates aloft, on elephants or other elevations, waiting to pull triggers, which is their function, are as safe as if they were on the bridge of a battleship, bombarding whales. The ladies could do it equally well; or the ladies’ maids. The expense is multiplied a hundred or a thousand times, to increase the amusement; and that is the fashionable Indian tiger-hunting. It differs from ordinary hunting as the Spanish bull-ring differs from the slaughter-house; but, as there is room for thousands to sit in safety round the Spanish circus, and a display of courage and agility by the leading actors, a Spaniard might reasonably argue that his sort of sport was superior in every way. It certainly does supply more fun for the money.
4. The Happy Hunter
The happiest huntsman I ever heard of was a fat little Frenchman, who was a guest in a shooting-box in the Highlands of Scotland. His host was some ex-royalty; and one morning the whole crowd were going to stalk the deer, except our hero, who stood watching their departure as cheerily as he could. “Take a gun and potter about yourself near the house,” was the parting shout to him; and after a little, finding time begin to drag, he remembered the kindly-meant advice, and shouldered a gun and went off alone.
At dinner-time, he could hardly contain himself till the others had finished telling their doings; and when at last his hints had made them curious, and they asked what sport he had had, he cried: “Ah, my friends, smaller, but better than yours. Just over the top of the first hillock (petite colline), on the edge of the moor, I met a glorious herd of Scottish chamois, magnificent wild sheep (moutons sauvages), and killed half-a-dozen of them before they escaped. They must have watched you all go to a distance and felt safe. I completely surprised them.”
It was only the conventions of sport that made the fat little man ridiculous. The deer were no more wild animals than the sheep. If the deer-stalkers were real hunters, so was he. In danger and in joy, they were the same.
They tell me that this story is well-known in London. That was to be expected. It was too good not to tell. But I heard it in 1894, in the north, from a parish clergyman of superior character, who located it in ground adjacent to his parish. It is impossible that he lied. There is barely one chance in ten that he was misinformed. So, if the “French lord” concerned convinces me that he desires such “immortality” as the mention of his name would give, then his name shall be mentioned, with perhaps a few more particulars. The probabilities seem to me about ten to one that the story is true. After all, a statement is not necessarily false, because it is known in London.
The pleasure of fighting big cats any brave man can feel. But wherein lies the joy of being what Lord Chesterfield despised, a poulterer? Or of butchering the deer? Why do we not all feel as kind-hearted Plutarch did that, when men are at play, the beasts that help in the fun should have a share of it? Why is there joy in dealing out death? God knows. I have felt it myself; but a man cannot really analyse his feelings. He can only pretend to do that. At times—not always of course, but often enough—our feelings are as mysterious as the stars, which we can watch and photograph, but never explain.
So, when I say God knows, I mean that there doubtless are in Nature, which is another name for the mystery of the Universe, abundant reasons, far beyond my sounding. And I do know a partial explanation, a kind of clue, which our mealy-mouthed manners make me hesitate to mention. Yet, after all, truth needs no fine excuses, and the sentiments of the natural man need no apology. There is a genuine joy in killing. Nobody needs to be ashamed of it, any more than of sneezing. It is born in us all; and to a mind undeveloped, unable to imagine itself in the place of another, cruelty is a pure pleasure, the lively sensations of it not being spoiled by pity. That was how the Inquisitors enjoyed themselves, and executions were always popular. A man likes killing as naturally as he likes sugar. “Clear your minds of cant,” as Dr Johnson advised, and it is easy to see in that the true attraction of hunting. How great and genuine a joy it is I never realised till once I watched a lady crunching a praying mantis under a paper-weight, and gloating over its sufferings, just as a cousin of hers, a famous hunter, loved to dwell on his more gory glories. She was sipping a liqueur she liked a minute later, with the same beatific expression of happiness.
The good old salt, Frank Bullen, has lately been lamenting the new and unromantic ways of whaling, when the whales are chased by steamers and the harpoons driven home by gunpowder, and the whales quickly finished by bombs. Indeed, there is no blinking the fact that the fun is out of the business. A man should think himself a fool if he goes on fancying that there is danger or romance, when there is none. The whaler and the hunter, under modern conditions, are as like the old-fashioned whalers and hunters as the saloon passengers in an Atlantic greyhound are like the fellow-voyagers of Columbus or Drake.
5. The Use of Hunting
To talk of the use of hunting to-day is generally cant, like talking of the danger of it. At the expense of what is wasted in a few years upon foxes in England, it would be possible to exterminate the lions, tigers, leopards, wolves, foxes, jaguars and every other big kind of dangerous wild beasts on the face of the earth; and fewer lives need be lost in the business than went to the building of the Forth Bridge. The work might be done in a year or two; and in the same time, and still more cheaply—perhaps with a positive profit—the deer and elephants and other wild cattle might all be killed or tamed.
In Great Britain, of course, no planning would be needed. The clearing of the game there shall all be done for fun, “like winking,” as soon as the many-headed king, the multitude, decides, if it ever does decide, to end the Game Laws. It is in the Indian and Burman and American and African forests, and in the plateaux of Central Asia, that a little planning and some expense would be required, and a little brave work need to be done. Of course, the present writer is not advocating such a thing. He is fond of cats; and loves wild Nature as well as Nature tamed. But let us have no cant about the business; and recognise what humanity can do in A.D. 1910.
What men go after big cats for is, in general, amusement, just as much as when they go to shoot pigeons; and the one kind of sport is intrinsically, nowadays, no more dangerous than the other. Hunting used to be a school of war; and so was archery. Both arts are equally obsolete for any such purpose. It is only among unwarlike peoples, like the English or the Chinese, that such a thing needs to be mentioned. Officers who go a-hunting are not making themselves better able to lead regiments in battle. It is well if the hunting does not make them worse. There is nothing of military art or science to be learned from sport. Gunpowder and chemicals and machinery have ended that, and made hunting to-day the same kind of thing as golf, or cricket, or any other child’s play.
6. Irresistible Evolution
I saw a real hunter a few months ago (1908). He was a Eurasian, in Burma, living from hand to mouth. His clothes were of the roughest, poor fellow, and his appearance showed he had to live very barely. The police said that he was kept alive by his patient mother, who “allowed him to sponge upon her.” A passion for hunting had withdrawn him from other occupations. The deer in the woods, along the muddy coast, and the rewards for an occasional leopard or tiger, I was told, enabled him to buy ammunition and a little food. He came before me with his companions, some idle vagabond Burmans of like tastes, because, it was alleged, when other game failed, they had decided to become hunters of men—in plain words, they were robbers. As I unravelled the tangled threads of his history, I saw in it what any man, who has developed healthily, can read in his own consciousness, a summary of human evolution from hunting to stealing. From stealing to working is the next step. The hunters shall soon be all vanished from the earth; but the thieves shall be with us yet awhile.