JUNGLE PEN PICTURES.

Auckland Star, Volume LXII, Issue 14, 17 January 1931, Page 8 (Supplement)

JUNGLE PEN PICTURES.

WILD LIFE IN INDIA.

FASCINATING GLIMPSES.

FACTS STRANGER THAN" FICTION,

(By J. M. GORDON.)

It is quite impassible that even the average person living in India, and knowing something of its animal life and various species of fauna, would hesitate to regard the wild pig as the deadliest of all the wild animals of that country. To those whose idea of the pig is drawn from the peaceful porcine dwellers in English styes and farmyards, the wild pig of India would not only open their eyee but strike terror into their beings. So fierce is the Indian pig that elephant and tiger both evince terror when in their vicinity and dash headlong to their home fastnesses. So fierce are they that these monarcks of the jungle will not rest till they have put the safest of distances between themselves and their diminutive but ruthless adversaries. Always ready for battle against any odds, they grind their lower tusks on the upper ones, until they have a razorlike sharpness, and in their furious onslaught have been known to disembowel a horse and gore to death its luckless rider. "The Indian boar," says an authority, "is ferocious to the point of madness. He will charge'a line of men or a line of elephants without counting the coat. His lower tusk, sharpened to a razor edge upon his upper one, has been known to cut through the sole of a heavy riding boot. When going full tilt —and their pacc is fast—they use their snout as a brake and pivot within their own length to attack at right angles. Elephants and even tigers hold them in awe. Pig-stickers in India all pay tribute to the gallant beast, which charges even before it is touched and never hoists the white flag."

From the point of view of sport and providing a foe worthy of the pigstickers' steel the wild pig is no doubt a valuable asset to India, but he is .a destructive swine and not very desirable in any other respect.

Referring to the depredations of wild animate of India,, Mr. G. F. Keatinge, formerly Director of Agriculture of Bombay, giving evidence before the Royal Commission of Agriculture in India, said that the wild pig was the chi-jf offender. Owing to religious sentiment, apathy and lack of effective weapons for the cultivators, the pigs were not destroyed. In the canal tracts of the Deccan large droves of wild pig lived in the sugar cane, doing immense damage j'ear in and year out. They are becoming such a menace in large tracts of the vast sub-continent, particularly in the northern regions, such as Rajputana, owing to their rapidly increasing hordes, that drastic measures are now necessary to protect the cultivator against their depredations.

The Bravest Wild Animal

Discussing the courage of the animals inhabiting the jungles, another writer, who is obviously a student of animal psychology, as well as a fine big game hunter, expresses the opinion that the buffalo and wild pig stand out :>L-yond all others. The buffalo, however, combines with pluck a large amount of low cunning; the wild boar practically never descends to cunning of any kind. But while there may be some question as to whether the buffalo or the pig is the bravest, the writer has no doubt that the most majestic and beautiful of, all animals is the gaur, so often mistermed bison by sportsmen.

The rhinocerous, the grotesque and ponderous horned beast of Africa, is one of the most unpleasant of animals to encounter. One never knows what he will do. Perhaps four times out of five he will make off, but there is always the fifth time, when he will charge like a swift tank, crashing through the undergrowth as though it were paper. "Our car," remarks a traveller, "was several times chased by one and we paced him by our speedometer and found that he was doing 33 or 34 miles an hour, apparently without effort. Once under way— and it is surprising how quickly he can take off —there is nothing to stop him, for he weighs 'two tons.'

The Home of the Tiger. One of the places most famous for tiger in India is the Sanderbas, which is a dense tract of jungle situated in this Gangetic delta from the mouth of the Hughli eastwards over an area of mora than a hundred miles.'

Barisal, which is' a small town in the delta of the Ganges, is noted for the phenomenon known in India by the name of "Barisal Guns." The origin of these phantom sounds, which resemble the dull, muffled booming of heavy guns being fired at a great distance, is believed to be subterranean. The reports are heard at irregular intervals, sometimes singly, sometimes in quick succession, and the phenomenon, needless to say, from the native point of view, has invested the place. with many traditions of superstitious awe and mystery. The patron saint of this wild and inhospitable region is the Gazi Shaheb, who is a kind of Indian Tarzan of the Apes, and, according to native belief, exercises a, despotic influence over the wild animals of the jungle. A true and amazing instance of a tiger attacking its hunter perched high up In a tree-liide is verified by the details of am adventure which befell Mrs. E. A. Smythies, the wife of a member of the Imperial Forest Service in the United Provinces.

Mrs. Smytliies, while hunting in the Terai forests of the Himalayas, fired at and wounded a tiger which had been beaten out of the jungle. The beast immediately attacked Mrs. Smytliies in the tree-hide and climbed so near to her that the woman thrust her rifle down the animal's ■ throat and pulled the trigger. The cartridge misfired, the rifle was torn out of her hands, and Mrs. Smytliies fell from her watching post to the ground. Her husband, who was near at hand, fired many shots into the beast, wounding it every, time, but not killing it, until he the last shot in the magazine of the rifle. Mrs. Smytliies was fortunately unhurt, but the narrowness of her escape can be judged from the torn seat of the tree-hide, which was ripped open by the tiger when lie climbed the tree. A Queer Tiger Story.

Of other tiger stories more or less within the realm of legendary things, India lias produced an inexhaustible variety, but the following one, told by MajftcHowletL i&worth j§peatjgggi«a

"I do not say I believe the story myself," he avers, "nor yet do I altogether disbelieve it. But a picture of India would be incomplete without it, or one (like it.

"Here is the story. Two old natives came to the forest bungalow one morning and asked if I wished to go after a tiger, as it was close by, and tliey had seen it the evening before. I disclaimed all desire to do so, as I had only a small rifle, a .300 Winchester, which I used to carry in case of meeting trouble, but with which I was not going to look for trouble. I asked them where they had seen it, and how.

"They told me that they had been sitting in their hut in the semi darkness with their fire burning in the middle of the floor, when the door was pushed open and the tiger himself came in. He did not molest them at all, but calmly sat down on his haunches before the fire, and remained there several minutes warming himself. After a time he got up and walked out as unconcernedly as ho had come in. The two men were paralysed with fright, and could neither speak nor move, not daring to stir out, but doing their best to keep up the fire until daylight. They told me the whole story so simply and with such a matter-of-fact air that I know I felt my hair rise as I pictured the scene. Their hut stood in a ravine less than a mile from the bungalow, and I must have passed it frequently in my wanderings. They were simple peasant men, and they may have been the victims of an illusion, but I am positive that they were convinced that they were telling the truth." The Man-eating Crocodile.

In the normal course of events, crocodiles are long-lived creatures. Specimens which have been shot have revealed the fact that they must have been a hundred years old. In many parts of India they are regarded as sacred creatures, and it is said that 011 occasions are propitiated by human sacrilice. Whether such (sacrifices are any longer permitted in India's remoter parts may be questionable, but a well-known nobleman in a recent description of his visit to a certain potentate in the North of India, vouches for the fact that he himself, at tlio dead of night, witnessed one of- these gruesome and blopd-chilling sacrificial rites. He tells how he saw the body being enveloped in a sack and thrown into the dark and slimy .pool, whose murky waters were seething with these reptilian monsters, and quickly dragged underneath, into a swirling vortex. The man-eating Saurian has remarkably catholic tastes with regard to "solid" foods, which fact was dramatically demonstrated some time ago at a scientific meeting of zoologists, when the contents of the stomach of a maneating crocodile were produced. The brute had been shot, and when cut open revealed the following extraordinary assortment: Eleven heavy brass arm rings, three coiled wire armlets, one glass bead necklace, fourteen arm and leg bones (various animals), three spinal columns, one length of cord made from bark fibre, 18 stones of assorted sizes, several porcupine, quillsj Most of these objects had a tragic significance. The length of fibre cord had been used to tie up a bundle by a native carrier. The man had vanished, and the bundle had disappeared, but the indigestible cord remained to tell the story. The porcupine Was evidently the crocodile's last meal. Instances have occurrcd in the darkness of sleeping occupants in open boats being pulled into the river by crocodiles and borne away to a frightful death. These fearsome monsters, however, do not lurk in watch for their prey in silent, mysterious lakes and backwaters of rivers, but often steal a march on their victims on dry land

"Directly the sua goes down," writes one traveller, "The crocodile becomes as lively as a cat, and prowls about on the land in the vicinity of its haunts. Sometimes it can be heard in the stillness of the night, grunting like a pig." A crocodile has been known to come up behind a man and knock him out by a tremendous flourish of its tail, and the rest of the story has been told by the odd bits of garments the monster may have left in disposing of his bonne bouche.

"Milking" Cobras. Medical science lias done much of recent years to reduce the dreaded danger of snake-bite' in India. The cobra is one of tlie most common of the many venomous reptiles.which infest" the country. For very many years a remedy for this kind of snake bite, known as ' ; antiVenine," has been prepared at the Parel Laboratory, Bombay. It was here-I had an opportunity of inspecting the cobra farm where the reptiles were kept and milked for the purpose of collecting the poison'direct from them. When a supply of venom is required a cobra is selected and a syringe full of the cobra's poisonous fluid is extracted from the reptile by the followingmethod: An Indian orderly, armed with a forked bamboo cane about four feet long tips the cobra bodily out of its box and, rapidly pinning it by the neck, grasps the reptile behind the jaws, making it eject a golden trickle from its perforated fangs into a glass receptacle covered with a piece of thin gauze. When a case of snake-bite is treated by an injection of antivenine the chances of recovery are increased a hundred-

fold, but the remedy only protects the victim if the bite waa caused by the same species of snake as that from which the remedy was extracted. This means that a native bitten by a Russels viper would derive more harm than benefit if treated with an antidote taken from the cobra. To tell the truth, no scientific remedy has yet been discovered to counteract the deadly effect of the bite of a Russels viper. The hamadryad, India's most ferocious snake, like the green mainba, of Africa, has the evil reputation of attacking and pursuing anyone who crosses his path. This is an aggressive habit quite exceptional among snakes, their usual instiuct, as in the case of the cobra, being not to strike unless they are cornered or accidentally trodden on. Other loss deadly and more common venomous creatures like the scorpion, which in the Mofussil constantly invades the privacy of one's bathroom —and upon which the unwary ablutioner is liable to place an erring naked foot, with distinctly painful after-results—together with the infernal legions of stinging pests and disease-carrying insects, arc the real terrors and torments of everyday life in India. - But with all these torments and tribulations incidental to existence in the tropics, and the continual bodily fume and. fret occasioned by the enervating and blistering heat, to those who have had any long experience of the East, its call is never completely stifled; and its romance, its mysticism, its glamour and the many other enchanting attributes of its indefinable lures are, ever and anon, re-echoing through their minds and pulsating through their veins.— (Anglo American N.S. Copyright.)

According to the researches of paleograpliists and bibliographists, neither in printing nor in writing were capitals always used. The earliest writing consisted of characters of almost uniform size, the transition being gradual. In MSS., both Greek and Latin, of the earlier centuries, the writing runs continuously without' breaking into distinct words. The systematic use of capitals commenced only in the fifteenth century. It was in this century that they first began to be used in printing.