JUNGLE THRILLS.

Hawera Star, Volume XLVIII, 11 February 1925, Page 9

JUNGLE THRILLS.

TRAPPING WILD ANIMALS. A MALAY INDUSTRY. The Malays who lived among the animals it was the business of Mr. Mayen (author of “Jungle Beasts I Have Captured”) to catch and sell to menageries were puzzled at his occupation; they asked why the tuau would carry away beasts with him and feed them in idleness as a rajah feeds a woman of great beauty. Mr. Mayer had to stop to think liefore replying to the spokesman

“In far countries it is good for the eves of men, women and children to look upon the beasts of the jungle.”

"f will tell them, tuati, that in vour country beast-gazing i s good eyemedicine.”

It is medicine that extends the range of the eye, and it will be more efficacious if applied after reading the book (says a writer in London TitBits”). Neither the hunter nor the photographer brings home to us the full strength of the beasts they have to do with, for if they have experienced it they are unlikely to tell the tale. Mr. Mayer had to reckon with it. for he had to devise traps to hold uninjured beasts and to transfer them angry from trap to cage. Une speculates in the strength of a p,v thou seen at the Zoo ; Mr. Mayen tells us how lie caught half a one in a bag suspended from a tree by a slipknot, and how the oilier half —wound round a branch —took elaborate tackle and a posse of men to uncoil it. Mr. Mayer solved this sort of problem on the spot with such implements as the jungle afforded, and by tbe time we have read that his plan for taking a rhinoceros “worked wonderfully well.” We have endorsed the local verdict that “a man who is wiser in the jungle than the wild 'beasts must have great wisdom.” It would take too long to recount the plan in detail: if the reader is inclined to devise one for himself let him remember that the quarry weighs more than a ton, that iu the dense jungle of Sumatra stalking it is difficult and driving in a given direction impossible, that it has a super keen sense of smell and that to it the thick growth is not the impediment that it is to the hunter. „I.n these stories the risks taken by the hunter have to be borne in mind, otherwise sympathy is too strongly with the defeated ' beast. That rhinoceros was caught because she. would not leave her calf:—

The rhinoceros, by the way, is a model mother, as animals go. She will keep her offspring with her either following it or pushing it before her like a careful nursemaid. In this connection there is a line given to a moving tragedy of childhood : we are told of Mr. Mayer’s baby elephant —Timar— eight months old. She appears to have had fascinating ways, and ran about loose with the children of the compound. Suddenly she goes out of the story. “The Flying Jordans came 'to town and p.lid her price.. I hated to see her go and my head attendant’s little girl cried herself sick.” Wc got other sidelights on the life of the circus, for it was at that end of the animal business that Mr. Mayer began : - An elephant ride is the meanest ride on earth. The animal’s skin is a misfit. It is so loose that jt slides aud slips with every move he makesMoreover, his gait in itself is » torture. In circuses the women who ride them throwing kisses to the crowds demand extra pay. . They deserve it. Mr. Mayer knows a lot about elephants, but even he does not know why, when rounded up, the wild elephants do not pull the men off the backs of the tame ones; all he knows is that a man on the back of a tame elephant is always safe among a herd of wild ones and that “had the big hull been an exception” his story would never have been written.

Fortunately, in the coasts round Singapore, where he did his hunting, there is much else of interest; to quote the headman of three kainpongs.

“There are beasts in the jungle there, many, many, like grains of sand, and their skins shine like level water in the sun.”

The most difficult of all to catch and exhibit appears to he the orangoutang; he is so slrewd that he will not enter a trap until he has seen a monkey eat the bait and return in safety, he is so strong that he is said to kill the "ocodile by tearing his jaws apart with his great paws; bold enough to wait for the hunters by the trap in which bis young one is caught—-Mr. Alavei had ' two "men killed hv the parents and sensitive enough to starve himseli to death if he realises that it is hit captor’s wish that he should eat.