A VILLAGE ON THE IRRAWADDY
On the right bank, a little distance from the big rock of the defile, there is a village and this is where Lala was lost. Lala was a little black bear an engineer told me about. "It was one of those honeybears," he said—"had a white V-shaped mark on the chest." They kept chickens on board in a coop and one night Lala pulled a chicken out of this coop, practically skinning it between the bars; the Sakunny, the wheelman, declared that Lala took a piece of his bread and deliberately placed it in the chicken's trough outside the bars and waited till the bird put its head out. He was not the sort of man to make up such a story, but the engineer could hardly believe him and asked to be called the next time the Sakunny could see the bear was after the coop. Whether the engineer was in bed or not, Lala used to sleep not far from him on a mat by the engine-room door. One night the wheel-man called him up, and he actually saw the bear take along a piece of his bread and drop it into the trough. He was ready to cuff Lala if he touched a fowl, but the bear was too quick for him, and the very moment a hen put her head through the bars whipped it out clean through. The engineer never gave Lala meat, but somebody got feeding him on "bully beef," and that seemed to make him restive. He never really bit anybody, but the engineer felt it was safest to get rid of Lala. He got off one day at the village near the defile and took the bear a mile and a half away into the jungle and "lost" him.
Soon after the villagers petitioned the engineer to take the bear on board again. It seemed that Lala was haunting the village and stole chickens persistently. So there was nothing for it but to take him on to the steamer again. Then he gave him to the Rangoon Zoo.
It was months after that the engineer went to see Lala. He took with him a retriever, which had been a great chum and playfellow of the bear. When he asked about it at the gardens they said it had got very wild and would not take its food. I'll give the rest of the story in the engineer's own words.
"They were just going to give it rations, so I said, Give me the food and I'll go into the cage myself. I took the retriever in with me, and I'll never forget the way that bear looked at me as long as I live. The poor thing just stood up and put its forepaws on my chest and looked into my eyes as much as to say:—'Is this what you've done to me?' No, I'll never keep a wild animal again."
Below the defile the stream widened again and the banks were low sand-flats as before. The sun blazed on the water, but little pieces of tin tied to floating bamboo marks gleamed brighter than the water surface. In the evening a long wraith of white mist lay across the grey-blue of the mountains, and in the reflection of the afterglow bamboo stakes swung from side to side with the current, tied to the bottom by their sand-bags and shaken to and fro as a soul tethered to mortality quivers in the stream of circumstance.
On each side of the steamer a man was now trying the depths with a long pole, which he swung round in the air; like some monotonous prayer he chanted the depths of the water—Sari ache balm—ache balm—ache hart—chanted these words again and again.
BURMESE MURDERERS.