The hare gives birth to its young on full moon days, one of them has a crescent on its forehead and dies the first day it sees the moon or invariably becomes a prey to the rat snake.
When a tooth drops, its owner throws it on to the roof saying squirrel, dear squirrel, take this tooth and give me a dainty one in return (lenô lenô me data aran venin datak diyô).
Goblins are afraid of cattle with crumpled horns; a stick of the leea sambucina (burulla) is not used to drive cattle as it makes them lean; the saliva from the mouth of a tired bull is rubbed on its body to relieve its fatigue, and bezoar stones (gôrôchana) found in cattle are prescribed for small pox. In the olden time the ox had no horns but had teeth in both its jaws, while the horse had horns but had no teeth in its upper jaw; each coveted the other’s possessions and effected an exchange; the ox taking the horns and giving the horse its upper row of teeth; cart bulls are driven with the words ‘jah,’ ‘pita,’ ‘mak,’ ‘hov’.—move, to the right, to the left, halt.
Wild buffaloes are susceptible to charms.
Deer’s musk prolongs a dying man’s life.
An elephant shakes a palm leaf before eating it as bloodsuckers may be lurking there to creep inside its trunk. A dead elephant is never found for when death approaches the elephant goes to a secluded spot and lays itself down to die. Children who are made to pass under an elephant’s body become strong and are free from illness.
When the keeper says ‘hari hari,’ the elephant moves; ‘ho ho’ it stops, ‘dhana’ it kneels; ‘hinda’, it lies down; ‘daha’, it gets up; ‘bila’ it lifts the fore foot; ‘hayi,’ it lifts its trunk and trumpets.
A shower during sunshine denotes the jackal’s wedding day; a jackal always joins the cry of its friends, otherwise its hair will drop off one by one; a jackal’s horn (narianga) is very rare and it gives the possessor everything he wishes for and when buried in a threshing floor increases the crop, a hundred fold. The jackals assisted by the denizens of the woods once waged war against the wild fowls (welikukulô) who called to their aid a party of men one of whom seized the king of the jackals and dashed him on a rock and broke his jaw; as the king received the blow he raised the cry, apoi mage hakka (Oh my jaw), which could still be heard in the jackal’s howl. The wild fowls are still the enemies of the jackals. The jackals and the crabs have also a feud between them; a jackal once deceived a crocodile on the promise of getting the latter a wife and got himself ferried across the river for several days till he had consumed the carcase of the elephant on the other bank. A crab undertook to assist the crocodile to take revenge, invited the jackal to a feast and suggested to him to go to the riverside for a drink of water. The jackal consented but on seeing his enemy lying in wait killed the crab for his treachery.
Dark plumaged birds like the owl, the magpie robin and the black bird bring ill luck and are chased away from the vicinity of houses. The cry of the night heron (kana-koka) as it flies over a house presages illness and that of the devil bird (ulamâ) death. The devil bird was in a previous birth a wife whose fidelity her husband suspected and in revenge killed their child, made a curry of its flesh and gave it to the mother; as she was eating she found the finger of the infant and in grief she fled into the forest, killed herself, and was born the devil bird.
Crows are divided into two castes which do not mate, the hooded crows and the jungle crows; they faint three times at night through hunger and their insatiate appetite can only be temporarily appeased by making them swallow rags dipped in ghee; they hatch their eggs in time to take their young to the Ehela festival held in honour of the godlings during July and August. A crow seldom dies a natural death, and once in a hundred years a feather drops. As no one eats its flesh it sorrowfully cries kâtka (I eat every body). The king crow was once a barber and it now pecks its dishonest debtor, the crow.