No wonder tigers flourished in the days of old. It is the invention of gunpowder, and then of breechloaders, that has handicapped them hopelessly. The long guerilla war between them and us has lasted for scores of millenniums; but the end is now in sight. Let us not libel the brave that are doomed to disappear. Let us not rail at the conquered. If they were fierce and strong, they were not cruel. As Nature made them, so they filled their function. They came, and chased, and conquered, impelled by hunger: and now that their hour has come they are going away. The day is at hand when the big wild cats shall all be as completely extinct as the vanished giants that wallowed in the primeval slime.
V [46]
THE GIRL AND THE TIGRESS
This is a story that has been often told; and I confess I did not believe it when I heard it in 1895, in the district where it happened. Long afterwards, in 1908, Mr G. Tilly, who had been the District Superintendent of Police on the spot at the time, told me he held a local inquiry, and was so completely satisfied of the truth of it that he recommended the payment of a reward of R100 to the girl, and the Deputy Commissioner and the Commissioner agreed with him, and the Chief Commissioner of Burma sanctioned the reward, which was paid. In the absence of any motive for rash credulity on the part of these officers, this might seem enough; but I happened to be acquainted with Mr Grant Brown, who is now the Deputy Commissioner of that district, called the Upper Chindwin, and wrote to him about it. He replied on 21/2/09: “... I remembered the incident quite well as told in the Rangoon Gazette, and should have included it in [47] ]my article on Burmese women if I had been able to remember more of the details; but I had no idea that it took place in this district. Curiously enough, the very first person I asked was the headman of the village where the thing happened. He could give me no details beyond those you mention.... The heroine is dead, and as I thought I was sure to find an account of what happened in the record-room I did not make further inquiries. A search has been made, however, without result....”
The “article” mentioned is Mr Grant Brown’s article in The Women of all Nations, by Messrs Joyce & Thomas, published by the Messrs Cassell lately.
Failing to find the record of the original inquiry held by Mr Tilly, which had perished, as a thing no longer needed, in a periodical destruction of papers, Mr Grant Brown had a new inquiry held, and the vernacular record of it is now before me. I sent a set of interrogatories, which have been answered by Ma Shway U, an eye-witness, and the head man of the village and another man, who were soon on the scene, measured the tigress and did everything else that needed to be done. None of these persons has any motive for misstatement, and the chance of mistake is infinitesimal. That [48] ]time has not altered their stories I can myself testify, for what they say tallies with what I was told in 1895.
Readers can now see how my doubts have been removed, and must be impatient to know what it was that I was so slow to believe. As Mr Tilly tells me the newspapers merely gave more or less abbreviated versions of his report, I have not referred to them.
The scene was Seiktha village on the Chindwin, an Upper Burman tributary of the Irrawaddy, in one of the districts that form the southern fringe of the mountains between Burma and Assam. One day in 1894 three nut-brown girls set out from Seiktha to cut firewood in the forest, making for a likely place they knew, a little south-east of their village. They carried one or two heavy knives or choppers, like butchers’ cleavers, such as are common in Burman houses.
Now if there had only been a man with them, or even a big boy, he would certainly there and then, in going and coming, have walked in front, bearing a spear or dah, a big curved knife like a sword. What makes it needful to mention a thing so obvious to us who have lived there is that Englishwomen sometimes resent, as degrading to their sex, the Oriental custom that makes the man stalk in front; [49] ]whereas a little reflection would show them, when familiar with plain facts of this kind, that there are reasons for it honourable to human nature. It is not as a master that a man, who is a man, precedes a woman, or goes into war, or business, or politics; but as a pioneer, protector, provider, and in short head servant. The old maid, at whom Dean Ramsay made us laugh, because she “thought a man was perfect salvation,” was moved by a wise inherited instinct, far different from what simple sophisticated persons have hitherto supposed.
On this occasion there was no man at all, and in the absence of any natural protector it was “go as you please.” A tigress in the bush saw her chance. The lightest-limbed and lightest-laden of the trio was a little girl, Mintha by name, who ran on in front. The tigress seized her and carried her away.
There is a lot, at times, in etymology. An Englishman who knows Burmese would tell you that Mintha means prince, or son of an official (min); but, as written in Burmese, without a long accent on the tha, and pronounced like an ordinary English word with the stress in front, the name Mintha has another modest meaning which you may discover from a dictionary, but can only with difficulty persuade a Burman to tell you. It means [50] ]Better-than-an-Official, a name curiously recalling the kind of names that were common in England in the great days of Cromwell.