The kitten took the hint and jumped upon a chair and thence to the table, and walked across it towards me. He is fond of me; that is to say, he sometimes comes to me when he has nothing else to do or wants something. But on the way across the table he saw what seemed more interesting. The brass Egyptian finger-bowl caught his eye, and he surveyed it and its doily. He had passed it unconcerned a few minutes before, but that was when preoccupied about the frog. On this occasion, after an attentive survey of the finger-bowl, he put out his paw and tried to push it sideways. It did not move. He tried a spring [115] ]and a push, to add momentum to his muscle; and so he shook it a little.

He raised himself to his full height and looked and beheld something inside it, moving! Then he became excited.

When you try to think like a cat, you must begin by realising that he has fewer categories than Aristotle. The universe is, in his mind, divided into—himself and other things not-himself, which is exactly the feline counterpart of Hegel & Co.’s Ego and Non-Ego; but, having to find a living, the cat has passed as far beyond the Hegelian stage as the Germans themselves have done since Hegel died. He classifies things not-himself into the Eatable and the Not-Eatable; and again, a cross-division, into what he fears and what he does not fear; and thirdly, another cross-division, he distinguishes things that move from things that do not move. Few hunting animals are long of learning that last distinction; and yet to know that motionless things escape the eye is one of the first lessons that scouts have to be taught. The kitten knew it. He flopped down motionless a while, as soon as he saw something moving inside the bowl; but men who have been miseducated into believing without observing, whose minds have been constricted by Greek [116] ]grammars and the rest, as the feet of Chinese ladies are constricted by bandages, men of bandaged brains, in short, still need to be taught that in their maturity. Better late than never!

Stealthily the kitten now approached the bowl and tried in vain to jerk out what was inside. The bowl was too heavy for him. He crept round and round it, and endeavoured to move it by pulling the tablecloth, but failed again. Then he sat down at a distance, with his head between his paws, and watched it and considered, concentrating his intellect upon it, exactly as a boy sits down, with his arms round his head to puzzle out a thing, retiring into himself, so that distracting sights and sounds be held aloof, and only the problem to be solved find access to his brain. It is an excellent thing to make a camera obscura of your skull in that way at times. I have watched a great inventor doing it; and with like admiration I now watched the kitten. No apology is needed to my Brahman friends for mentioning that this concentration is what they call “Yoga,” described as “a discipline whereby the powers in man are to be so trained that they will attain their utmost development, and will realise and respond to the subtlest and minutest influences which bear on him from outside.” Such is ever [117] ]the way of the wise; and it may be attempted by the simple too, if they are sincere. It is conceit and affectation that make the fool. The kitten had no weakness of that kind. So he meditated to some purpose; for he saw what to do.

He put out his paw and tugged the doily. Hurrah! The bowl moved briskly. The hunt was up now at the fifth tug the water flew out. The triumphant kitten darted round the bowl to catch his prey and found nothing. The tablecloth was wet; but how could he connect the wetness of the tablecloth with the thing that had leapt from the bowl?

I tried to console him with milk, but he was transported beyond the reach of sordid comforting. Besides, he was not hungry. He returned again and again to investigate the matter, till he was tired. Where had the thing gone to? He never guessed, and I could not tell him. Poor little puss! For him, as for humanity, the ocean of mystery, on which all things swim, is very close at times.

XVII [118]
THE LEOPARD AS A KILLER OF MEN

1. TWICE TWENTY YEARS AGO OR MORE

Not long ago I read in Indian papers about a leopard in Central India which had killed about 173 men and women, and the carcass of which showed fore-paws and chest muscles of unusual size. “It had almost the front of a tiger,” wrote one of the scribes. This was exactly the description of another of the same kind, which was told me about 1888 by Colonel Bingham, then Conservator of Forests for an eastern division of Burma. He beguiled the long evening in a rest-house on the fringe of the woods by telling me the life-history of a man-killing leopard in Central India, which I believe he had hunted there about twenty or thirty years before. It made the “hours and minutes hand-in-hand go by” so light that it was long, long after our usual bed-time before we thought of looking at our watches.

[119] ]If he had been the common story-teller, I could never have kept awake, much less forgotten to note the time. He was a man of accurate and scientific tastes, and great knowledge of Natural History, and, best of all, one of those rare comfortable souls who are more interested in things in general than in themselves. This makes accuracy almost easy, and modesty comes without an effort. We discussed at length the question whether that leopard had been a cross between the leopard and the tiger. The reports about it had made Bingham think it must be so, but the post-mortem upon it, at which I think he assisted, made him dubious, for, to his surprise, he found its markings purely leopard’s, and the only difference between it and common leopards to be its size, especially in front.