Anecdotes of Big Cats and Other Beasts

by David Alec Wilson

“It is a duty to slay that leopard. Through this big village he went ravenous, seeking whom to devour. He terrified the women and children, and made the men shiver, while the sky rang with shrieks. He stalked as a master through the town” (here the orator, by a sweep of one arm, included the adjoining village to the north); “and the country shuddered with horror” (here, with a sweep of both arms, he included the entire countryside).

In fact, the leopard had been in search of a superfluous village dog, and when he found himself noticed and heard the people yelling, he skulked from bush to bush till he was shot, and then ran up a tree. The orator expressed the matter differently. There is a great deal in the way of putting things. What he next said was:

“He left the woods, the home of his kind. He [142] ]came among the dwellings of men. Shall we make way for him? Shall he be suffered to ravage and run away? Shall he come and go like our master, as if we all were sheep and he the eater? No! give me but the word, and up I go, and take him by the paw, and fling him down. Danger? What do I care for danger? O, let me at him, to show how brave a man can be and make the beasts beware! For, of all the duties a brave man has....

At this moment he looked up, as if at the sky, but saw the leopard, suddenly visible, coming down the tree, and hastily ran back, and was seen and heard no more.

A curious sequel is worth telling. The wounded beast ran into a bush; and a young Burman policeman, who understood of the sepoy’s speech only that he was boasting of bravery, resolved to show himself the better man, and sprang forward, dancing a beautiful pas seul, and brandishing a big knife, the Burman sword, a handier weapon than ours. “I’ll finish the leopard,” he cried, and started for its hiding-place, running past me.

It was a pretty sight. We never see now in Europe the solo dances still visible in Burma, and some other eastern countries, on religious high tides. We can only read of them in the Hebrew [143] ]Bible, which tells of King David casting off the trappings of royalty, and leaping and dancing before the ark in a scanty garment, and so scandalising the genteelest of his wives, Saul’s daughter, Michal, who quarrelled with him about it. A dance like David’s, if you are lucky, you may yet see in Burma; but hardly again, in this new world of breechloaders and explosive acids, hardly but by some rare accident, can anyone see what we saw then, a spontaneous Pyrrhic dance done singly, so to speak, a man dancing forward, flourishing his sword, to a deadly encounter.

A most deadly encounter it might have been. The leopard was shot through the lungs, and bleeding to death, inwardly. I thought I had noticed him spit blood, and anyone could see he was badly wounded. But he was only dying, not dead. His eyes flashed in the dark below the brushwood, where he lay, and he raised his head and half sat up, showing his teeth and growling, a very loud, monotonous, continuous growl.

I just was in time to knock our hero down, within five yards of the leopard, and step between him and it, quickly joined by one or two others. There was nothing to do but stand ready. The uplifted head was lowered, slowly; the growl [144] ]grew less, and was punctuated by pauses, which grew longer and longer. There was a long pause, during which there was nothing to hear but men’s breathing; then the dread silence was broken by the voice of a young Burman, creeping past me on all fours and crying, “Just let me pull its tail....”

It was an idle day that followed, which gave them leisure to enjoy themselves. About twenty-nine men spent it dividing the corpse.

They quarrelled, and I quoted to them the proverb, “The lot causeth contention to cease.” Sure enough, it did so. They cast lots in peace, and told me that eating such a beast made men partake the strength and courage of the dead. I thought of many things, as I listened, such as Marco Polo’s story of tribes in Southern China, who were so sure of acquiring fine qualities in this way that, if a traveller seemed uncommonly beautiful or otherwise gifted, they sometimes killed and ate him. It is a strange belief, and, in one form or another, it has appeared in many countries. But all the same, whatever I happened to remember on this occasion, the prevailing feeling was that the next time there was such a job to be done, with such a crowd, it would be alike expedient and gracious to—delegate the leadership.