A wolverine, finding a backwoodsman’s house empty, will clear it of everything movable down to the gridiron.
Still the memory of such a lump of meat as that will be sure to linger, so next day the trapper comes again, hoping that the wolverine will have been there before him. And so he has been, but he has gone, again, with the bait, having first drawn the pine-tree out of the way, and then cut the string—which, if pulled, would have fired off the gun—only just behind the muzzle. His tracks lead down to the shores of the lake, at a part where it stretches out widely, so as to give a good view all round. There he has eaten the meat, and there the trapper finds his string, which he can use again if he likes. He does use it again two or three times, first tying it where it has been bitten through, and then arranging things in the same way. But each time it all happens over again, just as before, except that now the wolverine is careful to gnaw the string a little behind the knot, where it has, each time, been tied, as if it had thought that it might be as dangerous to be in front of this as in front of the muzzle of the gun. So the trapper, at last, thinking that there must be a human spirit in the body of the wolverine—and a very cunning and malicious one, too—gives it up, and goes into another part of the country, so far away that he is not likely to be followed.
It is not only traps that the wolverine is fatal to. If he finds the house of a backwoodsman empty, he will get into it through a hole which he makes in the wall—never through the door, even if this should be open—and then takes away whatever there may be inside. It does not matter what the things are. Guns, kettles, knives, axes, blankets, boxes, or cans of tinned meat, it is all the same to the wolverine, he carries them all off or pushes them along with his paws, to hide them in different places—for he is like the magpie or the bizcacha in this; whatever he sees seems to have an attraction for him. Thus it has sometimes happened that a hunter and his family, having been so imprudent as to leave their “lodge” unguarded for a day or two—or perhaps having to go and there being no one to leave there—have come back and found it quite empty, only the bare walls with nothing inside them. The misfortune, however, is not so great as it seems, for the tracks of the wolverine, or sometimes the pair of them, can be followed up, and, little by little, everything is found hidden about in the bushes. It is not often, however, that the animal itself is discovered.
Indeed the wolverine’s presence is much more often felt than seen. One ill deed after another comes to light, and is surely traced to his door, but their author remains, for long periods, invisible. With a cunning that seems human, he devises, plans, and executes, and with equal astuteness he chooses his time. When he does happen to meet a man, how does he act? He sits up on his haunches, like a dog begging, and holding one of his big, flat fore paws just above his eyes, so as to shade them from the light, looks long and earnestly at the intruder—for as such he considers him. This he will do, sometimes, three or four times, before deciding that he had better go, unless, indeed, he sees any special reason for alarm, in which case he quickly disappears. There is no other known animal, as far as I am aware, that has this odd human-like habit. No wonder the American backwoodsman, besides looking upon the wolverine (or carcajou as he calls him) as a very malignant animal, thinks him a little uncanny as well.
CHAPTER XXVI
MAN-EATING ANIMALS—THE TIGER’S SLAVE—A SAVAGE LION-HUNT—WOLF-REARED CHILDREN—MEN AND APES—A SHAM GORILLA—UNPROHIBITED MURDER—A MONKEY’S MALISON.
We have seen how some animals are, by their cunning and sagacity, able to compete even with man himself. At an earlier period, when wild animals were more numerous than they are now and when man had nowhere risen above the savage state, this must have been still more the case, and, even now, there are parts of the world where the struggle between man and beast can hardly be said to have been decided in favour of the former. Thus in India, in spite of its old and, in many respects, high civilisation, tigers have held their own from time immemorial, and every year numbers of the natives are killed by certain individuals amongst them, that have acquired a taste for human flesh in preference to any other.
These man-eaters, as they are called, become wonderfully cunning, and never attack either a European or a shikaree, or native hunter, who is always armed with his matchlock. The poor labourers or cattle-herds, on the other hand, who carry nothing, except perhaps a stick, which, of course, is of no use, are totally defenceless against these lurking fiends, which hang about the villages, and sometimes quite depopulate them. A fearful thing it must be, not to be able to stir beyond the little collection of mud and straw-thatched huts which make an Indian village without being liable to a sudden and horrible death. Sometimes, indeed, the tiger will come into the very village street and carry off a man or a woman almost from the door of their hut. Or it will lurk near the well or tank from which the water is drawn, so that to procure the precious fluid, without which the lives of the community could not be supported, individual lives must constantly be risked. The only remedy for a state of things like this is the arrival of a British officer or, at least, of a native shikaree upon the scene, and this in a country so large and densely populated as India, and with such a small scattering of Europeans in it, is not an everyday occurrence. Often, therefore, the people get tired of waiting, and after losing a certain proportion of their number, the remainder abandon the village and migrate to another part of the country altogether.
No wonder all sorts of superstitions have sprung up in the native mind concerning an animal so fierce and terrible, against which men—at least poor men—are so defenceless. One of these superstitions is that the tiger has power over the body of the man slain by him, for as long as he may care to come to it—that the man, under these circumstances, becomes, as it were, the slave of the tiger, and is bound to help his master and give him warning of danger should he see it approaching. Thus a story is told of a shikaree who went to watch by the remains of a man that a tiger had killed, hoping to shoot the murderer when it returned at sundown to complete its repast on the body, as is the animal’s habit. In the still of the afternoon, when the sun was low, the shikaree saw the tiger approaching over the level ground, but while it was still at a safe distance, the corpse, all mangled and gory as it was, raised itself a little and held up a hand in warning, on which the tiger slunk away. Twice it came back, but each time it was warned in the same way by the man that was now its slave, so the shikaree had to give it up, and go without getting a shot. If the corpse had been left there, then, even after it had become a skeleton, it would have been obliged to help the tiger, had the latter required its assistance; but no doubt it was taken away and properly buried.