Speaking of the tiger always brings to mind that other great cat, the lion. These powerful marauders dispute the title of "king of beasts." Their respective realms overlap but little. The lion, like the other big cats, is a relic of a diminishing race and kingdom. In the early Stone Age the "cave" lion (virtually the same as the present Felis leo) roamed throughout the southern half of Europe, and its final extermination north of the Mediterranean was doubtless accomplished by prehistoric men. Afghanistan, Beluchistan and northern Persia were rid of them long ago. A century ago lions were more or less prevalent in northwestern India, but now none remain save a few in the Gheer, a wooded hilly tract of Kattiawar. In Persia they survive only in Farsistan, where marshes afford shelter, and the hosts of pigs feeding on the acorns of the oak forests furnish subsistence. But they were long ago exterminated from all Asia Minor, Arabia, Egypt, and Algeria. From Abyssinia, and the southern Sahara southward to the Orange River, lions still exist except in the most populous districts, and in some places are very numerous. This range of territory shows that, unlike the forest-loving tiger, the lion is an inhabitant of open, bushy country, finding its game in the herds of antelopes, zebras, and similar plains-running animals rather than in the jungle fauna to which the tiger is confined; also that the tiger is inured to a far colder climate. This difference in habitat and hunting requirements accounts, in the minds of those who pay much attention to adaptive (or "protective") coloration, for the difference in their dress, for the tiger is said to become almost invisible in its yellow coat and vertical black stripes amid the flickering shadows of the wood, or when creeping through the long Indian grass, while the unmarked, grayish yellow, or sand tint, of the lion is equally unnoticeable on the desert or on the sere veldt of its East African hunting grounds. The great mane of the male lion—but some never acquire this ornament, or only scantily—and his greater height at the shoulder give him a majestic mien.
A lion of large size measures about nine and a half feet from the nose to the tip of the tail, which is about three feet long; stands three and a half feet high at the shoulders; and weighs about five hundred pounds. Most specimens, however, fall far short of these figures; and the largest examples have come from South Africa. The dimensions and weight of tigers average just about the same, the extreme examples on record having no doubt been measured along the curves of the body instead of in a straight line between the two terminal points, nose and tip of tail, as is the proper method. The literature relating to these two royal and puissant beasts is immense in its extent, and the best of it is that written by the hunter-naturalists who during the past century have studied and fought them in their native wilds.
| LION |
| (Felis leo) |
The western hemisphere has a series of native cats which, although not equal in size and strength to the lion and tiger, are hardly less formidable in view of the game they hunt. The biggest is the jaguar, which is found from western Texas to northern Argentina. It is about the size of the leopard, but has a bulkier body, bigger head, shorter and more massive limbs, and shorter tail; hence, while less active and supple, it is perhaps more powerful than the leopard, and certainly is stronger than the puma. The ground color varies from the yellowish gray seen in arid Paraguay to almost red in the steaming equatorial swamps, while in the lower Orinoco Valley deep brown and black ones are common; but there is only one species. The coat is everywhere spotted with black, not in the leopard's hollow rosettes, but forming larger, irregular groups, each inclosing a black central spot.
This is the "tigre" of the American tropics, and indeed, is so called wherever Spanish is spoken. It hunts the largest game of its country, especially tapirs and deer; and wherever domestic animals are reared it becomes a destructive pest. For the most part, however, these cats subsist on capybaras and other rodents; and in Mexico on peccaries, striking down stragglers and then hastening up a tree out of the way of the furious herd of these sharp-toothed pigs brought together by the squealing of the first victim. Rarely found away from water, which seems as necessary to it as to the tiger, it is not surprising to find that in such places as the reedy borders of the La Plata fish form its main diet, snatched from the water by the paw. On the Amazon it feeds largely on turtles and their eggs. It attacks the manatee in its own element, and has been seen "dragging out of the water this bulky animal, weighing as much as an ox." Even the crocodile and cayman are regularly preyed upon. Its fondness for monkeys is also well known, and it is hated and reviled by them with the same fury as leads the East Indian apes to hurl sticks and bad language at the tiger.
The "cougar," as Buffon named it, the "puma" of the Peruvians, "panther" and "mountain lion," as it is known in the United States, is another big American cat familiar to woodsmen from New England, Minnesota, and northern British Columbia southward to Patagonia; and everywhere it is so precisely uniform that the most hair-splitting systemists have been unable to subdivide its species (Felis concolor) into local varieties. Its upper parts vary from foxy red to a dull blue, this difference in color having no reference to age, season or locality. The underparts are white; and there are no spots anywhere except that the lips and outer rim of the ear are black, and a patch of white marks each side of the muzzle. The panther was much dreaded by the early settlers of the Eastern States and by the frontiersmen settling the Mississippi Valley, who were more alarmed by its doleful screams as it wandered about in the night, than by any history of harm, for it avoided men with a greater fear than their own; nevertheless, it became a nuisance by its raids on the farmer's live stock and he killed it off, so that now pumas are to be met with only in the forested and swampy fastnesses of some of the Gulf States and in the Far West. There they still do great damage to the young animals on ranches, especially where horses are plentiful on the range. This is equally true of South America. Nowhere, however, is the puma feared by mankind as is the jaguar; on the contrary, remarkable stories are recorded, and constantly being verified by experience, not only of the cowardice of the animal, but of its apparent desire to make friends with humanity, following lonely persons without harming them, apparently merely in satisfaction of an innocent curiosity. It is hunted usually with dogs, to escape which it will climb into a tree, and once there remain to be shot rather than come down to fight, even when the hunters are close up.
Tropical America is the home of several smaller cats, some of which among the spotted ones are probably only varieties of the ocelot. This highly variable but always beautiful creature is about two and a half feet long in body, rather long in the legs, is an expert tree-climber, and is abundant from Oklahoma southward into the Brazilian forest, but has a different name in every country. It is grayish, thickly marked with fawn-colored, black-edged, oval patches and stripes in endless variety; and its fur is one of the most marketable in the country. On the prairies and plains of the open country south of Brazil the pampas cat, or "pajero," is common. It is of robust form, with long hair, very plain in its grayish tint on the back, but beautifully spotted and striped on the belly and legs. It is a ground-runner, preying on rodents and birds. Brazil has in its forests a notable cat of medium size called "jaguarundi," with a noticeably slender form, short legs and a tail nearly as long as its body. It is dark gray in hue and entirely unspotted. This may, on further study, turn out to be only a variety of the "eyra," another cat of the tropics, sometimes met with as far north as the Rio Grande Valley, which looks in its unspotted chestnut coat more like a huge weasel than a cat. It is a graceful and nimble climber, and lives on prey caught in trees.