The buffaloes are tropical cattle, usually heavily built, with massive, flattened, wrinkled horns, and the hair so thin that in old animals the bluish black skin is left almost naked. The typical buffalo is that native to India and Ceylon, where it formerly roved in herds, which, quickly forming into a compact bunch, heads and horns out, defied attack from even the lion or tiger. Bulls often exceed five feet in height, are extremely strong and quick, and carry rough horns, sweeping back circularly, which may measure twelve feet around the curve. Such a veteran herdmaster spends his days wallowing in marshy jungles, his broad, splayed hoofs sustaining him in the muddy soil, and his hairless back, coated with clay, proof against insects; but evenings and mornings he leads his band out to feed in lush prairies where the grass is tall enough to hide them. This is the race that has supplied the working cattle of hot, swampy regions, especially where rice is grown, and that has been the farmer's servant in the Far East, in Egypt, and in parts of Spain and Italy from time immemorial. Several breeds have been developed, of which the best known to Americans is the carabao of the Philippines. Africa has native buffaloes in two species, neither of which has been domesticated. The African buffalo is regarded as perhaps the most dangerous brute a sportsman can meet in that land of irritable beasts. Only rarely will even the lion attack one single-handed, and then seldom succeeds.
The bisons, although regarded by systemists as of two species, the North American "buffalo" and the European "wissent," are as nearly alike as well can be. The latter originally ranged over all Europe, and was necessarily a forest animal, and hence never could assemble into herds as did its American cousins. It has been protected on the Czar's and other great estates in Lithuania and Russia, to the number of about 700; but these preserves were ravaged during and after the World War. The wanton waste that swept away the millions of our American bison in a few short years would long ago have exterminated this species also had it not been preserved in bands here and there in the West and in various animal collections. The peculiarity of the bison is the massive, humplike strength of the fore quarters, the great mop of hair upon them and about the head, and the short, stout horns growing straight out of the side of the head.
The animal called "bison" by sportsmen in India is the gaur, one of four species of true oxen inhabiting southeastern Asia—heavy animals with massive, upcurved horns, a long, ridgelike spine, short tail, and fine, glossy, dark-colored hair. A big bull of the gaur or "sladang," as Malays call it, will stand six feet tall at the shoulders, and is one of the greatest game animals of the world in every sense of the word. Celebes has a curious dwarf ox, the "anoa," which is hardly bigger than a goat. Contrasted with this is the great ungainly yak of Tibet and the high Himalayas, where it still wanders in a wild state, although large herds are kept by the Tibetans as beasts of burden in a region where hardly any other large grazer can exist. Finally, the Orient is the home of an extraordinary race of ancient domestic animals, the white, humped cattle of India, of which many breeds exist, modified by local conditions and purposes, and prehistorically used in Egypt and probably southward. No wild animals of its kind exist, and we know nothing of the origin of the race.
We now come to the most interesting species of the family, now extinct as a wild animal, but perfectly traceable—the primitive wild ox of Europe, the original of our farm cattle. It was much larger than any modern breed, and bore immense, wide-spreading horns, as still do certain coarse breeds in southern Europe, and especially in Spain, whence the herds of long-horned cattle of America were derived. Old bulls were black, but there is reason to suspect that the cows and calves may have been red. This great animal roamed throughout Europe and western Asia, and was counted among the fiercest of game in Cæsar's time, who found it called "ur," or "aurochs"; the former word was Latinized as urus, and the latter, when this ox had disappeared, became transferred to the bison. Even in Roman times the wild ox was growing scarce, and it died out early in the seventeenth century. Meanwhile, from prehistoric days, calves have been tamed by the peasantry, and such cattle as Europe and the Mediterranean basin generally possessed were until quite recently little better than rough descendants of this captured stock.
The so-called "wild white cattle" preserved in various British parks are, according to Lydekker, albino descendants of the tamed native black aurochs stock, of unknown antiquity, and are kept white (with blackish or reddish ears and muzzles) by weeding out the dark-colored calves which occasionally appear; but do not represent the original aurochs as well as do the Welsh breed preserved in Pembroke since prehistoric days. These park cattle are all of moderate size, elegantly shaped, with soft hair, white, black-tipped horns of moderate length, and many wild traits.
[CHAPTER XXXIII]
BEASTS OF PREY—THE CARNIVORA
"One of the most striking and significant results of the study of the later Mesozoic and earliest Tertiary mammalian faunas," remarks Prof. W. B. Scott, "is that the higher or placental mammals are seen to be converging back to a common ancestral group of clawed and carnivorous or omnivorous animals, now entirely extinct, to which the name of Creodonta was given by Cope. The creodonts are assuredly the ancestors of the modern flesh-eaters, and, very probably, of the great series of hoofed animals also, as well as of other orders. From this central, ancestral group the other orders proceed, diverging more and more with the progress of time, each larger branch dividing and subdividing into smaller and smaller branches, until the modern condition is attained."
The story of the creodonts—savage marauders large and small—includes the rise of the powerful order Carnivora—the beasts of prey, whose food is the flesh of other animals. There always has been, and always will be in every department and rank of animal life, some or many species that live by preying on their neighbors; and every living thing, from monad to man, has to fear such enemies.