The tenderest love that a Sakai can bestow is poured out upon his son, especially when the child is little, but gradually, with the passing of years, and the formation of new families around, the warmth of this attachment somewhat cools down, perhaps because there is no longer any need of his care.
Kind reader, I have introduced you (as best I could) to my good friends of the Malay forest; I have made you know their virtues and their defects, their habits and their family ties and now I should like you to follow with me the little tribe marching from one end of their territory to the other in order to fix upon a new dwelling-place.
The long procession moves along without any order whatever. Everybody carries something that they did not want to leave behind in the abandoned village. The very little children are fastened to their mother's backs, the others caper merrily round the women, and the old people walk slowly on, sometimes leaning on their sticks.
All the men and the youths are armed with their deadly cane and poisoned arrows.
Several dogs—not unlike little setters—escort the company and give the alarm when danger threatens. With them, in friendly intimacy, are monkeys, squirrels and tame wild-boars, while fowls cackle in the dossers where they have been put for fear of being lost in the jungle.
This is an emigrating tribe. Are they then taking a long journey that they are so well provided with food?
Such a supposition would be erroneous. Those fowls, boars, squirrels and monkeys are not a reserve stock of provisions for the travelling Sakais but are their friends and companions, brought up by them with kind care and which are considered as a part of the family.
A Sakai never eats an animal that he has reared; it would seem to him to commit a crime. He uses the fowls, however (which are a trifle smaller than those in Europe) as a means of exchange for tobacco, rice and other articles but he would never eat one himself unless reduced to the verge of starvation.
How different to civilized persons who breed animals and poultry on purpose to devour them, who fatten fowls in coops, cruelly convert cockrels into appetizing capons, peg geese to the ground that their liver may supply an extra dainty for the table and protect the poetic love of pigeons in order to cook their little ones!