Animals also hear just the same foul and senseless abuse of their female relatives that their masters bestow on each other. The constantly heard "Sala" (brother-in-law) is the key-word to this loathsome line of talk. Among caressing epithets in use are young one, son, father, mother, darling, and daughter; sometimes my child, etc. The interjection of surprise of ordinary life "aré!" is often heard as a sort of "Would you, now?" Horses are calmed and stopped by the kissing chirrup with which we stimulate them in Europe, as a newcomer learns with surprise when his steed stops dead at a sound meant to make him go faster. Bird-catchers and jungle-folk at large imitate all bird and animal cries with surprising skill. Quails, however, are lured to the net by a mechanical call, produced by the finger-nail on a stretched skin. On thieving excursions the notes of the jackal, owl, and other creatures are used as signals by burglars and cattle-stealers.
On the whole Indian country cries and songs are harsh and unpleasing. But there are exceptions to this rule. In Hindustan and parts of the Bombay Presidency where oxen, walking down an incline, haul up water, the drivers accompany their work with songs clear in note, musical in cadence, and pathetic in effect.
CHAPTER XIV
OF ANIMAL TRAINING
India,—land of waning wonders,—has a great name for the training of animals, a pursuit in which the people are popularly believed to attain marvellous success by reason of special aptitudes and faculties. In the yellow-backed romances of the boulevard Orientalism in which the French indulge, Indian princes and princesses are habitually attended by trained leopards and tigers, while English writers dwell on the skill of the trainers. But seen from near and compared with what has been done and is now done in other countries, the wonder pales a little. Nothing half so squarely attempted and completely accomplished as the modern European and American training of wild beasts in performances foreign to their nature and habits has ever been thought of in India. It should be noted, to begin with, that only persons of low caste ever engage in this pursuit, which demands peculiar qualities of hand, will, and temper, and cannot be learned as easily as wood-sawing. These people have a wonderful knowledge of woodcraft, and are fearless with the creatures they know so well. They can catch and tame, but, at the risk of falling into the pestilent error of hair-splitting, I venture to discriminate between taming and training. The first is the most important part but not nearly the whole of the latter, and it is the first only which is well done.
But as to training as indicated, for example, in the deservedly popular works of the late Rev. J. G. Wood, it may be worth while to look a little nearer. This authority wrote that "in India trained otters are almost as common as trained dogs." But they are not used throughout Hindustan, nor in Central India, nor in the Punjab, where they are found in great numbers, and in the regions where they help in fishing they are never seen out of the hands of their owners, obscure river-side tribes. They are only employed in the back waters of Cochin, in part of Bengal, and on the Indus river. All that we see of the otter in Britain is a poor little beast desperately fighting for its life against murderous crowds of dogs and men; but in reality there are few animals of more amiability, talent, and docility. A Scottish gamekeeper once trained one to go with dogs, and used to say it was the best cur in the pack. They are effectually tamed in India, which is an easy matter, and they practise for the benefit of the fisherman the art to which they are ordained by nature. The cormorant and the pelican are also used by the Indus boatmen as in China for fishing. The pelican, though furnished by nature with the finest game-bag or creel ever carried by angler, is inferior to the cormorant (Graculus carbo) as a fisherman. Both these birds, like the otter, fish by nature, nor could Buckland or Cholmondeley-Pennell teach them a turn of their craft. It is certainly interesting to see the hooded cormorants on the fishermen's house-boats and the otters tethered to stakes near, playing with the no less amphibious children and behaving like the playful, intelligent water-cats they are. But both this sight and the knowledge that they are used in this wise are distinctly uncommon and out of the range of the people of India at large.
A HUNTING CHEETAH