The Wonders of the Jungle, Book Two

by Sarath Kumar Ghosh

Also, the tail of the lion has a tuft of hair at the end; no other animal of the Cat Tribe has the tuft.

Moreover, the tail of the lion or lioness hangs straight out from the body; it is not naturally curled, like the tail of the ordinary cat or other feline. But of course the lion can curl his tail for a moment, if he wants to,—for instance, in order to whisk off a fly.

I shall now describe to you more fully these special qualities of the lion.

The lion's mane is composed of long, bushy hair. The hair grows all around his neck, and upon his shoulders. It begins to grow when he is three years old, and continues to grow till he is about five years old. A shorter growth of hair extends to the under part of the body of those lions that live in colder regions.

You may have read in your geography that in the interior of Africa there is a table-land, a part of which is about 6,000 feet high. There it is generally cold, and especially at night. So, to protect them from the cold, the lions that live there have a much thicker mane and more hair on the under part of their bodies than the lions that live in the hot lowlands nearer the sea.

When the lion lives in forest regions where there is plenty of vegetation, his mane is usually brown in color and much darker than his tawny yellow body. Why is that? Because the vegetation has both dark and yellow patches, and so the lion looks very much like his surroundings, and finds it easier to stalk his prey without being detected.

But when the lion lives in sandy or stony regions, the color of his mane is more like that of his body, that is, yellow; so he appears to be very much like the color of the sand or stones around him.

Once a lion and a lioness were drinking the water from a little pool in the stony region. Two hunters happened to approach the place from behind a large boulder. They were standing about twenty yards from the lion and lioness, and yet they could not distinguish the animals. They heard the lapping of the water, and that is how they knew that the animals were somewhere close to them.

As for the tuft of hair at the end of a lion's tail, nobody seems to know why the lion has that tuft. The end of the tail has a hard nail, or claw, and the tuft of hair may be meant to enclose the nail, and to prevent it from being worn out against the ground. But nobody seems to know why the nail itself is there, as the lion never uses it now. Perhaps the nail had a use many generations ago, and the lion has forgotten that use now.

The tail itself, as I have already told you, hangs down straight, and does not naturally curl. It may be so because the lion does not use his tail constantly, as other animals of the Cat Tribe do, such as the tiger and the leopard. Why? Because those other animals live in denser jungles, and so they constantly use their tail as a feeler; that is, as the animal walks through the jungle his tail feels the objects which it touches, just like a hand; and in that way the tail gives warning of any danger coming from behind. So these felines that live in the dense jungles have got used to keeping their tail stretched out like a hand; and the tail is curled upward so as not to rub against the ground.