“Bark, Sir Slender-foot; bark, Sir Brush-tail.”
The Pawang generally tries to deceive the deer as to his ownership of the hunting-dogs. Thus he will say:—
“It is not I whose dogs these are,
It is the magical deer Pawang whose dogs these are.”
So, too, they are called by certain specific names (according to their breed and colour), which are in several cases identical with the names of the dogs with which the wild Spectre Huntsman (the most terrible of all personified diseases in the Malay category) hunts down his prey.[111]
Ugliness is by no means looked upon as a disadvantage, but rather the opposite. An ugly dog is apparently formidable. Thus we find a dog addressed as follows:—
“Let not go the scent (of the quarry)
As you were formidable (lit. ugly)[112] from the first.”
Again, the description of the “good points” of some of these dogs which is given in the Appendix would, if ugliness and formidability are convertible terms, satisfy the most exacting whipper-in, the so-called good points being for the most part a mere list of deformities. These points, however, are merely the external sign of the Luck to which dogs, as well as human beings, are believed to be born. In a fine passage we are told:—
“From the seven Hills and the seven Valleys