CHAPTER XIX
THE PRESENT AND FUTURE OF THE GAME OF ASIA
After a successful survival of man's influence through two thousand years, at last the big game of India has made a good start on the road to vanishment. Up to 1870 it had held its own with a tenacity that was astonishing. In 1877, I found the Ganges—Jumna dooab, the Animallai Hills, the Wynaad Forest and Ceylon literally teeming with herds of game. The Animallais in particular were a hunter's paradise. In each day of hunting, large game of some kind was a certainty. The Nilgiri Hills had been quite well shot out, but in view of the very small area and open, golf-links character of the whole top of that wonderful sky plateau, that was no cause for wonderment.
In those days no native shikaree owned and operated a gun,—or at the most very, very few of them did. If a rogue elephant, a man-eating tiger or a nasty leopard became a public nuisance, it was a case for a sahib to come and doctor it with a .577 double-barreled express rifle, worth $150 or more; and the sahibs had shooting galore.
I think that no such great wild-life sights as those of the plateau regions of Africa ever were seen in southern Asia. Conditions there are different, and usually the game is widely scattered. The sambar deer and muntjac of the dense forests, the axis of the bamboo glades, the thameng deer of the Burmese jungles, the sladang, or gaur, of the awful Malay tangle, and the big cats and canines will last long and well. The ibexes, markhors, tahr and all the wild sheep eventually will be shot out by sportsmen who are "sheep crazy." The sheep and goats of Asia will disappear soon after the plains animals of Africa, because no big game that lives in the open can much longer endure the modern, inexpensive long-range rifles of deadly accuracy and limitless repetition of fire.
Eventually, I fear that by some unlucky turn of Fortune's wheel all the native hunters of Asia will obtain rifles; and when they do, we soon will see the end of the big game.
Even to-day we find that the primitive conditions of 1877 have been greatly changed. In the first place, about every native shikaree (hunter) owns a rifle, at a cost of about $25; and many other natives possess guns, and assume to hunt with them. The logical conclusion of this is more hunting and less game. The development of the country has reduced the cover for game. New roads and railways have made the game districts easily accessible, and real sportsmen are now three or four times as numerous as they were in 1877.
At Toonacadavoo, in the Animallai Hills where thirty-five years ago there modestly nestled on the ridge beside the river only Forest Ranger Theobold's bungalow, built of mud and covered with grass thatch and bamboo rats, there is now a regular hill station lighted by electricity, a modern sanatorium high up on the bluff, a club, golf links, and other modern improvements. In my day there were exactly four guns on the Animallais. Now there are probably one hundred; and it is easy to guess how much big game remains on the Delectable Mountains in comparison with the golden days of 1877. I should say that there is now only one game animal for every twenty-five that were there in my day.
I am told that it is like that all over India. Beyond question, the gun-sellers and gun-users have been busy there, as everywhere else. The game of India is on the toboggan slide, and the old days of abundance have gone forever.
The first fact that strikes us in the face is the impending fate of the great Indian rhinoceros, an animal as wonderful as the Titanothere or the Megatherium. It is like a gift handed down to us straight out of the Pleistocene age, a million years back. The British paleontologists to-day marvel at Elephas ganesa, and by great labor dig his bones out of the Sewalik rocks, but what one of them all has yet made a move to save Rhinoceros indicus from the quick extermination that soon will be his portion unless he is accorded perpetual and real protection from the assaults of man?