Part 5

5. THE CHARGE OF THE TIGRESS

Coming to 1909, there is an episode in his Shikar-Book about a tigress, which for various reasons may be transcribed:--

"... 14th April.--I started up to inspect the Banbwebin fire line ... accompanied by my wife ... an Indian and two Burmans.... After we had gone about five miles up the ... path, ... we heard bamboos being broken. The Burmans said there must be a herd of wild elephants feeding on the flowered bamboos. I thought they might possibly be bison or a rhinoceros, so walked on to see what they really were. The Indian was walking ahead of me, and I was following, looking down the side of the hill from which the sound of the bamboos being broken came, when Barhan, the Indian peon, stopped and said 'Bag' (tiger). I looked up and saw the tiger crossing the path about sixty paces ahead of me, so ... had a quick shot at it. On which it turned round and came down the hill straight at me.... My wife, who was just behind me, on seeing it come down the hill, called out, 'It is coming.' ... It came on, and when less than thirty paces from me I fired the second barrel and knocked it over. After receiving the shot it fell and lay on the ground, trying to drag itself towards us.... It put its head up and snarled and showed its teeth.... The Burmans, who were very excited, kept on saying, 'Give it another shot quick, or it will get up and do for us.' So after a bit I put in another cartridge and walked up a few paces and gave it a bullet in the chest and finished it off.

"After giving it a shot in the chest I walked round and got above it, and then approached cautiously with my gun at the ready to give it another shot if necessary; but after throwing a clod or two of earth at it, and finding that it did not move, I walked up and pulled its tail, and when I found that it was dead I called out to my wife, who was close by all the time, and she came up.

"We found it to be a tigress ... measuring eight feet and five inches as she lay.... The first shot had missed and the second ... caught her at the point of the shoulder. On looking at my gun, I found that the 200 yards leaf sight had got pushed up, and that made me shoot high. I was carrying the gun in my right hand, but holding it across my back, and in pulling it forward in a hurry, the leaf sight had got pushed up, and I did not notice it in the excitement of the moment....

"Maung Nita, one of the Burmans who was with me, said, 'Sir, if you had not finished her with the second shot we would all have been lying kicking on the ground.'

"As three men were not able to lift her, my wife rode back to our camp and called other eight men, and they slung her on poles and carried her into camp.

"On dissecting the tigress, I found that she had nothing in her stomach and appeared to have had no food for some time. She was evidently out shikaring (hunting), and was after the animals that I heard breaking bamboos." ...

In a private letter to me at the time, Mr Allan wrote:--

"... Had I missed the second shot she would have had us.... She was very angry. She was hungry and meant business. On opening her we found that she ... had evidently not had a meal for some days." ... This illustrates a truth which is often forgotten by us. The big beasts live from hand to mouth, like improvident working men. A dog may bury a bone, a tiger return to a kill, and a leopard has been known to put half a corpse or an unfinished bit of venison up a tree for security. But beyond the next meal they never look. It is only the insects of the universe, like ants and bees, or such animals as squirrels, that practise thrift. Hence arose the Jewish proverb about considering the ways of the ant in order to be wise. There is no such lesson to be learned from the cat.

One can be sorry for the tigress all the same. Think of her empty stomach, and perhaps hungry cubs in her lair; and then this big, strong Englishman, with his diabolical machinery in his hand, molesting her as she was stalking the wild cattle. "She meant business," said he. Of course she did. Did anyone think she was hunting for amusement?

No matter now! Her body lies inert enough, a subject for their inquisitive knives to her indifferent.

Put yourself in the skin of that tigress, if you can. Think what a gunshot means to a wild beast, and consider how, when fired at, she "faced the music" in the real sense of that phrase, and went "straight at the guns," as gallantly as the Light Brigade at Balaklava. As even the enemy notes--"After receiving the shot, it fell and lay on the ground, trying to drag itself towards us.... It put its head up and snarled and showed its teeth." ... Was she not like the glorious Englishman, who, when his legs were cut away, still fought upon his stumps? Did any hero of Homer's ever surpass that sorely-stricken tigress? Could any living creature have done more? And yet there are men to be found who call the big cats cowards! I never heard Mr Allan do that, nor any other man of sense who knew them well at first hand.

No wonder tigers flourished in the days of old. It is the invention of gunpowder, and then of breechloaders, that has handicapped them hopelessly. The long guerilla war between them and us has lasted for scores of millenniums; but the end is now in sight. Let us not libel the brave that are doomed to disappear. Let us not rail at the conquered. If they were fierce and strong, they were not cruel. As Nature made them, so they filled their function. They came, and chased, and conquered, impelled by hunger: and now that their hour has come they are going away. The day is at hand when the big wild cats shall all be as completely extinct as the vanished giants that wallowed in the primeval slime.

THE GIRL AND THE TIGRESS

This is a story that has been often told; and I confess I did not believe it when I heard it in 1895, in the district where it happened. Long afterwards, in 1908, Mr G. Tilly, who had been the District Superintendent of Police on the spot at the time, told me he held a local inquiry, and was so completely satisfied of the truth of it that he recommended the payment of a reward of R100 to the girl, and the Deputy Commissioner and the Commissioner agreed with him, and the Chief Commissioner of Burma sanctioned the reward, which was paid. In the absence of any motive for rash credulity on the part of these officers, this might seem enough; but I happened to be acquainted with Mr Grant Brown, who is now the Deputy Commissioner of that district, called the Upper Chindwin, and wrote to him about it. He replied on 21/2/09: "... I remembered the incident quite well as told in the Rangoon Gazette, and should have included it in my article on Burmese women if I had been able to remember more of the details; but I had no idea that it took place in this district. Curiously enough, the very first person I asked was the headman of the village where the thing happened. He could give me no details beyond those you mention.... The heroine is dead, and as I thought I was sure to find an account of what happened in the record-room I did not make further inquiries. A search has been made, however, without result...."

The "article" mentioned is Mr Grant Brown's article in The Women of all Nations, by Messrs Joyce & Thomas, published by the Messrs Cassell lately.

Failing to find the record of the original inquiry held by Mr Tilly, which had perished, as a thing no longer needed, in a periodical destruction of papers, Mr Grant Brown had a new inquiry held, and the vernacular record of it is now before me. I sent a set of interrogatories, which have been answered by Ma Shway U, an eye-witness, and the head man of the village and another man, who were soon on the scene, measured the tigress and did everything else that needed to be done. None of these persons has any motive for misstatement, and the chance of mistake is infinitesimal. That time has not altered their stories I can myself testify, for what they say tallies with what I was told in 1895.

Readers can now see how my doubts have been removed, and must be impatient to know what it was that I was so slow to believe. As Mr Tilly tells me the newspapers merely gave more or less abbreviated versions of his report, I have not referred to them.

The scene was Seiktha village on the Chindwin, an Upper Burman tributary of the Irrawaddy, in one of the districts that form the southern fringe of the mountains between Burma and Assam. One day in 1894 three nut-brown girls set out from Seiktha to cut firewood in the forest, making for a likely place they knew, a little south-east of their village. They carried one or two heavy knives or choppers, like butchers' cleavers, such as are common in Burman houses.

Now if there had only been a man with them, or even a big boy, he would certainly there and then, in going and coming, have walked in front, bearing a spear or dah, a big curved knife like a sword. What makes it needful to mention a thing so obvious to us who have lived there is that Englishwomen sometimes resent, as degrading to their sex, the Oriental custom that makes the man stalk in front; whereas a little reflection would show them, when familiar with plain facts of this kind, that there are reasons for it honourable to human nature. It is not as a master that a man, who is a man, precedes a woman, or goes into war, or business, or politics; but as a pioneer, protector, provider, and in short head servant. The old maid, at whom Dean Ramsay made us laugh, because she "thought a man was perfect salvation," was moved by a wise inherited instinct, far different from what simple sophisticated persons have hitherto supposed.

On this occasion there was no man at all, and in the absence of any natural protector it was "go as you please." A tigress in the bush saw her chance. The lightest-limbed and lightest-laden of the trio was a little girl, Mintha by name, who ran on in front. The tigress seized her and carried her away.

There is a lot, at times, in etymology. An Englishman who knows Burmese would tell you that Mintha means prince, or son of an official (min); but, as written in Burmese, without a long accent on the tha, and pronounced like an ordinary English word with the stress in front, the name Mintha has another modest meaning which you may discover from a dictionary, but can only with difficulty persuade a Burman to tell you. It means Better-than-an-Official, a name curiously recalling the kind of names that were common in England in the great days of Cromwell.

"We know what judges can be made to do," said Selden, grimly.

"We know what officials are," the Burmans have been saying for centuries; and they class them with thieves and plagues, perhaps with more emphasis to-day than ever before. So Mintha is an unpretentious name, and so common that the little girl who bore it had probably never thought of the meaning of it, and would certainly have referred you to her mother if you had asked her about it.

She was perhaps eleven years old, but small for that age, this brown little maiden whom they called "Better-than-an-Official," and swift and silent like a dream the tigress stepped out and picked her up and carried her away between its teeth, as a cat does a little mouse.

Her older sister, Ngway Bwin, which means Silver-blossom, a girl on the verge of womanhood, about fourteen years old, was next behind her, and beheld her taken. She quickly turned to the third girl, Shway U or Grain-of-Gold, who happened at that moment to have a chopper in her hand; and, snatching the chopper, little Silver-blossom ran at the very top of her speed after the tigress. She overtook it, and lifting the big knife high above her head with both hands, she brought it down heavily on the animal's head. It dropped little Mintha, "Better-than-an-Official," and stood as if it were stunned. It was easy to see the need of keeping it stunned. Silver-blossom knew that that was her only chance. So hammer, hammer, hammer, cut succeeding cut, the little Burmese maiden killed the tigress.

Grain-of-Gold was the only other person near. She always said, and says still (1909), that she did nothing but look on. The village headman reported, and still reports, that the animal, which was shown to everybody in 1894, was a full-grown tigress in the prime of life, measuring "8 cubits and 2 meiks." A cubit, in rough village measures, is still the original cubit, from the elbow to the farthest finger-tip, and a "meik" is the width of a clenched fist with the thumb standing out. So 8 cubits and 2 meiks can hardly be less than 11 or 12 feet; but the villagers measure along the curved outline of the body, so we may conclude the straight measurement was 8 or 9 feet.