by Ruskin Bond
The procession passed immediately under my tree, and as the bearers of the two corpses (as I took them to be) were beneath me, I looked down and received quite a shock—the bodies were those of our guide and my servant Mohamed Ali.
Waiting till the procession had passed, I took my rifle, and slipping from the tree, followed cautiously in their wake. I had not far to go. Reaching a clearing, the procession stopped. As the dancers and musicians advanced, each threw his burning torch on the ground and in a little while there were a heap of torches burning fiercely, around which the whole procession gathered.
Concealing myself in the bushes, a short distance out of the circle of light, I watched in amazement the strange rites that now followed.
First of all, the two bodies were laid side by side on the ground close to the fire. Two of the dancers—more grotesquely decorated than the others and whom I rightly conjectured were high priests of this strange sect—advanced and raising each body in turn, set the pole into a hollow in the ground, so that the bodies now confronted the dancers in an upright position. The instant the firelight fell on their faces, I realized with a thrill of horror that both men were alive, but so drugged or otherwise stupefied that they hung loosely in their fastenings, swaying like drunken beings.
No sooner was this done, than the whole circle of dancers sprang into activity. Round and round the fire they whirled, chanting a queer plaintive refrain, punctuated with staccato beats from the muffled drums. For a long while they danced till, at last weary with their exertions, they gave a final shout and settled down once more.
The two priests now advanced. Going up to the captives they raised their heads and forced them to drink some concoction which they poured from a pitcher brought by one of the dancers. Whatever the drink was, it must have been a powerful restorative. Within five minutes both men were fully awake and conscious of all that was taking place round them.
What, I wondered, would be the ultimate fate of these two men. It was not likely that in a district so near to British administration they would attempt a cold-blooded murder, but had I known what was to follow, death would have been a merciful release.
Seeing that both men were now perfectly conscious, one of the priests arose and taking a long sharp knife in his hands advanced towards his victims. I fingered my trigger uneasily, uncertain to fire or not, but determined at all cost to save the lives of those two servants of mine. Instead of injuring them, however, he commenced a long harangue. Pointing frequently towards the prisoners and then into the forest in the direction in which I had come, he seemed to be working his followers up to some momentous decision and he was not long in gaining their unanimous support. The moment he stopped, with one voice, the whole tribe chanted ‘Maro, maro’ (Kill, kill) and, with a swiftness that completely deceived me, the priest struck twice, and the red blood gushed down the chests of the victims. Quickly I slung my rifle round, bringing the foresight to bear on the murderer. But from the moment of that one fierce shout and the anguished cry from the two prisoners, not a further sound could be heard. A strange tense expectant hush seemed to fill the forest. On the face of the two prisoners were depicted the most abject terror, their wounds, probably superficial, bled profusely, but the men were unaware of the blood, instead they stood staring before them into the forest, waiting for some awful apparition to come, and come it did.
Swiftly, silently, remorseless as death itself came a queer sinister shape. Not two feet high, semi-human in form, its hair, straggling and entangled all over its body, its face hideous, with two great eyes darting out of cavernous sockets, it leapt and gambolled out of the forest, into the clearing, and with a shrill maniacal laugh, stood confronting the two prisoners.
So hideous, so repulsive was this awful creature, that my rifle forgotten, I stood staring, unable to believe my eyes; and then started a dance the likes of which I have never seen.
Whirling slowly at first, advancing, retreating, this grotesque human shape, fluttered up and down before the terror-stricken silent men. Gradually the pace increased, a drum commenced to throb gently, swifter grew the dance and louder grew the drums and louder the chanting of the priests joined the roll of the drums; slowly, one by one, the other dancers joined in, the spectators swayed by a common impulse beat time to the ever swelling music, and the prisoners, hypnotized by the rhythm of sound and movement round them, sank lower and lower, till they hung inert, their bonds alone supporting them.
The end came suddenly, dramatically. A rifle shot rang out a sharp command, and a thin line of khaki-clad figures broke from the cover of the jungle and surrounded the dancers.
In a moment pandemonium broke loose. Surprised, startled and wholly unprepared, the dancers and priests broke and fled for the cover of the surrounding forests. Anxious to join the melee, I broke from the cover of the forest and rushed towards the fire. At that instant, I came face to face with one of the presiding priest.
With a fine disregard for sacerdotal procedure, I jammed my rifle butt into his ribs that he went down with a groan and stayed there. Reaching my two servants, I hastened to undo their bonds, and while engaged in this task, I was suddenly seized from behind and swinging round found myself face to face with a young Police Officer.
‘Well I’m damned. If it isn’t the very man we are looking for,’ he cried with surprise. ‘What on earth are you doing here?’
‘Can’t you see,’ I said, ‘Getting these two poor devils out of the scrape they have got into.’
Mutual explanation followed and I learned that from the moment I had left Daltonganj I had been shadowed by members of this tribe under the mistaken impression that I was an Excise Officer on one of my periodical raids into the interior. The guide had been overpowered and carried off the first night in the hope that without a guide further progress would be impossible, but as I continued, all unknown to me, in the right direction, my servant Mohamed Ali suffered the same fate.
Anxious to avenge themselves on what they considered were informers of the Police, these two men were taken into the heart of the forest and handed over to the ‘Soul Catchers’. The rites I witnessed were explained to me by the young Police Officer who had arrived on the scene so opportunely.
The men were first drugged with a native concoction containing bhang. On arrival at the scene of operations, they were given an antidote and restorative, and later branded in the chest by the priests, so that they were marked men for life. Next a strange half-demented creature, who lived in that part of the forest and who was credited with supernatural powers, danced before the victims who were thus hypnotized and in this condition made to believe that their souls had left them and were in the keeping of the ‘Soul Catchers’. They were seldom harmed physically, but were socially ostracized, driven from village to village and refused even the ordinary necessities of life. The hardships of such an existence usually drove these poor creatures crazy or they died from starvation and neglect. None dared to assist them for fear of incurring the enmity of the ‘Soul Catchers’ themselves. There was, however, a method of release and many took this course. By selling all they possessed, they would raise the necessary amount of money needed, and this on being paid to the high priest of the sect, a ceremony was performed by which the unfortunate victim regained his soul and his position in society. Although in the turmoil that followed the first rush of the Police, the strange creature I had seen eluded the troops and disappeared in the forest, the high priest of the sect I had knocked senseless with my rifle was secured and duly appeared in court. I will never forget the sensation he created, when in his full regalia, he appeared in the dock to answer the charges against him. Although I formed the principal witness, he produced an alibi that was unshakable. In fact the whole village turned out en masse, prepared to swear that on that particular night this same priest was asleep in his self but in the middle of the village—and that—the whole case was a police plot brought up out of spite.
He was eventually convicted and got three years hard, and
the tribe of ‘Soul Catchers’ shifted to healthier quarters, but to this day I never visit Daltonganj and the neighbouring villages without a strange sensation of being watched and spied on.
Mustela of the Lone Hand
C.G.D. Roberts
It was in the very heart of the ancient wood, the forest primeval of the North, gloomy with the dark-green crowded ranks of fir and spruce and hemlock, and tangled with the huge windfalls of countless storm-torn winters. But now, at high noon of the glowing Northern summer, the gloom was pierced to its depths with shafts of radiant sun; the barred and chequered transparent brown shadows hummed with dancing flies; the warm air was alive with the small, thin notes of chickadee and nuthatch, varied now and then by the impertinent scolding of the Canada jay; and the drowsing tree-tops steamed up an incense of balsamy fragrance in the heat. The ancient wilderness dreamed, stretched itself all open to the sun and seemed to sigh with immeasurable content.
High up in the grey trunk of a half-dead forest-giant was a round hole, the entrance to which had been the nest of a pair of big, red-headed, golden-winged woodpeckers, or ‘yellow-hammers’. The big woodpeckers had long since been dispossessed—the female, probably, caught and devoured, with her eggs, upon the nest. The dispossesssor, and present tenant, was Mustela.
Framed in the blackness of the round hole was a sharp, muzzled, triangular, golden-brown face with high, pointed ears, looking out upon the world below with keen eyes in which a savage wildness and an alert curiosity were incongruously mingled. Nothing that went on upon the dim ground far below, among the tangled trunks and windfalls, or in the sun-drenched tree-tops escaped that restless and piercing gaze. But Mustela had fed well, and felt lazy, and this hour of noon was not his hunting hour; so the most unsuspecting red squirrel, gathering cones in a neighbouring pine, was insufficient to lure him from his rest, and the plumpest hare, waving its long, suspicious ears down among the ground shadows, only made him lick his thin lips and think what he would do later on in the afternoon, when he felt like it.
Presently, however, a figure came into view at sight of which Mustela’s expression changed. His thin black lips wrinkled back in a soundless snarl, displaying the full length of his long, snow-white, deadly-sharp canines, and a red spark of hate smouldered in his bright eyes. But no less than his hate was his curiosity—a curiosity which is the most dangerous weakness of all Mustela’s tribe. Mustela’s pointed head stretched itself clear of the hole, in order to get a better look at the man who was passing below his tree.
A man was a rare sight in that remote and inaccessible section of the Northern wilderness. This particular man—a woodsman, a ‘timber-cruiser’, seeking out new and profitable areas for the work of the lumbermen—wore a flaming red-and-orange handkerchief loosely knotted about his brawny neck, and carried over his shoulder an axe whose bright blade flashed sharply whenever a ray of sunlight struck it. It was this flashing axe and the blazing colour of the scarlet-and-orange kerchief that excited Mustela’s curiosity—so excited it, indeed, that he came clean out of the hole and circled the great trunk, clinging close and wide-legged like a squirrel, in order to keep the woodsman in view as he passed by.
Engrossed though he was in the interesting figure of the man, Mustela’s vigilance was still unsleeping. His amazingly quick ears at this moment caught a hushed hissing of wings in the air above his head. He did not stop to look up and investigate. Like a streak of ruddy light he flashed around the trunk and whisked back into his hole, and just as he vanished a magnificent long-winged goshawk, the king of all the falcons, swooping down from the blue, struck savagely with his clutching talons at the edges of the hole.
The quickness of Mustela was miraculous. Moreover, he was not content with escape. He wanted vengeance. Even in his lightning dive into his refuge he had managed to turn about, doubling on himself like an eel. And now, as those terrible talons gripped and clung for half a second to the edge of the hole, he snapped his teeth securely into the last joint of the longest talon and dragged it an inch or two in.
With a yelp of fury and surprise, the great falcon strove to lift himself into the air, pounding madly with his splendid wings and twisting himself about, and thrusting mightily with his free foot against the side of the hole. But he found himself held fast, as in a trap. Sagging back with all his weight, Mustela braced himself securely with all four feet and hung on, his whipcord sinews set like steel. He knew that if he let, for an instant, to secure a better mouthful, his enemy would escape; so he just worried and chewed at the joint, satisfied with the punishment he was inflicting.
Meanwhile, the woodsman, his attention drawn by that one sudden yelp of the falcon and by the prolonged and violent buffeting of wings, had turned back to see what was going on. Pausing at the foot of Mustela’s tree, he peered upwards with narrowed eyes. A slow smile wrinkled his weather-beaten face. He did not like hawks. For a moment or two he stood wondering what it was in the hole that could hold so powerful a bird. Whatever it was, he stood for it.
Being a dead shot with the revolver, he seldom troubled to carry a rifle in his ‘cruisings’. Drawing his long-barrelled ‘Smith and Wesson’ from his belt, he took careful aim and fired. At the sound of the shot, the thing in the hole was startled and let go; and the great bird, turning once over slowly in the air, dropped to his feet with a feathery thud, its talons still contracting shudderingly. The woodsman glanced lip, and there, framed in the dark of the hole, was the little yellow face of Mustela, insatiably curious, snarling down upon him viciously.
‘Gee,’ muttered the woodsman, ‘I might hev’ knowed it was one o’ them pesky martens! Nobody else o’ that size ‘d hev’ the gall to tackle a duck-hawk!’
Now, the fur of Mustela, the pine-marten or American sable, is a fur of price; but the woodsman—subject, like most of his kind, to unexpected attacks of sentiment and imagination—felt that to shoot the defiant little fighter would be like an act of treachery to an ally.
‘Ye’re a pretty fighter, sonny,’ said he, with a whimsical grin, ‘an’ ye may keep that yaller pelt o’ yourn, for all o’ me!’ Then he picked up the dead falcon, tied its claws together, slung it upon his axe, and strode off through the trees. He wanted to keep those splendid wings as a present for his girl in at the settlements.
Highly satisfied with his victory over the mighty falcon—for which he took the full credit to himself—Mustela now retired to the bottom of his comfortable, moss-lined nest and curled himself up to sleep away the heat of the day. As the heat grew sultrier and drowsier through the still hours of early afternoon, there fell upon the forest a heavy silence, deepened rather than broken by the faint hum of the heat-loving flies. And the spicy scents of pine and spruce and tamarack steamed forth richly upon the moveless air.
When the shadows of the trunks began to lengthen, Mustela woke up, and he woke up hungry. Slipping out of his hole, he ran a little way down the trunk and then leapt, lightly and nimbly as a squirrel, into the branches of a big hemlock which grew close to his own tree. Here, in a crotch from which he commanded a good view beneath the foliage, he halted and stood motionless, peering about him for some sign of a likely quarry.
Poised thus, tense, erect and vigilant, Mustela was a picture of beauty, swift and fierce. In colour he was of a rich golden-brown, with a patch of brilliant yellow covering throat and chest. His tail was long and bushy, to serve him as a balance in his long, squirrel-like leaps from tree to tree. His pointed ears were large and alert, to catch all the faint, elusive forest sounds. In length, being a specially fine specimen of his kind, he was perhaps a couple of inches over two feet. His body had all the lithe grace of a weasel, with something of the strength of his great-cousin and most dreaded foe, the fisher.
For a time nothing stirred. Then from a distance came, faint but shrill, the chirr-r-r-r of a red squirrel. Mustela’s discriminating ear located the sound at once. All energy on the instant, he darted towards it, springing from branch to branch with amazing speed and noi
selessness.
The squirrel, noisy and imprudent after the manner of his tribe, was chattering fussily and bouncing about on his branch, excited over something best known to himself, when a darting, gold-brown shape of doom landed upon the other end of the branch, not half a dozen feet from him. With a screech of warning and terror, he bounded into the air, alighted on the trunk and raced up it, with Mustela close upon his heels. Swift as he was—and everyone who has seen a red squirrel in a hurry knows how he can move—Mustela was swifter, and in about five seconds the little chatterer’s fate would have been sealed. But he knew what he was about. This was his own tree. Had it been otherwise, he would have sprung into another, and directed his desperate flight over the slenderest branches, where his enemy’s greater weight would be a hindrance. As it was, he managed to gain his hole—just in time—and all that Mustela got was a little mouthful of fur from the tip of that vanishing red tail. Very angry and disappointed, and hissing like a cat, Mustela jammed his savage face into the hole. He could see the squirrel crouched, with pounding heart and panic-stricken eyes, a few inches below him, just out of his reach. The hole was too small to admit his head. In a rage he tore at the edges with his powerful claws, but the wood was too hard for him to make any impression on it, and after half a minute of futile scratching, he gave up in disgust and raced off down the tree. A moment later the squirrel poked his head out and shrieked an effectual warning to every creature within earshot.