by Ruskin Bond
The third round followed the same course as the first but with one dramatic difference. The crow and the myna, still determined to take part in the proceedings, dived at the cobra; but this time they missed each other as well as their mark. The myna flew on and reached its perch, but the crow tried to pull up in mid-air and turn back. In the second that it took the bird to do this, the cobra whipped his head back and struck with great force, his snout thudding against the crow's body.
I saw the bird flung nearly twenty feet across the garden. It fluttered about for a while, then lay still. The myna remained on the cactus plant, and when the snake and the mongoose returned to the fight, very wisely decided not to interfere again!
The cobra was weakening, and the mongoose, walking fearlessly up to it, raised himself on his short legs and with a lightning snap had the big snake by the snout. The cobra writhed and lashed about in a frightening manner, and even coiled itself about the mongoose, but to no avail. The little fellow hung grimly on, until the snake had ceased to struggle. He then smelt along its quivering length, gripped it round the hood, and dragged it into the bushes.
The myna dropped cautiously to the ground, hopped about, peered into the bushes from a safe distance, and then, with a shrill cry of congratulation, flew away.
The banyan tree was also the setting for what we were to call the Strange Case of the Grey Squirrel and the White Rat.
The white rat was Grandfather's — he had bought it for one-quarter of a rupee — but I would often take it with me into the banyan tree, where it soon struck up a friendship with one of the squirrels. They would go off together on little excursions among the roots and branches of the old tree.
Then the squirrel started building a nest. At first she tried building it in my pockets, and when I went indoors and took off my clothes I would find straw and grass falling out.
Then one day Grandmother's knitting was missing. We hunted for it everywhere but without success.
The next day I saw something glinting in a hole in the banyan tree. Going up to investigate, I saw that it was the end of Grandmother's steel knitting-needle. On looking further, I discovered that the hole was crammed with knitting. Amongst the wool were three baby squirrels — and all of them were white!
We gazed at the white squirrels in wonder and fascination. Grandfather was puzzled at first, but when I told him about the white rat's visits to the tree, his brow cleared. He said the white rat must be the father.
A CROW IN THE HOUSE
he young crow had fallen from its nest and was fluttering about on the road, in danger of being crushed by a cart or a tonga, or seized by a cat, when I picked it up and brought it home. It was in a sorry condition, beak gaping and head dropping, and we did not expect it to live. But Grandfather and I did our best to bring it round. We fed it by prising its beak gently open with a pencil, pushing in a little bread and milk, and then removing the pencil to allow it to swallow. We varied this diet with occasional doses of Grandmother's home-made plum wine, and as a result the young crow was soon on the road to recovery.
He was offered his freedom but he did not take it. Instead he made himself at home in the house. Grandmother, Aunt Mabel, and even some of Grandfather's pets objected; but there was no way of getting rid of the bird. He took over the administration of the house.
We were not sure that he was male, but we called him Caesar.
Before long, Caesar was joining us at meal times, besides finding his own grubs or beetles in the garden. He danced about on the dining table and gave us no peace until he had been given his small bowl of meat and soup and vegetables.
He was always restless, fidgeting about, investigating things. He would hop across a table to empty a match-box of its contents, or rip the daily paper to shreds, or overturn a vase of flowers, or tug at the tail of one of the dogs.
"That crow will be the ruin of us!" grumbled Grandmother, picking marigolds off the carpet. "Can't you keep him in a cage?"
We did try keeping Caesar in a cage, but he was so angry, and objected with such fierce cawing and flapping, that it was better for our nerves and peace of mind to give him the run of the house. He did not show any inclination to join the other crows in the banyan tree. Grandfather said this was because he was really a jungle crow—a raven of sorts — and probably felt a little contemptuous of very ordinary carrion crows. But it seemed to me that Caesar, having grown used to living with humans on equal terms, had become snobbish and did not wish to mix with his own kind. He would even squabble with Harold the Hornbill. Perching on top of Harold's cage, he would peck at the big bird's feet, whereupon Harold would swear and scold and try to catch Caesar through the bars.
In time, Caesar learnt to talk a little — as ravens sometimes do — in a cracked, throaty voice. He would sit for hours outside the window, banging on the glass with his beak and calling, "Hello, hello." He seemed to recognise the click of the gate when I came home from school, and would come to the door with a hop, skip and jump, saying, "Hello, hello!" I had also taught him to sit on my arm and say "Kiss, kiss", while he placed his head gently against my mouth.
On one of Aunt Mabel's visits, Caesar alighted on her arm and cackled, "Kiss, kiss!" Aunt Mabel was delighted — and possibly flattered — and leant forward for a kiss. But Caesar's attention shifted to my aunt's gleaming spectacles, and thrusting at them with his beak, he knocked them off. Aunt Mabel never was a success with the pets.
Pet or pest? Grandmother insisted that Caesar was a pest, in spite of his engaging habits. If he had restricted his activities to our own house, it would not have been so bad; but he took to visiting neighbouring houses and stealing pens and pencils, hair-ribbons, combs, keys, shuttlecocks, toothbrushes and false teeth. He was especially fond of toothbrushes, and made a collection of them on top of the cupboard in my room. Most of the neighbours were represented in our house by a toothbrush. Toothbrush sales went up that year. So did Grandmother's blood-pressure.
Caesar spied on children going into the bania's shop, and often managed to snatch sweets from them as they came out. Clothes pegs fascinated him. Neighbours would return from the bazar to find their washing lying in the mud, and no sign of the pegs. These, too, found their way to the top of my cupboard.
It was Caesar's gardening activities that finally led to disaster. He was helping himself to our neighbour's beans when a stick was flung at him, breaking his leg. I carried the unfortunate bird home, and Grandfather and I washed and bandaged his leg as best we could. But it would not mend. Caesar hung his head and no longer talked. He grew weaker day by day, refusing to eat. An occasional sip of Grandmother's home-made wine was all that kept him going.
One morning I found him dead on the sofa, his legs stiff in the air. Poor Caesar! His anti-social habits had led to his early end.
I dug a shallow grave in the garden, and buried him there, along with all the toothbrushes and clothes pegs he had taken so much trouble to collect.
HENRY: A CHAMELEON
his is the story of Henry, our pet chameleon. Chameleons are in a class by themselves, and are no ordinary reptiles. From their nearest relatives, the lizards, they are easily distinguished by certain outstanding marks. A chameleon's tongue is as long as its body. On its head is a rigid crest which looks like a fireman's helmet. His limbs are long and slender, and his fingers and toes are more developed than those of other reptiles.
Henry's most remarkable characteristics were his eyes. They were not beautiful. But his left eye was quite independent of his right. He could move one eye without disturbing the other. This gave him a horrible squint. Each eye-ball, raised out of his head, was wobbled up and down, backwards and forwards, quite independently of its partner. Reptiles are not gifted like us with binocular vision. They do not see an object with both eyes at once.
Whenever I visited Henry, he would treat me with great caution, sitting perfectly still on his perch with his back to me. But his nearest eye would move round like the beam of a searchlight until it had
got me well in focus. Then it would stop, and the other eye would proceed to carry out an independent survey of its own in some different direction. Henry took nobody on trust, and treated my friendliest gestures with grave suspicion.
Tiring of his attitude, I would tickle him gently in the ribs with my finger. This always threw him into a great rage. He would blow himself up to an enormous size, his lungs filling his body with air. He would sit up on his hind legs, swaying from side to side, hoping to overawe me. Opening his mouth very wide, he would let out an angry hiss. But his protests went no further. He did not bite. Non-violence was his creed.
Many people believe the chameleon is a dangerous and poisonous reptile. When Grandfather was visiting a friend in the country, he came upon a noisy scene at the garden gate. Men were shouting, hurling stones and brandishing sticks. The cause of all this was a chameleon who had been discovered sunning himself on a shrub. The gardener declared that it was a thing capable of poisoning people at a distance of twenty feet, and as a result the entire household had risen in arms. Grandfather was in time to save the chameleon from certain death, and brought the little reptile home.
That chameleon was Henry and that was how he came to live with us.
Henry was a harmless creature. If I put my finger in his mouth even in his wildest moments he would simply wait for me to take it out again. I suppose he could bite. His rigid jaws carried a number of fine pointed teeth. But Henry was rightly convinced that these were given to him solely for the purpose of chewing his food.
Provided I was patient, Henry was willing to take food from my hands. This he did very swiftly. His tongue was a sort of boomerang which came back to him with the food, an insect victim, attached to it. Before I could realise what had happened, the grasshopper held between my fingers would be lodged between Henry's jaws.
Henry did not cause any trouble in our house, but he did create something like a riot in the nursery school down the road.
It happened like this.
When the papayas in our garden were ripe, Grandmother usually sent a basket of them to her friend, Mrs. Ghosh, who was the principal of the nursery school. On this occasion, Henry managed to smuggle himself into the basket of papayas when no one was looking. (He did have a cage of his own, but was seldom in it.) The gardener dutifully carried the papayas across to the school and left them in Mrs. Ghosh's office. When Mrs. Ghosh came in after making her rounds, she began admiring and examining the papayas. Out popped Henry.
Mrs. Ghosh screamed. Henry would probably have liked to blush a deep red, but he turned a bright green instead, as that was the colour of the papayas. Mrs. Ghosh's assistant, Miss Daniels, rushed in, took one look at the chameleon, and joined in the screaming. Henry took fright and fled from the office, running down the corridor and into one of the classrooms. There he climbed on to a desk, while children ran in all directions, some to get away from Henry, some to catch him. But Henry made his exit from a window, and disappeared in the garden.
Grandmother heard all about the incident from Mrs. Ghosh, but did not tell her the chameleon was ours. I did not think Henry would find his way back to us, because the school was three houses away. But three days later, I found him sunning himself on the garden wall. He readily accepted some food from my hand, and allowed himself to be recaptured.
A WEEK IN THE JUNGLE
randfather never hunted wild animals, he couldn't understand the pleasure some people obtained from killing the creatures of our forests. Birds and animals, he felt, had as much right to live as humans. We could kill them for food, he said, because even animals killed for food; but not for pleasure.
At the age of twelve I did not have the same high principles as Grandfather. Nevertheless, I disliked shooting. I found it boring.
Uncle Henry and some of his sporting friends once took me on a shikar expedition into the Terai jungles in the Siwaliks. The prospect of a week in the jungle, as camp-follower to several adults with guns, filled me with dismay. I knew that long, weary hours would be spent tramping behind these tall, professional-looking huntsmen who spoke in terms of bagging this tiger or that wild elephant, when all they ever got, if they were lucky, was a wild hare or a partridge. Tigers and excitement, it seemed, came only to Jim Corbett.
This particular expedition proved to be no different from others. There were four men with guns, and at the end of the week all that they had shot were two miserable, underweight wild fowl. But I managed, on our second day in the jungle, to be left behind in the rest-house. And, in the course of a morning's exploration of the old bungalow, I discovered a shelf of books half-hidden in a corner of the back verandah.
Who had left them there? A literary forest officer? A memsahib who had been bored by her husband's camp-fire boasting? Or someone who had no interest in the "manly" sport of slaughtering wild animals and had brought his library along to pass the time? He must have left it behind for others like him.
Or possibly the poor fellow had gone into the jungle one day, as a gesture to his more blood-thirsty companions, and been trampled by an elephant, or gored by a wild boar, or (more likely) accidentally shot by one of the shikaris — and his sorrowing friends had taken his remains away and left his books behind.
Anyway, there they were — a shelf of some thirty volumes, in different shapes, sizes and colours. I wiped the thick dust off the covers and examined the titles. As my reading tastes had not yet formed, I was willing to try anything. The bookshelf was varied in its contents — and my own interests have since remained fairly universal.
On that second day in the forest rest-house, I discovered P. G. Wodehouse and read his Love Among the Chickens, an early Ukridge story and still one of my favourites. By the time the perspiring hunters came home in the evening, with their spent cartridges and impressive excuses, I had made a start with M.R. James' Ghost Stories of an Antiquary. This kept me awake most of the night, until the oil in the kerosene lamp was exhausted.
Next morning, fresh and optimistic again, the shikaris set out for a different area, where they hoped to get a tiger. They had employed a party of villagers to beat the jungle, and all day I could hear the tom-toms throbbing in the distance. This did not prevent me from finishing M.R. James, or discovering a little book called A Naturalist on the Prowl by 'EHA'. It described the tremendous fun and interest to be had from studying the wild life in one's own back garden — the grasshoppers, beetles, ants, butterflies and praying-mantises, all living such fascinating lives just outside (and sometimes inside) our bedroom windows.
Before I had finished the book, I was looking for spiders in the corners of the old bungalow and stalking grasshoppers in the long grass of the compound. My concentration was disturbed only once, when I looked up and saw a spotted deer crossing the open space in front of the house. The deer disappeared among the sal trees, and I returned to the verandah and my book.
Dusk had fallen when I heard the party returning from the hunt. The hunters were talking loudly and seemed excited. Perhaps they had got their tiger. I put down my book and came out of the house to meet them.
"Did you get the tiger?" I asked excitedly.
"No, laddie," said Uncle Henry. "I think we'll get it tomorrow. But you should have been with us — we saw a spotted deer!"
There were three days left, and I knew I would never get through the entire bookshelf. This I did not intend doing, as not all the authors on the shelf appealed to me. I chose at random The Wind in the Willows, The Jungle Book and David Copperfield.
On the day I made the literary acquaintance of Mowgli, the wolf-boy, the shikaris shot the two wild fowl already mentioned. As the party had from the first intended living off the jungle, only some tinned foods had been brought along; but two lean birds were insufficient for a party of five, and once again the meal consisted mostly of corned meat and mustard.
Next day, while the grown-ups were looking for their tiger and I was learning wisdom from the Water Rat, Toad and other river people of The Wind in the Willows, an event
took place which disturbed my reading for a little while.
I had noticed, on the previous day, that a number of stray mongrels — belonging to watchmen, villagers and forest-guards — always hung about the house, waiting for scraps of food to be thrown away. It was ten o'clock in the morning (a time when wild animals seldom come into the open), when I heard a sudden yelp in the clearing. Looking up, I saw a full-grown panther making off into the jungle with one of the dogs held in its mouth. The panther had either been driven towards the house by the beaters, or had watched the party leave the bungalow and decided to help itself to a meal.
There was no one else about at the time. Since the dog was obviously dead within seconds of being seized, and the panther had disappeared, I saw no point in raising an alarm but returned to my book.
It was getting late when the shikaris returned. They were dirty, sweaty, and, as usual, disappointed. This time their excuses held a note of defiance. They took their corned meat in silence. Next day we were to return to "civilization," and none of the hunters had anything to show for a week in the jungles of India.
"No game left in these jungles," said the leading member of the party, famed for once having shot two man-eating tigers and a basking crocodile in rapid succession.
"It's the weather," said another. "No rain at all this winter."
"Don't know what the country's coming to," grumbled the third.
"I saw a panther this morning," I said modestly.
In fact, I was altogether too modest. I might just as well have said, "I saw a donkey this morning," for all the impression I made.
"Did you really?" said the leading hunter. He glanced at the book lying beside me. 'Young Master Copperfield says he saw a panther!"
The others were only faintly amused. They did not have the energy to laugh.