Nature's Spokesman

by M Krishnan

  A gamecock clipped and armed for fight

  Doth the rising sun affright.

  Naturally the law takes a grave view of cockfighting. It is a rather horrible sport, but even I, who feel revolted by its carnage, realize it is a sport, the kind that stimulates speculation and betting. Once zamindars and other rich, leisured people were much given to patronage of cockfighting, but those days are past. The gamecock is a rare bird today, and getting rarer.

  It is said that domestic poultry orginated in India, and our junglefowl go a long way towards proving this claim. However, it is in other countries that fine and specialized breeds of domestic poultry have been built up and stabilized. True we have no native breeds to compare with those tender-fleshed egg-layers, but in our gamecock, purely the product of indigenous breeding skill, we have a bird second to none in looks and power. The gamecock is essentially the same all over India, a tall, hard-muscled, brown-and-black bird with a long, graceful neck, a broad keel, and great, columnar legs—the legs and spurs are the features of the breed, and are most impressive. The hen, as in all gallinaceous birds, is smaller and much more modest in looks.

  The reason why this superb and wholly indigenous breed is almost on the point of extinction is that it is of no use except in a fight. Obviously its flesh would be too tough for the table, and the small eggs have no appeal to the poultry farmer. However, a gamecock would make a grand pet, and the race can be saved if only people would keep it for its looks and its temperament. After all, utilitarian worth is as out of place in a pet as in sport, and the gamecock is a bird of real quality. It is capable of deep attachment to its keeper, and intolerant of strangers and intruders. A gamecock parading one’s compound lends more than picturesqueness to the place: it lends it security for, believe me, it is a formidable watchdog.

  1958

  K

  KANGAROO

  No one has seen a kangaroo

  waiting forlornly at a bus stop,

  waiting for Number 22

  to reach an office, home or shop.

  Nor has one seen a kangaroo

  waving a frantic paw to stop

  some passing motorist it knew

  so as to cadge a lift or drop.

  Progress by leaps and bounds, no kind of

  waiting for transport, is the feature

  of locomotion in the mind of

  this fiercely independent creature.

  Nature Theorized

  32

  The Vengeful Cobra

  Are cobras spiteful creatures that nurse grudges against particular men, bide their time, and take their revenge? Many people in the countryside believe powerfully in not provoking these snakes. Naturally. An attempt at killing a cobra, which is an ‘attempt’ in the IPC sense of the word, and which therefore results only in injury to the tip of the snake’s tail, can have disastrous consequences. Provoked by the injury and cornered, a cobra can attack with determination and speed, and in the countryside (where antivenin is still not readily available) a man well and truly bitten very often succumbs to the bite. But all this, as you would have noticed by now, is no answer to the question originally posed, except to the extent that a bite is reprisal for a blow.

  Well, actually there are three answers to that question, as there usually are to most difficult questions—‘yes’, and ‘no’, and ‘it all depends’. People who believe that the cobra is a specially vengeful snake, and there are plenty, will come out with the most circumstantially detailed stories to prove their point. Here is such a story told me by an educated friend who firmly believes in the vengeance of the cobra. A man who owned a plot of agricultural land went to plough it and found that a cobra had entered into possession during the months it lay fallow; he tried to kill the snake and only succeeded in landing a glancing blow on its ‘back’ with his stick; months later, when the field had been harvested, this man, along with quite a few others, slept in that field beside his stacks of harvested jowar; he was covered from head to foot in the tough, black ‘kumbly’ that people use in those parts, but the toe of his left foot alone was exposed; in the middle of the night the cobra bit the man on his left toe, and he died. According to my friend this story proves, conclusively, the cobra’s spiteful nature. According to me it proves nothing. I refuse to believe that a cobra, however percipient, can identify a man solely by his left toe—even for fingerprints, you know, they use the left thumb and not the toe. Moreover, the story doesn’t go to show that it was the same cobra, or even that the snake which bit that farmer was a cobra.

  The school that believes the cobra is not specially vengeful does so because it (the school) argues, fallaciously and energetically, that it is too much to credit a mere snake, low down in the evolutionary scale with the intelligence to recognize and remember a particular man. Actually, neither memory nor the ability to recognize something seen (or otherwise sensed) previously, is always dependent on the self-conscious exercise of intelligence, even in that acme of evolutionary perfection, man. I do not know how you recognize people, but when I see my friend, Chari, coming down the street a hundred yards away, I do not think in these laborious terms: the figure approaching is about five-footsix in height and almost a yard across; it is clad in a pink slackshirt and vivid green trousers; on its face I can dimly discern an expression that is at once smug, overbearing, supercilious and haughty; therefore it must be my friend, Chari. I know it is Chari straightway, and before he has got any nearer than ninety-nine yards, I already have an excuse ready for my present inability to return that trifling sum of twenty-five rupees I borrowed from him in November. The idea that all men must seem alike to a cobra and that it cannot distinguish between them is presumptuous; if a man can make out a particular cobra, why can’t the snake spot him?

  Dogs recognize their masters in the dark (I know this is unpleasant, but the truth will have to be faced in any scientific inquiry) solely by the smell of those same masters. It is a fact that birds and reptiles can get to know particular people, not by their faces perhaps, but by some trick of movement or repose that they have and of which they are probably unconscious. Such recognition is recognition still. It is well known that wounded animals tend to attack those that caused them injury.

  Apart from all this, every ‘cobra’s revenge’ story I have investigated has centred around these basic elements: a cobra taking up residence in a locality and a man occupying the same place (whether the snake or the man was first in possession is immaterial, since this is not a legal issue), the man injuring the snake and snake biting the man, usually days after the infliction of the injury upon it. Cobras do have a strong sense of territory and resent all intrusions into the area they have come to regard as their own; especially do they resent attempts to drive them out. The snake’s revenge may be due entirely to the fact that having been provoked it becomes aggressive, and bites the man on the spot, who is in the circumstances, likeliest to be the man who injured it. However, I will not rule out the possibility of specific recognition. It is there, but neither proved nor disproved by these stories. I cannot go into the question of animal recognition in detail here, because that would take pages.

  Instead of pursuing the third wishy-washy, ‘yes-and-no’ line of inquiry, let me mention an aspect of colubrine life in our country which is not unrelated to my original question. In many rustic areas, people believe not only that it is wrong to hurt a cobra (for reasons of religious sentiment), but also that if left alone the snake will do them no harm. So, when a cobra takes up residence near them, they do their best to display their friendliness towards it (mainly by leaving it severely alone), and in due course the snake accepts the people around as part of the place, and reciprocates their courtesy by leaving them severely alone. Many readers must have come across such a ‘vaazhumpaambu’ (resident snake) as it is termed in Tamil. You should realize that this amicable truce between a cobra and humanity is not the result of intelligent understanding, or courage, or anything so fallible and flimsy; it is the result of something a
hundred times more powerful, of faith.

  Incidentally, the practice of ‘showing’ a lump of burning camphor to a cobra to make it go away is sound—snakes are very intolerant of high temperatures and fire. The offer of milk in a saucer is less sound; snakes do not care for milk any more than they do for water, as any snake charmer can tell you—if you can get him to speak the truth.

  I once knew a resident cobra, attached to the cool, shadowed, peaceful, charming little shrine of Shiva in Sandur. This was a cobra of imposing dimensions, but somehow people did not fear it—it was the temple snake, and would do no harm if one took care not to step on it. I have often watched this snake, seated on a culvert two yards from it, and admired its thick, sinuous grace—once it stayed long enough to let me complete a sketch of it, though usually it would move away with leisurely dignity if subjected to close scrutiny. That was a very old cobra, and strangely enough it loved to bask in the early morning sun (though snakes are intolerant of a strong sun) and warm its beautiful back in the slanting, yellow rays. I used to wonder if it suffered from lumbago.

  1960

  33

  Sleeping Dogs

  On Monday morning, last week, a dusky pig-hunting pariah dog was brought to me for a portrait sketch. He was chained to a pillar in my verandah and left with me and it was plain that he distrusted the strange surroundings and longed to be back home. When all my long knowledge of dogs had failed to reassure him, I sat down and looked the other way and waited for the fidgeting and whimpers to cease. That dog was dog-tired if ever anyone was, having been out all night after pig, but he would not relax. I suppose a hunting dog needs to be wary and darkly suspicious by nature, but I must say that this was a specially mistrustful huntsman. After a while he lay down, but with his feet beneath him, ready for instant movement, with every sense alert. Sheer fatigue began to tell upon him, and at last sleep, blessed sleep, overpowered his limbs and closed his reluctant eyes. But even then his native wariness made him hold up his head and prick his ears, and no dog can sleep with head high and ears listening. This compromise with sleep was maintained, relentlessly. His head began to nod and wobble, and his muzzle would sink inwards, but at the point of laying it down on his paws he would pick it up jerkily, cock his tattered ears, and go through it all again. It was the triumph of willing spirit, over weak flesh, so very droll, but also pathetic in a way. I sent that dog back to his hut, back to his well-earned repose.

  I cite this drowsy-head in evidence of a theory that in dogs, at any rate, the ears are the last sensory organs to go to sleep and the ones that sleep lightest. The proof of this theory is complicated by the fact that dogs have such odd sleeping habits. Perhaps it is because of centuries of human association, but few other animals go in for so many grades and degrees of sleep. Dogs doze fitfully, indulge in forty winks, siestas, naps and snoring slumber—barring hibernation they know every form of sleep and repose known to every language. It is difficult to say offhand when a dog is sound asleep, and since deep sleep is necessary for any test of the measure of suspension of normal awareness, one should be slow in surmises. The sleep postures of dogs tell us little about how soundly they are asleep. The way a dog goes to bed seems to depend upon build and idiosyncrasies, even upon the weather. A long dog, for instance, will curl up compactly for a spell of sleep in cold weather, but in summer he will lie with limbs stretched and spread. Then there is the question of personal preferences. Some dogs like to sleep on their sides, some on their bellies; some with their heads tucked well in, and some again with the chin on the doorstep. I even knew an abandoned Labrador that would sleep flat on her ample back, with all four paws in the air! Furthermore, exceptional fatigue, debility, or a nascent fever, may cause heavy, comatose slumber, or dull some particular sense. In short one should know the sleeper and all his antecedents before predicating anything from his waking behaviour. I have not conducted any sustained experiments on sleeping dogs, preferring to let them lie as a rule. Others can have the joys of investigation and discovery; I am content to raise the point.

  What will we find when we do investigate the sleeping perceptions of dogs, scientifically? We will find, I say, that when asleep dogs depend mainly and usually on their ears to warn them. The sense of touch is rarely called into use—a dog is awake and up, generally, before danger can touch him. Sight, of course, is obscured by the thickness of the closed lids, but I believe that sight is a sense that is brought into play only when a dog is wide awake. Switch on a strong light in the drawing room late at night, where the canine sentry is doing duty reclined on the best sofa, and the dog sleeps on, though the glare must filter through the lids to his eyes. If the glare is considerable and direct on the face, he may shift his head, but that is all the notice he takes. But woken suddenly from deep slumber, a dog will often jump up with a surprised ‘wuff’ and look about him quickly, to locate what roused his sleep-drenched suspicions. Dogs have marvellous noses which they use as much as their colour-blind eyes to explore the world—in fact, many dogs rely more on their powers of smell than on sight. One would expect this sense to function in some way, even during sleep, but I believe that like sight it is wholly dormant then. I have tried placing favourite titbits (some of them quite smelly) right in front of the noses of slumbering dogs, but it failed to evoke any response in them. In one or two instances I thought I noticed increased salivation, but I am not sure of this. Anyway, in no case was the sleeper roused.

  A dog’s hearing never deserts him wholly, even in deep sleep. I should make it clear that I do not say that his other senses cannot be jolted into awakening a dog, but some violent appeal to them is necessary to rouse him. The ears, however, are sleep sensitive. It is likely that ground vibrations, sensed through the body, may also serve to warn a drowsing dog, but it is on his hearing that he relies in the main. No cognizance is taken of familiar noises during sleep, however loud they may be: it is the same with ourselves. It is not the volume or vehemence of noises that jerk a slumbering dog wide awake, but something unexpected or suspicious about them. Once I spent a night at a railway retiring room, where locomotives had a nocturnal bias. That room was just above the station yard, and a small, mangy dog, belonging to the station generally, insisted on sharing the room with me, with that fine sympathy for lonely strangers that stray dogs have. All night the sudden shrieks and reverberating thunder of the steam engines tore my attempts at sleep to pieces, and that little dog slept serenely through it all! But a strange whisper would have roused him. Any noise will rouse a dog at once, if it is sufficiently sinister; stealthy footsteps, a scraping sound in places where nothing should scrape, anything that squeaks and gibbers like the Roman ghosts. If life compels you at any time to pass a sleeping bull terrier on his own ground, walk boldly past, with a casual, assured step, as if he were some harmless, vegetarian creature—never, never try to sneak silently past. The better plan, of course, would be to take a circuitous route, say, some half a mile from the sleeper at all points.

  1949

  34

  The Aquatic Sambar

  In August last year and then in October, I was in two wildlife preserves over 1,500 km apart, one in the Western Ghats and the other in the Aravallis, wholly different in terrain, flora and even fauna. However, they had this in common—both held large stretches of shallow water, and sambar.

  I spent much time at these waterspreads watching the animals that came there to drink and feed—chital in small herds, wild pigs that rooted in the slushy banks for tubers, a great many waterbirds and sambar. I was particularly interested in the last, for they were there most of the time, wading and even swimming across to feed on the aquatic vegetation and, after having their fill, lying up on a flat, open bank to relax and chew the cud.

  Sambar are browsers in the main. They do also graze, especially on tall grasses, but the bulk of their food consists of green twigs, leaf buds and foliage, the bark of some trees, wild fruits and water plants. In the two locations I visited, the forests were deciduous and in
a resurgent somatic phase. The trees that were bare and spiky in summer were clothed in fresh green foliage again with the first showers, and the ground vegetation that the desiccating heat had withered was now in thick new leaf. Logically, one would expect sambar to seek aquatic vegetation mainly in midsummer when there is so little green fodder in the forests, and to feed on the lush green growth that the rain evokes later in the year, and I did notice the deer browsing at trees and bushes in places, but they were favouring the waterspreads much more and guzzling the aquatic vegetation with avid relish.

  Like all forest animals, sambar turn fugitive and nocturnal where there is much human traffic on foot by day in the forests, coming out only under cover of darkness and lying up dormant in bush cover all day. Hazaribagh in Bihar, notable for its sambar, is a good example of such a place. But the deer are mainly diurnal when they are not hunted or harassed by men in their haunts. In both the preserves I visited, sambar were out by day as well.

  What made the deer keep to the watersides and aquatic vegetation? I have no firm answer to the question, only speculative theories which, knowing how misleading logical reasons can be in assessing the motives of wild animals, I offer only tentatively. Wild animals are not devoid of intelligence or the capacity to learn by trial and error, but they are more governed by instinctive urges which, in the long run, are of considerable survival value. I should say this first in fairness to my speculations.