by Gavin Young
Layard wrote in his journals of Arabs driving wild pigs and shooting them with matchlock guns along dykes and among the tamarisk bushes and scrub. These days, far from dying out, they are more numerous than ever because the Marshmen cannot afford the expense of cartridges to shoot them. To have some idea of the havoc the pigs can inflict on rice, barley or wheat crops, one only has to envisage the sight of, say, forty or even sixty great black, shaggy-haired animals, grazing together in a rice field like so many monstrous sheep. With such a vision in mind, one can understand the despair of the Marsh Arabs who own the rice. Fired by this despair, young men will leap onto backs of pigs they have surprised swimming in deep water and drown them with clubs or by holding their hindlegs together with their bare hands.
All over the Marshes men display the scars of encounters with pigs. The shaggy brutes are something of an obsession. Whenever I have been out shooting them, local excitement has erupted in frenzied and voluble activity: every man and boy who can be spared from work springs shouting into a boat of some description and, armed with whatever he has been able to lay hands on – possibly a rifle, an old shotgun, a fishing-spear, or perhaps only a dagger – paddles excitedly to the fray. Apart from their satisfaction at the destruction of one of their greatest natural enemies, Marsh Arabs love the excitement of a chase and a pig hunt invariably brings out a large, chattering and milling audience. Occasionally a pig runs berserk amongst the spectators and someone may be savaged.
The image of these loathsome creatures does not fade. I see them now: enormous hulks galloping through walls of spray in water 3 feet deep; the dark silhouettes of boars 40 yards away swiftly raising their snouts and then wheeling head-on to charge; the obscene weight of a sprawling sow suddenly revealed at one’s very feet in high reeds, the split-second terror at the sight of her, the end of terror as pig and gunsight spring up simultaneously and the high velocity, soft-nosed bullets smother her point-blank charge just in time. Pig shooting could be horrific, exciting, and very messy, and sometimes all three things at once. I started by using a gun Wilfred Thesiger lent me, a ·275 high velocity rifle made by John Rigby of London, perhaps the best sporting rifle of its calibre in the world. Later I bought my own gun, a lesser beauty but it worked well enough for me – an 8 mm Mannlicher-Schönauer. It was rather stubby, more a carbine than a rifle, with the wood of the stock continued up to the end of the barrel. The Marsh Arabs, who like giving everything a name, called Thesiger’s Rigby Rigeibi – an affectionate version of the English name – but they had no hope of pronouncing Mannlicher-Schönaeur so they called mine al Nemsawi, the Austrian.
Marsh Arabs would use any means to shoot pigs. The damage they did justified any means of exterminating them. If possible the Marshmen liked to catch the pigs in deep water where a canoe could be deftly paddled alongside the swimming animal and a bullet planted at close quarters through the back of its head. (It was not so easy if the pig, though swimming, turned and tried to upset the mashhuf.)
My first encounter with a pig was a small nightmare. I was in a canoe with Ajram and Hafadh when we flushed three medium-sized pigs from a clump of reeds in shallow water. I had never fired at a pig before. I selected one now, aimed behind its shoulder as it shot away at top speed and squeezed the trigger. The shot struck low and late, a heavy, expanding lump of lead ripping across its belly exposing its innards. It did not kill the animal; it did not even stop it. To my horror, the pig disappeared squealing miserably into the reeds, presumably to die in agony an hour or two later. After that, I took very good care when and how I fired at pigs; and that wretched performance, thank God, was never repeated. Pigs were regarded as dangerous vermin and had to be reduced, no doubt of that. The Marshmen chided me for turning my head away when they set about spearing to death piglets they had found in an abandoned nest – the Massacre of the Innocents, I called it. ‘Do you want them to grow up and kill us?’ they demanded, quite irritably. No, one did not. But still….
The most frightening way of shooting wild pigs, it seemed to me, was walking them up in dense reeds. It was bad enough walking them up on dry land, in the small clumps of date-palms and bushy undergrowth you find where the Marsh frays out into meandering channels through cultivation or pasture. The pigs creep into these small oases, curl up in the shade of a large bush and sleep. You can be on top of them before you see them. In the next two seconds – not more – they are either on top of you or making off hell-for-leather into the distance.
I preferred to advance into these pig-fortresses in a fixed formation: myself holding the Mannlicher, Hafadh, Hasan bin Manati, or one of the others who, I knew, could shoot reasonably well, slightly behind me and to my right holding a two-barrelled shotgun loaded with buckshot. Sometimes someone else would be nearby with a fishing spear or a dagger, but one could not rely much on him. Once a very large pig shot out of a bush, tail up and head and tusks down, straight towards me at a distance of about 30 feet. There was no possibility of a reasonable shot; mine smacked into the ground well over the pig’s head, and I braced myself for the bone-crunching impact of 350 pounds of pig somewhere around my waist. I had heard, as if from a very long way off, Hafadh’s shrill cry of ‘Look out!’ – advice I hardly needed. By a miracle the pig swerved to my right and passed between Hafadh and myself like a cannonball. He brushed my legs. I felt the wind of him and smelt his meaty, muddy smell as the furry mountain – bunched muscle, hair, sickle-sharp tusks – shot by. The pig plunged into thick undergrowth. Hafadh’s barrel of buckshot went for nothing among the branches, and he and I gazed at each other, getting our breath back.
Another time, Hasan, in unorthodox fashion, dropped to one knee as a pig was coming across him towards me and stopped it stone dead with both barrels of the shotgun fired almost simultaneously. This may give the impression that killing pigs was easy – simply a question of hitting them correctly. But it was more than that. You could hit a fast-moving pig square and it would still come on. I was far too timid to go after pigs with nothing but a shotgun.
Marsh Arabs are courageous in a crisis. One day Thesiger and his canoe-men were charged by not one, but two, exceptionally big boars as the canoe lay alongside the dry land. They seemed, with their heads lowered and their great shoulders hunched, about to hurl themselves furiously into the boat. It took five shots from Thesiger – each one audibly a direct hit – to stop them. When they finally dropped in a flurry of mud and blood at his feet, Thesiger turned to find his companions half-crouched, their daggers in their hands. He asked them what they would have done if a pig had got into the boat. Amara replied, ‘We were going to jump on it and kill it with our daggers.’
Probably even more numerous, and as much prized as the wild pigs are hated, the water-buffaloes still lumber their way across the morasses and flatlands of southern Iraq like repetitive shapes on an old frieze.
At Sahain’s house late one night, I went out into the buffalo-platform to relieve myself and heard a low voice at the unlit door of an island-house fifty yards away across the silent water. It was too dark to see; the house was a black hump in the water. Somebody seemed to be singing, but in a strange, jerky, strangulated way – and it was too late at night for people to be singing to one another. Next morning I asked about this unusual sound and people told me that it had been Ajram out on the platform under the stars crooning to a sick buffalo to comfort it. Ajram arrived later to confirm this. It was the normal thing to do, he said, although in this case the unfortunate animal had not recovered from its undiagnoseable complaint and had died just before dawn. ‘What words did you sing to it, Ajram?’ I asked. ‘Oh just words that came into my head,’ he said.
Some houses have buffalo-shelters called sitras on the same island but separated from the house. But usually the buffaloes sleep outside the front door. Occasionally the calves are allowed into the house itself, with young cows, and you can be woken up in the middle of the night by a snort in your ear from a damp, inquisitive muzzle or by a bump from the hoof of a res
tless buffalo. No one ever seems to be seriously trampled in his sleep, I don’t know why.
Buffaloes grumpily enjoy their wonderfully pampered lives. Every morning early the women have to chivy these hulks of fat, bone, horn and hide to their feet, before they can be induced to go off, loudly protesting the unpardonable intrusion on their privacy, to spend an utterly carefree day luxuriating in the lush grazing grounds of the Marsh. The scolding women might be suburban wives forcing recalcitrant husbands out of the house to face the day in a hated office: the buffaloes have to be swiped with rushes and sticks, shouted at and cursed before they move, in a reverberation of groans, to the platform’s edge. There, in. what seems like slow motion, they splosh heavily into the water, setting up a small tidal wave that may cause a small boy passing in a tiny canoe to rock wildly and cry in alarm.
All day these lords of indolence wallow in cooling water and rich acres of edible sedges (called hashish). No man or beast will molest them. They can range safely and at will. They swim easily in deep water, or lunge their way through the reed-beds, incidentally creating new watery lanes that the tribesmen soon begin to use. They pant and gasp and stare blankly at the world with only their glistening muzzles and long-lashed eyes above water. I have seen buffaloes submerged so totally that only two black and quivering nostrils broke the water’s surface. When they are standing on dry land, egrets and even small children can stand and sit on their backs but the buffaloes pay no attention.
In winter, the water is often too cold for them and they remain all day on their platforms, emitting their groaning, rasping, gargling sounds of complaint, and fodder cut by the family during a hard day in the reeds is brought and laid before their disdainful noses as if it was roast peacock before princes. Even in summer the family – every man, woman, boy or girl – sallies out daily to cut hashish which is presented to buffaloes that have already enjoyed a full day’s free grazing in the reeds. The yearly outpouring of gallons of milk and curds and butter, and tons of dung fuel is well worth the family’s efforts.
The value Marsh Arabs place on these buffaloes can be seen from the following prices I noted in 1976: female buffalo (in calf) 117 dinars; old male buffalo 76 dinars; one buffalo calf 35 dinars (1 dinar = £1.50).
The settled Madan families own between three and eight buffaloes. But the Madan nomads of the eastern Marshes move great herds from west of the Tigris to the Persian frontier. They used to have a surly reputation; in the old days constant stealing of buffaloes caused violent feuds and bloodshed among the tribes. Even so, the sight of these ponderous, black buffalo shapes is somehow comforting. What harmless animals they are after all; and how useful. Despite their bulk, they are hopelessly vulnerable and humanly neurotic. They pick up foot-and-mouth disease from the wild pigs; and drop their calves into the water; and they easily go out of condition if something upsets them. They deserve the devoted attention they get, because, despite their Walt Disney look, these creatures are the mainstay of the Madan way of life. They are at peace with all nature.
There is little I need say of other animals found in the Marshes – domestic cows, for example, or cats, or sheep, which manage to survive on the Marshmen’s soggy island platforms. Marsh dogs, however, are worth mentioning because of their extreme aggression and because of the deafening dog-choruses that, day and night, shatter the peace of villages: a distant shot, a sudden shout, the appearance of a mashhuf carrying one or more strangers on the edge of the village, sometimes no more than a buffalo’s strangled bellow at the back of the house, can act as the switch that starts off a mad cacophony of frenzied barking. High-pitched yelps, gruff, choking roars, full-throated howls without any apparent pause for breath, blend into a maddening bombardment of sound that can make you lie under your blanket praying for silence to return. It seems an age before the dogs turn, growling, back to sleep, and you are left to the soothing rustle of wind in the reeds and the cronk-crunk of the frogs.
Marsh dogs not only bark, they are savage biters, too. They will go for strangers as if to kill and only someone they know can bring them to heel. Other Eastern countries have their guard-dog populations, and it is as well to watch out for them if you are approaching a village in, say, Thailand or India. But the village dogs of southern Iraq are a ferocious breed apart. I think they are bigger than other people’s. They look much thicker and stronger round the neck and shoulders, although not much taller, than Indian pi-dogs. They fight furiously amongst themselves, sometimes four or five together in a terrifying mêlée of teeth and gurgling roars. Most have battered, pugilists’ heads and often an ear or an eye missing. They are used to being hit with stones or sticks by members of the household they guard (it is often difficult to restrain them any other way). I would never try to stroke a Marsh dog, however docile it looked or however near to it and me its master was sitting.
Once, walking from Sayyid Sarwat’s house to a village not very far. away and on dry land, I was surrounded by a large pack of frenzied dogs – I would say about twelve or fifteen – that charged in on me like a swarm of maddened bees on the attack. By the grace of God, two men from the village were walking towards me not very far away. They began running towards me and shouting at the dogs, which I was having the greatest difficulty holding off by hurling stones and lumps of earth. I can see now the uncurbed fury in those dogs’ eyes and the fangs that chopped the air closer and closer.
One of the largest dogs raced towards me with such determination to tear me apart that it was unable to stop and smacked into me in a cloud of dust. A canine head as hard as oak thumped my calf. Luckily the shock of the impact alarmed the dog as much as it did me and it cringed away before rejoining the attacks on me from a distance. The two villagers beat them off. But these dogs could kill.
The man would be extremely unlucky who found himself within striking distance of two other dangerous inhabitants of the Marsh area: sharks, which are very rare visitors; or snakes, which are common but prefer to evade rather than attack man. Sharks have been sighted in the Basra roadstead – so I was told when I lived there – and, according to local gossip, they occasionally attacked bathers in the Shatt al Arab. People also talk of sharks spotted at rare intervals in the Tigris as far up as Baghdad. But the story one of his colleagues spun to General Chesney of a 15 foot long shark in the Euphrates near Qurna seemed pretty unlikely to him. ‘Shark?’ he huffed sceptically. ‘A whale more likely.’ I heard Marsh Arabs now and again insist that they had seen small sharks in the Marshes, and this is possible at flood time. Be that as it may, you are unlikely to see one.
Snakes abound, especially in the summer. One should keep a good lookout for them. The bite of a certain species, called arbid, is fatal. As we were travelling in the tarada one hot day near Dima Lake, the prow-man, Jabbar, suddenly called out, ‘Look, an arbid. On that island. Let’s get it.’ I thought he had seen a snake in the reeds and wanted to leap ashore to tackle it. But a foraging Marsh Arab had got there first and killed it with his spear. Jabbar held the snake up on the end of his paddle: an ugly-looking thing, about 4 feet long with an underbelly of ivory-white.
Sometimes these Marsh snakes wrap their coils round reed stems and hang there in the sun. That 4-footer was a mere tiddler compared to the mighty serpents that do move about the reed forests. Reddish monsters, several feet long and as thick as a man’s forearm, slither through the sodden undergrowth and no wonder the Marsh Arabs fear them: they are things you hope won’t crop up in your dreams. In former times, Marsh Arabs invented a mythical snake-monster with supernatural properties which they called Afa or Anfish. Today, they simply keep their eyes open and avoid stepping on the unmythical arbid, which I imagine is a kind of viper.
I have left the birds to the end: they are the Marshes’ crowning beauty. From November to early spring, the lagoons and reed-beds are flecked with the flashing colours of halcyon kingfishers and the gaudy purple gallinule, and the sky is dotted with floating eagles or mottled with whirling concourses of geese from Siberia and
wild duck of many kinds. Summer is not the time for birds. After spring, most of them have gone. The long, sinister-looking cormorants fly low across the water. There are still scores of herons about, too; both the tall, round-shouldered Goliath heron – almost man-sized – and its smaller replica, the pigmy heron, inhabit the marshes year in, year out. Marsh Arab folklore of long ago has it that herons slept in flocks, one bird being chosen to stand sentry. Forbidden to sleep, he balances on one leg, supporting the other foot against his knee, so that if he does begin to doze he will immediately topple over. Woe betide a heron ‘sentry’ who does so sleep and topple: the other herons peck him to death. Or so the Madan used to say.
Winter is the time of porcelain-blue skies and countless birds. You see most kinds of duck: pintail, widgeon, teal, mallard, shoveller, red-crested pochard, gargany, diving duck, and white and black tufted duck. There are white ibises, too, and hoopoes, red hawks, avocets, stilts; warblers of all kinds perching on reed stems, unafraid, or twittering unseen; and black and white kingfishers, bee-eaters, yellow-billed storks, African darters. Eagles always seem to be drifting overhead and white-tailed sea-eagles, quite tame, breed in the reed-beds. A large predatory bird the Marsh Arabs call a haum, which is either a harrier or an eagle of sorts and has wide, dark, canopy-like wings with an impressive span to them, skims the top of the reed-beds, looking for coot and moorhen. Finding any in open water, the haum dives onto them with a surprisingly abrupt contortion of wings and body. Tribesmen out shooting coot and not having any luck point eagerly to a hunting haum and paddle towards it for dear life knowing that coot are there.
The lagoons are often dark with thousands of blue-black coot. The eagles dive and dive on them trying to panic them into individual flight; they like to take these plump, eatable birds in the air. But, although coot have a sheep-like air of stupidity, they are wise to an eagle’s tricks. When the eagle’s dive-bombing begins, they huddle even closer, then spread their wings and skitter across the surface, beating up a dense cloud of spray which is usually enough to decide the eagle to go hunting somewhere else.