by David Day
And survived the years of the Great War
That ended the power of the Kaiser,
The Ottomans and the Russian Czars
Death is before me today
Like a strong wind filling
The sails of a great ship
To the French and English in the garrison
He was the soldier’s mascot: the embodiment
Of steadfastness and endurance
And the island’s Hindu lascars and slaves
Had an ancient legend ready-made for him:
He was Chukwa, the Great Tortoise
Upon whose back was heaped
The weight of the whole world
And perhaps from their own enslavement
Through generations of exile and captivity,
They understood something of his suffering
Death is before me today
Like the desire of an ancient prisoner
To see his home again
The Tortoise’s fall
Was an unlikely accident
Blind or not, after a century and a half
The garrison’s corridors were no mystery
His own time had long passed
The weight of the world
Did indeed rest upon his back
The air above his carapace was empty
Yet heavier for all that with the weight of time
Not quite the immortal Chukwa
He was not the Spiritus Mundi
Not the footstool of Venus
Not Methuselah’s Pet
But only a lonely mortal tortoise
It was time to join the others
This was the end of his race
It was time to see his home again
THE BULL OF HEAVEN
FIRST WATCH 9 A. M. TERCE
AUROCHS OR WILD OX – 1627 – Bos primigenius
Gilgamesh Poet – 2100 BC
Epic of Gilgamesh, Sumeria
Ishtar led the Bull of Heaven
Down into the world.
When the Bull of Heaven bellowed
The earth shook and quaked:
Lakes and streams were emptied
And the Euphrates stopped its flow.
When the Bull of Heaven bellowed again
And its great hoof struck the ground:
The earth cracked open
And into that deadly abyss fell
The armies of the King of Uruk.
The Aurochs or Wild Ox first appears in literature in that first epic of the human race, Gilgamesh (Mesopotamia – 2100 BC), as the “Bull of Heaven” belonging to Anu the King of the Gods is lent to his daughter Ishtar, who wishes to use it to destroy the hero Gilgamesh, the King of Uruk. The Aurochs is also referred to as the Reem in the Bible, and as the British traveller Canon Tristram wrote in 1884, “on the Assyrian monuments its chase is represented as the greatest feat of hunting in the time of the dynasties of Nineveh.”
In Greek mythology, the Aurochs was the avatar of the thunderbolt god, Zeus, and the god of earthquakes, Poseidon. In the 5th century BC, the Greek historian Herodotus, in his The Persian Wars, wrote: “That whole region [of Thrace] is full of lions and wild bulls with gigantic horns which are brought into Greece.” In the earlier Minoan civilization of Crete many images of these massive wild bulls being used in the spectacular sport of bull jumping were painted on the walls of the palace of Knossos.
Julius Caesar – 65 BC
De Bello Gallico, Gaul
They are but little less than Elephants in size, and are of the species, colour and form of a bull. Their strength is very great, and also their speed. They spare neither man nor beast that they see. They cannot be brought to endure the sight of men, nor can they be tamed, even when taken young. The people who take them in pitfalls assiduously destroy them: and young men harden themselves in this labour, and exercise themselves in this kind of chase; and those who have killed a great number – the horns being publicly exhibited in evidence of the fact – obtain great honour. The horns in amplitude, shape and species, differ much from the horns of our oxen. They are much sought after; and after having been edged with silver at their mouths they are used for drinking vessels at great feasts.
The Aurochs or Wild Ox was known to Caesar as the Ur or Uras. Measuring six and a half feet at the shoulder, the Aurochs was the archetypal wild bull, as its Latin name Bos primigenius suggests. It was from the Aurochs that all our domestic cattle are derived. It is the source of what was the single most important animal domestication in the evolution of agriculture-based civilizations.
Recent DNA research indicates there were at least three subspecies of Aurochs. Two were the Indian Aurochs from which the “humped” cattle of India are descended, and the North African Aurochs from which the “humpless” cattle of the Near East are descended. What survived in a wild state into historic times in Europe was this terrifying, primeval, and untameable Giant Wild Ox.
Pliny the Elder – 65 AD
Natural History, Rome
Scythia produces but very few animals in consequence of the scarcity of shrubs. Germany, which lies close adjoining it, has not many animals, though it has some very fine kinds of wild oxen: the Bison, which has a mane, and the Urus.
The hunting of the Aurochs seems to have been regarded as the exclusive right of kings and aristocrats among the Germanic peoples. In the 9th century, Charlemagne hunted Aurochs in the forests near Aix-la-Chapelle; while in the German epic the Niebelungenlied, we learn that the hero Siegfried slaughtered four of these mighty beasts near Worms in the 12th century.
The Aurochs was sometimes confused with that other giant of the European forests: the Wisent or European Bison. Both of these beasts are famously and frequently portrayed in hunting scenes in prehistoric cave paintings. It is instructive to realize that although populations of both these massive quadrupeds were hunted by man for at least 40,000 years, it took the advent of firearms to result in their extinction.
Benedyct Fulinski – 1627
Fulinski Manuscript XVII, Poland
A century ago, King Sigismund III Vasa, seeing the imminent danger of a quick and total extermination of the Aurochs, proclaimed orders with the object of protecting the feeding grounds of these animals, the number of which at this time did not amount to more than some ten pieces. Unluckily the enactment of those orders came too late and in consequence the Aurochs disappeared from the lands over the next century.
By 1400, two royal preserves in Poland were the last refuges of the Aurochs. By 1564, there were only 30 surviving animals in the Jaktorowska forest preserve. By 1620, this last herd had dwindled to one last animal. With her death in 1627, after nearly four millennia, the “Bull of Heaven” finally enters the annals of literature – along with the dragon and the griffin – as an entirely (non-existent) mythical creature.
Like the Aurochs, the Wisent was becoming rare by the end of the Middle Ages. By the 1800s, Wisent populations surviving in the wild had dwindled to small herds in only two regions and in two forms. Both the Caucasian Wisent (Bison bonasus caucasicus) and the Lithuanian Wisent (Bison bonasus bonasus) populations survived because they lived in substantial park reserves under the protection of the Czar of Russia. However, after the Great War and the Russian Revolution, these last animals were no longer protected in imperial reserves, and by 1923, both the Caucasian and Lithuanian Wisent became extinct in the wild. Then, in 1925, an aging bull called Kaukasus, the last of the Caucasian race, died in the Hamburg Zoo.
However, a remarkable captive breeding program by the European Bison Society in the 1920’s gathered just 6 captive animals from various zoos, and miraculously saved the Lithuanian race from extinction. Since the end of the Second World War, new parklands were established, and today there are several thousand European Bison of the Lithuanian subspecies roaming woodland reserves in Europe.
TAURUS
Aurochs or Wild Ox – 1627
The last black bull’s wounding
Was like the burstin
g
Of an old sun in the belly
His roar betrayed the centuries
Of refusing to tread warily in this world
Flutes were made from his bones
They play them even now
And hunting horns from his ivory crown
In his veins the singing of a hundred
Rapacious birds
He was strength without malice
His forehead was a crushing millstone
Fearful, lordly beast of all the mythologies
Father of the minotaur
A small part of his stubborn blood
Is yet in the fighting bulls of the ring
Who break the bodies of horses and men
His legend is as ancient as the pale moon
But his life now is only a fish’s song
And his spirit is steel and flint striking
On a dark and empty plain
THE HORSES OF DAWN
SECOND WATCH 10 A. M. TERCE
TARPAN – 1887 – Equus feras feras
Herodotus – 445 BC
History of the Persian Wars, Greece
The third great river in Scythia is Hypanis. This stream rises within the limits of Scythia, and has its source in another vast lake, around which wild white horses graze. The lake is called properly enough, the Mother of the Hypanis.
The Tarpan is the Eurasian Wild Horse or “True Wild Horse” (Equus feras or Equus feras feras) from which the many breeds of the Domestic Horse (Equus caballus) are descended. The name “Tarpan,” meaning “Wild Horse,” is from a Turkic language (Kyrgyz or Kazakh). It was also known as the Dzerlik-adu by the Mongols (and the Yeh-Ma by the Chinese). The Tatars and Cossacks, like these others, distinguished the Tarpan wild horse from the feral horse, which they called the Takja or Muzin. The oldest human records we have of the existence of Tarpans are to be found in cave paintings 20-40,000 years old. The wild horses on the walls of the caves of Lascaux are perfectly-detailed portraits of the Tarpan with its distinctive “Mohawk” mane.
Herodotus in Book Four of The Persian Wars concerns himself with Scythia, which he defines as all the lands between the Danube and the Don Rivers. Herodotus credits the nomadic tribesmen there with being the finest horsemen in the world, and Scythia as the one part of the world where true wild horses still roamed in abundance. The region where wild white horses were to be found grazing (and survived until the early 19th century) was probably the region known as the Pripyat Marshes on today’s Polish-Belarus-Ukraine border.
Max Toppen – 1870
History of Mascovia , Danzig
In the time of the Teutonic Knights, wild horses and other game were hunted for the sake of their skins. In 1543 Duke Albert sent an order to command at Lyck, bidding him take measures for the preservation of wild horses. Proofs of the horse being an object of the chase in Poland and Lithuania are found far into the seventeenth century.
In the forests of Białowieża, Poland, records of the hunting of the Tarpan go back to 1409, when King Władyslaw Jagiello arranged a royal chase in honour of his cousin, Witold of Lithuania. In these immense forests the Tarpan, along with European Bison (Wisent), survived in substantial numbers through most of the 18th century. However, by 1800, the Tarpan had vanished everywhere except on the steppes of Tauria and Cherson. The last herds died out in the Ukraine around 1850, and the last known pure-bred Tarpan was killed near Askamia Nova in Russia on Christmas Day in 1879. Eight years later, the last captive Tarpan died in Poland.
Harold J. E. Peake – 1933
On the Domestication of the Horse, London
The first mention of the horse is documented before 2000 BC in Babylon, where it is called the ‘Ass from the East’, but it does not seem to have been introduced into Mesopotamia before the arrival of the Kassite conquerors in 1746 BC. The horse was also well known to the Hittites, who arrived in Asia Minor about 1900 BC from the Northwest. All this evidence tends to show that the horse was used as a means of transport both in Persia and upon the Russian steppe well before 2000 BC. It seems likely that it was first tamed in that part of the world, or still farther east in Mongolia, as early as 3000 BC.
Samuel Gotlieb Gmelin, a German physician, botanist, and explorer of Russia in the days of Catherine the Great, was the first to collect specimens of the Tarpan and make it known to science. In 1766, Gmelin was appointed professor of botany at St. Petersburg, and the next year he was sent on an expedition to study the natural history of the Russian Empire. In his four-volume Reise Durch Russland, Gmelin recorded seeing the animals in 1769 in the Brobrovsk region near Voronezh. Gmelin’s hunters killed a stallion and two mares and a foal. He described the stallion as “hardly as large as the smallest Russian pony.” Gmelin explored the Don and Volga Rivers and the shores of the Caspian Sea. In the Caucasus he was taken hostage by Usmey Khan of Khaitakes, and died in captivity at the age of 29.
In 1784 Pieter Boddaert named the species Equus ferus, based on Gmelin’s description. This was to distinguish it from its descendants, the 300 or so breeds of the Domestic Horse (Equus caballus, as named by Linnaeus in 1758).
Otto Antonius – 1938
On the Recent Equidae , Vienna
In times not long before the beginning of historical days there were true wild horses or Tarpan spread over the whole Eurasiatic continent from the Atlantic to the Pacific. The Tarpan was a mouse-dun horse, which the medieval philosopher Albertus Magnus means when he calls the colour of the wild horse ‘cinereus’, as in ash-coloured. The first Duke of Prussia, Albert von Hohenzollern, sent wild horses as highly esteemed gifts to the Emperor, and also to the Archduke Ferdinand, so there can be no doubt that these horses were truly royal game – like the Urus and the Bison. The last refuge of the Tarpanis in Poland was the great game park of Count Zamoyski. Here they were strictly protected until the civil conflict and severe winter of 1812 made feeding and survival impossible. Franz von Falz-Fein, the owner of the matchless Ascania Nova Zoo, has told the life-history of that last wild horse of Europe, an old one-eyed mare, lingering for years around the feral horses, covered by domestic he-horses, captured, escaped with its filly, and some years later hunted and killed on the ice by the peasants of Agaiman.
Otto Antonius was an Austrian zoologist and palaeontologist who became director of the Tiergarten Schönbrunn in Vienna. An active member of the Zoological Society of London, Antonius was co-founder of modern zoological biology. He was a pioneer in creating modern humane zoo environments and redefining zoos as places to protect and breed endangered species. A key figure in saving the Wisent from extinction, he was also one of the first to attempt “rebreeding” domestic animals back to their wild ancestral stock. At the close of World War II, the Schönbrunn Zoo was nearly destroyed in bombing raids, and with the approach of the Russian Army on 9 April 1945, Antonius and his wife committed suicide.
Antonius’ methods were adapted by others and resulted in the successful captive-breeding of the Przewalski Wild Horse (Equus przewalski or Equus feras przewalski) – the only surviving form of Wild Horse – despite its total extinction in the wild. His concept of “rebreeding” has also resulted in the controversial “reconstruction” of “Tarpan-like” animals that can now be seen in a number of zoos and wildlife refuges.
THE CENTAURS
Tarpan – 1887
Little wild horses of the steppes
Straggling tribal men
What has the Emperor
Behind the Great Wall to fear?
He feeds on peacock tongues
His people cover the lands of the world
His power changes the course of rivers
And shapes the face of the earth
He is disturbed by a terrible vision
He fears the image of a demon
With eight limbs
That is fierce and swift
The Tartar horn blows
And the vision
In a whirlwind comes
At the Dragon Gate
At
the Ivory Gate
The bowmen mount the towers
But the demons pass by, not against the wall
But around, their brave hearts pounding distance away
It is the frenzy of the little horses
And the savage tribal men
Two creatures made one
The Tartar horn blows
And the Tarpan carries the tribesmen on
The wall is left to the west wind
The yellow axes of the Imperial Guard are untried
The horsemen pass by, pass around
The cities are pyres
The jade images are shattered
The silk of the Imperial banners
Lies tattered beneath the conqueror’s hooves
THE LIONS OF ROME
THIRD WATCH 11 A. M. TERCE
ATLAS GOLDEN LION – 1922 – Panthera leo leo
Herodotus – 410 BC
The Persian Wars , Greece
That whole region [of Thrace] is full of lions… upon Xerxes’ march the camels that carried the provisions of the Persian army were set upon by lions, which left their lairs and came down by night, but spared the men and the beasts of burden, while they made the camels their prey. I marvel what may have been the cause which compelled the lions to leave the other animals untouched and attack the camels, when they had never seen that beast before, or had any experience of it.
The Barbary or Atlas Golden-Mane Lion, as its Latin name Panthera leo leo suggests, was the remnant population of the archetypal lion species that once roamed throughout the entire Mediterranean basin. As this curious observation by the Greek historian Herodotus in his The Persian Wars (410 BC) confirms, lions were still numerous in Europe in Classical Greek times, and they were certainly still extant in Macedonia in the days of Alexander the Great. The Mediterranean Lion was probably extinct in its northern range of Europe by the time of Julius Caesar’s Rome, but remained relatively numerous for most of the next two millennia throughout North Africa – from Egypt to Morocco – until the advent of modern firearms.