Mr. Hornaday's War

by Stefan Bechtel

  In an ink-smudged, four-page letter from the Neilgherry Hills dated Monday, June 25, 1877, he wrote her: “Your letters, darling . . . never fail me either in frequency, length or sweetness. You see, I long since made up my mind that I would never marry a girl, or become engaged to one, who could not write a real good letter . . . eighteen months ago I passed a unanimous vote that Miss Chamberlain wrote the best letters I had ever received or read, and also that said Miss C. was the smartest girl of all I had ever known.”10

  He lived for her letters. It made all the difference in the world to him to know that every morning that he awoke in the Wainaad forest, or Mullaitivu, or the Neilgherry Hills, there was a beautiful young woman back in Battle Creek, Michigan, with a jaunty aristocratic air, who was thinking of him—pinning up her heavy hair, thinking of him; gathering up the supper dishes, thinking of him; cutting roses in the kitchen garden, thinking of him. And he was doing the same: marching off on a morning hunt on the slopes of Anamudi, thinking of her; preparing specimens by firelight in the bush of the Deccan plateau, thinking of her; lying in his hammock at night, listening to the hoarse croak of a hornbill or the distant trumpeting of elephants, thinking of her.

  But, of course, everything was not as idyllic as his letters to Josephine sometimes made it seem. While he reveled in this rough life in exotic hunting camps, he had regularly been brought to his knees in India by tropical fevers of one kind or another. On this trip, he would get severely ill sixteen separate times, once crawling into a fleabag hotel room in Bombay, chugging quinine and drifting in and out of delirium for two weeks. More than one white adventurer had simply died in places like that. He’d grown so accustomed to these dreadful fevers that he could anticipate when the nausea would reach a gut-wrenching peak, and he would try to schedule his activities for the hours before the fever’s terrible crescendo.

  There were other times, often when he was ill, that he just felt low and lonely and a little bit lost. He badly missed his hunting companion and doppelganger Chester Jackson, who would have reveled in all this but was unable to come along on this grandest of grand adventures. Professor Ward was unwilling to pay his way, and this time Jackson could not afford to pay part of the passage himself.11

  But one of the most worrisome developments lately was the fact that he and Professor Ward were more-or-less continuously squabbling. Hornaday had agreed, in a written contract signed before he left, to undertake the expedition on a shoestring budget and to devote all his time except Sundays “and other odd times” to the pursuit of specimens, and specifically those requested by Ward. To fill these orders, and to keep his enterprise afloat financially, Ward seemed to want Hornaday to produce several museums’ worth of specimens, in no time and at no cost, regardless of risk or hardship. Ward seemed to have no real idea how difficult and dangerous it was to procure specimens out in the bush. You couldn’t just pick a tiger off a tree! In a series of letters to Jackson, back home in Wisconsin, Hornaday complained bitterly about Ward’s demands:

  Gospel truth. He never thanks anyone, or praises or compliments me in the least, and I am told others under him fare exactly the same. Why, he says right out, that every improvement he makes in my character is so much money in his pocket, and it is to his interest to try & make something out of me. He told me that himself.12

  Just beneath the surface of this letter, one can hear the yearning of a boy for a father’s uncritical love, for someone who will praise and support him, not just exploit his money-making potential or treat him as some kind of sadistic nineteenth-century character-building experiment. There were moments when the lost thirteen-year-old boy, still hungry for love, showed through.

  There were other, darker worries that surfaced on this trip. Despite the abundance of game in the Animallai Hills, there were many places in India—in fact, most places—that had been virtually “hunted out.” At one point, Hornaday had participated in a grand hunt in the imperial British style, with shooters riding in howdahs on the back of elephants and twenty-four servants either preparing meals or beating the bush for game, but all they’d taken, in days of hunting, was a single black deer and a couple of gazelles. The massive loss of large mammals that he would witness later in the Montana Territory of the United States was already appallingly apparent on much of the Indian subcontinent. Historians might later call this period of the late nineteenth (and early twentieth century) the “Progressive Era,” but biologists would come to call it the “Age of Extinction.”

  In his book, which was published in 1885 and made Hornaday justly and suddenly famous, he described the remote jungles, swamps, and forests of East Asia and Borneo with deep feeling and precise zoological detail. (Of the crocodillian called the gavial, for example, he wrote that it had “very slender and elongated jaws, with an expanded end, quite like the handle of a frying-pan, smooth and compact, set with twenty-seven teeth on the upper jaw and twenty five in the lower.”) But if his love of the natural world was all-consuming, what were his relations with the human world? How did he feel about and act toward all the dark-skinned people who carried the gear, set up the camps, cooked the food, and cared for the pack animals on this expedition? If a man’s character can be seen most clearly in the way he treats people who cannot do him any favors, how did Hornaday treat the lowly porters, cooks, and coolies?

  In his book, he spoke admiringly of the pluck and courage of his two assistants, Pera Vera and Nangen. Later in his trip, when a Chinese half-caste assistant named Eng Quee became lost in a swamp in Borneo, Hornaday led a rescue party into the snake-infested darkness and thigh-deep bogwater to rescue him. He wrote respectfully of the Malay people’s “sobriety, their quiet, dignified manner under all circumstances and their entire disinclination to loud-mouthed brawling,” though he also found them phenomenally lazy. “Procrastination is the evil genius of the Malay, and the exasperation of whoever looks to him for help in time of need.”

  The most pressing human concern on his trip through India was, of course, the famine. In response to what had clearly become a national crisis, Hornaday rode down out of the mountains from his airy, high-elevation camp one day to the Animallai River and the desolate plain below. There he encountered a heartbreaking sight. He came upon a small child, about four years old, entirely naked, aimlessly hobbling around through the sandy mud of a dried-up pond. His feet and legs were swollen with “famine dropsy,” as if he had elephantiasis, so that his ankles were as big around as his thighs. He was so weak he could only walk a few inches at a time. The little boy’s “sunken cheeks, hollow eyes, and protruding ribs told of starvation, and it was plain to see the helpless waif would soon die, unless cared for.” While Hornaday was trying to decide how best to help the boy, a grown man, naked except for a dirty loincloth, stepped out from behind a bush. He, too, was in the last stages of starvation, “indeed a living skeleton, literally skin and bone. He was nearly six feet high, but I could have picked him up in my arms and carried him like a child.”

  Hornaday instructed his coolies to pick up the little boy and the man and carry them to the relief camp at Animallai. When they got there, Hornaday was informed that both of the little boy’s parents had died, and there was no one else in the world to care for him. Hornaday placed him in the care of a doctor at the camp, who found him a bed in a hospital shed and promised that the boy would have “every attention.” What actually happened to the child, however, Hornaday never did find out. Neither did he cancel or postpone his collecting expedition to be of further service to the suffering people of India.

  But it was when he encountered the Dyak headhunters of Borneo that he became so enamored of their way of life that one wonders if, like Margaret Mead among the South Sea islanders, he was blinded by his own adoration. The Dyaks, he maintained, were kind, happy, thrifty, honest, and scrupulously faithful in paying their debts. They respected women and treated them as equals. They lived in huge communal longhouses, but they seemed to get along famously. Stealing, he said, was simply unheard of
. “Where else but among the Dyaks will a traveller dare to trust a cart-load of boxes and packages, none of them securely fastened . . . in the centre of a village of fifty strange natives with no one to watch for thieves?” In fact, Hornaday wrote, “in human sympathy, and charity, the Dyaks are not outranked by any people living, so far as I know.”13

  There was, of course, the small matter of head-hunting. Since time immemorial, Hornaday reported, it was the custom of the various Dyak tribes to cut off the heads of conquered enemies and keep the cleaned skulls as trophies of war. A warrior’s hearth was often festooned with heads, hanging from the rafters like so many coconuts. Often a Dyak girl would scorn a suitor who had not taken a head. A warrior’s grief at the death of his wife or child “could only be assuaged with a fresh head, taken by himself, of course, and the death of a chief often involved a regular head-hunting expedition.”14 Even so, Hornaday laid most of the blame for this festival of bloodletting on the “instigation and encouragement of the reprobate Malays, who so nearly ruined the country.” Overall, he concluded, the customs and character of these half-naked natives were far more praiseworthy than the hypocrisy, venality and deceit of the “civilized” citizens of the West.

  In short, Hornaday’s attitude and behavior toward native peoples showed a profound empathy and—within limits—an admirable loving-kindness.

  There were two main ways to hunt tigers in India. The most common method was to hunt them from a howdah, a small compartment mounted on the back of an elephant. Another way was to hunt them from a machan, a platform of bamboo poles about fifteen or twenty feet off the ground that is erected near a tiger’s recent kill. The most dangerous and foolhardy way, rarely practiced, and the way reponsible for nine-tenths of all deaths of men hunting tigers, was to hunt them on foot.

  Hornaday wanted to hunt a tiger on foot. And one day, the young hunter got his chance. It was September 27, 1877. He was having one of his periodic fever spells and had felt low for a couple of days. On the days that he’d been able to hunt, he’d gotten no game at all, and now that the fat axis deer had been eaten, there was—once again—no meat left in camp. Now, because of the regularity of the fever, he knew he was going to have an attack at about two in the afternoon. It was still morning, so he calculated that he would have a few pain-free hours to hunt, and perhaps bring back some venison, before he was incapacitated with nausea. Most of the men were away from camp, so he took with him Pera Vera; Nangen, a “quiet but courageous fellow”;15 and a small boy.

  Hornaday had the Maynard rifle tucked under one arm, with Pera Vera carrying the 16-gauge Maynard shotgun, loaded with bird shot for jungle fowl. They walked through the forest all morning, at one point encountering a small herd of axis deer feeding in a glade. But Hornaday was too exhausted to undertake a stalk, so they let them go. It was almost noon and they were circling back around toward camp when suddenly they heard “a fearful growling and roaring” in the bush a few hundred yards ahead. Instantly on the alert, Hornaday dropped to one knee and raised his weapon.

  “Tiger, Vera?” Hornaday whispered.16

  “No, sahib, panther. Shall we go for it?”

  “Of course!”

  They crept through the dry forest, communicating to each other only with hand signals and trying not to step on twigs or dry leaves, getting closer and closer to the sound. Every so often, they would hear a roaring growl, enough to raise the hair on one’s neck; then it would stop. Then, distantly, perhaps half a mile away, they heard trumpeting and the noisy breaking of branches.

  “Elephants,” Vera said, in a harsh whisper.

  They crept on, increasingly uneasy about the fact that they could not see the panther, although they seemed to be getting very close to the place where it seemed to have been. They came to a small nullah, or streambed, and there in the sandy wash, clear as day, was the trail of a tiger. It wasn’t a panther at all. Pera Vera and Nangen knelt to examine the enormous pugmarks in the wet sand.

  “Fresh,” Vera said. “Very fresh.”

  Hornaday also knelt down to take a close look at the tracks.

  “Fresh,” he repeated, although he later confessed in his journal that he wasn’t certain if they were fresh or not.

  Now Vera, the second tracker, began looking fearfully at Hornaday’s small rifle, something that was fine for deer but extremely questionable for anything larger. As if to emphasize his point, Vera stuck his little finger into the muzzle of the gun; it fit snugly.

  “Sahib, would you really dare to fire this small rifle at a big tiger?”

  “Why, sure,” Hornaday whispered. “Just show me one and you’ll see!”

  The party began tracking the tiger’s trail along the sandy creek bottom, with Vera in the lead, Hornaday following with his Maynard in his shooting hand, and Nangen and the boy following, as silent as shadows. The creek bed was about eight feet below the level of a dry, open thorn forest, forty feet wide, and almost dry except for muddy puddles here and there. The tiger’s tracks told the story of its movement up the stream, in places seeming to lollygag along, stopping here to play in a puddle, there to investigate this or that or to rake his claws through the sand. Silently, the hunting party followed this meandering trail for about a mile until they came upon a dense clump of bamboo, growing out of the bend in the creek.

  Suddenly Vera stopped short, grabbed Hornaday’s arm, and pointed through the bamboo thicket. He had a habit of doing this when pointing out game, and Hornaday could tell how big the game was by how fiercely he grabbed his arm. Now his grip was like a C-clamp.

  There was the tiger, only thirty yards away. It was the first tiger Hornaday had ever seen in the wild, and he was absolutely splendid. “His long, jet-black stripes seemed to stand out in relief, like bands of black velvet, while the black-and-white markings upon his head were most beautiful,” Hornaday wrote later. He was also huge—“Great Caesar!” he thought. “He’s as big as an ox!”17

  The hunters were lucky: they were downwind from the big cat, and so far, the tiger had not seen or heard them. The tiger reached the other bank of the streambed, sniffed it idly, then turned back, shade and sunlight dappling its velvety stripes. Quietly and carefully, Hornaday stepped in front of Vera, lifted a spare cartridge and put it between his teeth, raised his rifle, and waited. Just as the tiger crossed to the middle of the stream, he seemed to sense or smell the hunters, gave an angry, irritated growl, and turned its huge face directly at them through the bamboo thicket. The animal was so enormous, it could have covered the distance between them in a couple of bounds. Hornaday calmly aimed his little rifle squarely at the tiger’s left eye, squeezed off a shot, and without waiting to see what happened next, shoved the other cartridge into the chamber. When he got the big cat in his sights again, it was still in the middle of the streambed, but now he was woozily circling around and around in the same spot, confused, apparently badly wounded. When the enormous face came around again, so big it looked like a black-and-orange planet, Hornaday fired at his neck, probing for the spine, and the tiger instantly dropped in the sand. He immediately shoved in a fresh cartridge, and they all just stood there, waiting for a long time, with the rifle at full cock. Then, very carefully, the hunting party approached the fallen monarch up the streambed. Hornaday knew well enough that this was an extremely dangerous situation—in fact, many tiger-hunting fatalities, or “accidents,” as they were called in India, occurred after the animal appeared to be dead. But this great beast, magnificent as he was, had now breathed his last.

  For a hunter, the great moment of triumph was laying a hand on the fallen foe, and the more fearsome the enemy, the greater the triumph. With a kind of awe bordering on reverence—more reverence, in fact, than he’d ever felt in church—Hornaday knelt beside the sprawled tiger and stroked the glossy sides, still warm; pulled back the lips to see the terrible incisors, the last thing many a terrified animal, or perhaps even a child, ever saw; pulled open a heavy eyelid to look into the eye that had so recently gazed fear
lessly at every foe; and handled the huge, heavy paws, now with retracted claws, which had made those meandering pugmarks in the sand and which, minutes earlier, could have disemboweled him in an instant.

  The tiger was very likely the greatest prize of Hornaday’s entire hunting career, which would span decades. Hornaday could not help but feel a sense of pride at his own skill and the courage of his men (including, amazingly enough, the small boy). After all, they were completely unarmed, and they had recently seen Hornaday miss an axis deer at a similar distance; yet when they faced down this god of the jungle at such close quarters, they didn’t bolt.

  When they laid the tiger out on the sand and took measurements, it turned out to be nine feet, eight inches from the nose to the tip of the tail; three feet, seven inches high at the shoulder; and four feet, two inches in girth at the belly. They reckoned that it weighed 495 pounds. There was no evidence that this magnificent animal was a man-eater—in fact, owing to what appeared to be its near-perfect health, it probably was not. But the cat, as it turned out, was the biggest Bengal tiger ever killed in India up to that time, and the record was not broken for another fifteen years. As word got out about the size and circumstances of the kill, big-game hunters and government officials throughout India marveled at Hornaday’s feat. In recognition of his achievement, officials of the Madras district government rewarded him with a bounty of 100 rupees instead of the usual 35. The villagers in the area also were awed by the boldness and skill of Hornaday’s kill. He must be, they said, a sadhu (saint). A few years later, this great animal, whom Hornaday called “Old Stripes,” was mounted and put on display in the museum of natural history at Cornell University, where its cold predatory gaze chilled the blood of generations of prey animals for years to come.18