Nature's Spokesman

by M Krishnan

  As per the textbooks, it is nocturnal and crepuscular, and a knowledgeable man I met in the desert advised me not to go looking for it except in the evening and very early in the morning. So, being in a cussed mood, I scouted around when the sun was at its hottest—and found it! I even saw one with a fat-tailed lizard which it had just killed in its jaws, and on sighting me it took its prey to a bush and buried it in the earth beneath for consumption later when no man was watching it, smoothing the earth over its buried treasure with its snipy snout.

  Thrice I saw two foxes very close to each other, no doubt they were mated pairs. These foxes are said to mate for life. A Bishnoi elder of Doli showed me, from a distance, the earth of a pair of foxes beside an obscuring bush: he told me that on 10 March he had seen the vixen at the mouth of the earth with two half-grown cubs.

  Foxes have scent glands in their feet, and that is why they have been hunted for generations with foxhounds that follow their quarry by the scent trail left behind, not by sight. These desert foxes are also hunted with sight-hounds. The scent glands of a beast are of primary utility to it in intraspecific communications, that is, in indicating its presence to other animals of its own kind, but no doubt animals can and do identify other quite different animals by their smell. I think the desert fox has a keen nose and finds much of its food requirements with the help of its nose—desert rodents, lizards, ground birds like the partridge, and also the fruits of some plants.

  However, its sight is also keen, even during the glare and heat of the day. When followed at a distance in a jeep (it is useless to try and follow it on foot) it sometimes doubled on its tracks to lie curled up behind a bush, with its brush obscuring its body and only the big head and upright ears betraying it, as if it had gone to sleep—but it slept with one eye open!

  Unfortunately for this charming and most interesting animal, it has a soft, silky thick pelt, and nomadic hunters in the desert poach it assiduously, in spite of their quarry being protected by law and by wildlife wardens. I was told that recently a party of poachers had been caught with several hundred fox pelts. Since it is a solitary animal and not too numerous anywhere, those skins must have meant a substantial depletion of the local population of desert foxes.

  The trouble in preventing poaching in open country (and no country is more open than the desert) is that it is hardly possible to patrol such a vast periphery without being spotted from far away, and that, even if one does come upon a party of poachers, they may have cached their ill-gotten goods or disposed of it in some way, to play the part of outraged innocents. They hunt the desert fox with highly bred, very fast greyhounds of a small, distinctive breed: the dogs run the fox to earth and keep watch till their masters come up to dig out the quarry. Such a method involves no incriminating traps, noses or nets.

  It is significant that all the desert foxes I saw were seen not in the uninhabited wilderness but near Bishnoi villages, where the vigilance of their self-appointed guardians prevented any hunter from coming near them. It is a mistake to think that wild animals are not acutely appreciative of sanctuary when they can find it. Many, many years ago, although I am against all forms of shikar and have never hunted, I went to Karwar with a party of shikaris who had licence for some of the shooting blocks there. For the first few days they could find nothing worth shooting at Supa, Virnoli and Dandeli. Then one morning one of them came back to the camp in high excitement with the news that sambar, chital and gaur were just teeming in one of the remoter reaches of a block for which they held licence—it proved to be Birchi, reserved for the governor of Bombay (who administered Karwar in those days) where no one else was allowed, and with the governor safely away in Bombay the animals were crowding it, finding peace only within it!

  1980

  23

  Incessant Rain

  For the past four days it has rained incessantly. The only change we have had from the monotonous downpour has been an occasional bout of more vehement rain, a driving, slanting rain that comes in at unexpected angles through chinks in closed doors and windows. No thunder or lightning, no black billowing rain clouds and dramatic cloudbursts, followed by a dazzling sun, in which one can sense the grandeur of the elements—only dreary unceasing rainfall out of a grey sky.

  Railroads have been drowned and passengers marooned, and people in low-lying areas have been forced to abandon their dwellings and seek higher ground. The stormwater drains are great canals, overflowing with swift, red water, and even those who live in high mansions, under waterproof roofs, are not comfortably dry, for the air that comes into their homes is heavily moist, there is a clammy wetness on wall and floor and roof, and in the shuttered, humid, gloomy indoors fungi sprout with epidemic speed over leather and paper and even wood.

  I have been spending my time between wiping and drying my possessions and wandering through the rain, looking for lesser life. Where are the squirrels that were so loudly in evidence last week? Where are the crows and sparrows and other familiar birds? They are rarae aves now, but above the dreary swish of the rain I can hear thousands of frogs from the roadside drains and puddles, even during the day, though it is at night that they are much more vocal.

  In a mosque I have passed many times these last four days, the pigeons sit still and huddled within the sharply arched, sheltering niches in which they nest. From a tea shop across the road I have watched these birds for nearly an hour, through the grey, streaky pall of rain and they have hardly moved, except to shift their static weight from one leg to the other. I was reminded, irresistibly, of a passage from an ancient Tamil classic, Nedunalvaadai, about pigeons in sustained rain:

  The red-legged cock-pigeon, confused between day and night,

  Does not set out with his well-beloved mate to glean the yards,

  But, moveless, mopes within the loft, shifting from leg to leg.

  How true to life those lines are! The crows and sparrows, of course, are still there, perching under eaves and ledges and such other shelter as they can find, bedraggled, wet, huddled, but still keenly interested in the prospect of food. Domestic beasts, dogs, cats and cattle react to the weather like the pigeons—they are lethargic, miserable and still. Only the buffaloes revel in the rain. Our buffaloes, incidentally, are direct descendants of that magnificent beast, the Indian Wild Buffalo, which is now almost extinct. The domesticated buffalo belongs typically and anciently to our country, and has well been named the Water Buffalo, to distinguish it from the lesser buffs of other lands.

  I saw a buffalo cow sitting in a roadside ditch which had filled and enlarged to a small pond, a private pond that could hold just one buffalo in comfort. Only the top of the head and shoulder of that big beast was above the water, and the eyes were closed against the vertical rain—such a picture of quiet contentment!

  Many trees have come crashing down, the soil eroded from between their shallow outspread roots, but certainly the monsoon is conducive to vegetative spread. The way the grasses and weeds have spread is astonishing; even in shallow land under an inch or more of water, these plants have gained ground. Apparently they are none the worse for a drowning over a few days—in fact, this seems to be necessary to swell and revivify their underground stems, baked hard and dry by many months of sun, and to start them on their vegetative growth. Even shrubs and trees suffer no harm from being waterlogged for a week or two—provided the soil is hard and has not been dug up.

  I was much impressed by the ability of carpet vegetation and trees to stand long periods of inundation, and come up so quickly immediately the water dried, when I had occasion to study the flora of a tank bed over two successive years. But that, of course, concerns quite a different set of plants and circumstances.

  1957

  Nature’s Wars

  24

  Monkey Versus Man

  Inside the compartment it was crowded and close, and outside too the afternoon was muggy. I bought a ‘sweet-lime’ at Jalarpet Junction to assuage thirst and lassitude, and balanced it speculativel
y on my bent knee. Would it be bitter, would it be weak and watery, or would it be sharply satisfying? A hairy grey arm slid over my shoulder, lifted the fruit off my knees, and disappeared, all in one slick, unerring movement.

  I jumped out of the compartment, and there, perched on the roof of the carriage, was the new owner of the sweet-lime, a trim, pink-and-grey she-monkey, eating it. My gestured threats had no effect on her, squatting securely out of reach, and she ate on unconcernedly. She jerked the rind free of the top of the fruit with her teeth and detached it in pieces, and having exposed the pulp, bit into it daintily, eating it in small mouthfuls, removing the white, pith-like core with her fingers and spitting out the pips.

  I should have felt annoyed, I suppose, but this was the first time I had seen a macaque eat a sweet-lime and I was interested. Years ago an American lady had lectured me on the right and only way to eat an orange; how one should take the bitter rind with the pulp as nature had intended a citrus fruit to be eaten. I had never been able to eat any citrus fruit that way, and I felt gratified to note that this macaque ate the fruit just as I do, rejecting rind, pith and pips with care.

  A big, thick-muscled dog-monkey came stalking along the carriage tops, and my she-monkey leaped lightly on to the galvanized iron roof of the platform and from there to the security of the slender upper branches of a neem where the dog-monkey would find it hard to follow, the half-eaten fruit clutched securely in one hand. She did not stuff it into her mouth, to be stowed away in her cheek-pouch till danger had passed, as macaques are apt to do—apparently the acrid rind was as distasteful to this daughter of nature as it is to me!

  There are many suburban stations along south Indian railways that hold their colonies of Bonnet Monkeys. I could name a dozen such places offhand and these have sustained their individual macaque colonies from ever since I can remember. This partiality of macaques to railroad stations is not peculiar to the south—in north India, the Rhesus takes the place of the Bonnet Monkey along railways. Both are macaques, and look and behave very similarly, the flat, tousled crown of hair and longer tail distinguishing the Bonnet Monkey from his northern cousin. The Langurs, no less sacred and therefore equally suffered by men, are rarely colonists at railway stations, though they will settle down in the neighbourhood of suburban shrines.

  At these railroad colonies you can see every stage in the evolution of macaque society; the infants at their mothers’ stomachs, the big dog-monkeys living as largely by plundering their fellows as by their own pickings, the carmine-faced lepers, the shrinking elders well past their prime. I have noticed that such colonies contain many more individuals than do troops of feral macaques, and I believe these railroad settlements are usually built up of several troops which have discovered that slick hands can come by more things on a congested platform than in the jungles.

  There is no recognized leader among them, as there is in a feral troop, and I have often felt amused at the behaviour of two equally powerful, dominant dog-monkeys when their paths happen to cross. Each ignores the other studiously then, and affects some urgent preoccupation, preferring to live and let live rather than fight for mastery. Democracy is an institution that requires one to be unmindful of his individuality at times.

  Strangely enough, though naturalists have studied macaques in the jungles, where they are nomadic, there does not appear to be any detailed record of these railroad settlements, semi-parasitic on passing humanity. A study of such a colony would, I feel, amply repay the effort, and perhaps some day an observant stationmaster will give us an authentic account of the social behaviour and habits of these settled macaques.

  1950

  25

  Bashing a Bandicoot

  The low mud wall that divides my neighbour’s compound from mine runs east to west, and almost in its geometrical centre there is a crack: a jagged, vertical cleft that extends right down to the foot of the wall. And one morning I noticed a pile of new earth heaped up against the wall, a yard or so away from the crack. The earth was obviously quite fresh—it must have been dug overnight—and had been stamped all over with feet that had left no defined imprints. A miniature mine shaft, wide enough to have taken my arm, opened on one side of the heap, and scattered around it were the pink and yellow particles of some strange substance—particles that might have set a more pedantic man guessing, but which both MacInnes, my sturdy Airedale, and I well knew to be the remains of assortments of dog biscuits. An indescribably musty smell clung to the air around the place and by these tokens I knew that this excavation was the work of a bandicoot.

  And more than that for I knew which particular bandicoot it was. All bandicoots are hateful creatures, but this one seemed especially so to me. He had first appeared about a month back, tunnelling his way into the kitchen, taking advantage of a loose tile in the floor. We had discovered the tile, far away from its original setting, a generous quantity of loose plaster and the ruins of what was once a tidy kitchen in the morning. And from time to time, since then, we had had painful reminders of his existence; ruthless exposures of the weak spots in our fortifications, the wrecking of a jar of oil in the bathroom, the wanton destruction of the soap and (this is the thing that still rankles in my mind) the systematic massacre of my beautiful bed of African blue lilies. I had tried every thing—poisoned titbits left seductively lying about, and every kind of trap from rat traps to huge contraptions which might have been intended for elephants. And when these had failed, I had tried MacInnes.

  So when I contemplated this heap of newly dug soil my hopes began to rise, for here at last was the chance I had waited for. My trouble all along had been that I could not locate this bandicoot’s earth. MacInnes and I, we might not be this infamous animal’s equal in cunning, but we were confident that we could get the better of him in a skirmish. My plan was quite simple. Somewhere on the other side of the wall there would be another opening, and in between these two exits the bandicoot, tired with his nocturnal orgies. I would have the farther opening blocked and dig him out, and once he was out of the burrow—well, MacInnes and I would be there to attend to him. Strictly speaking, I would need my neighbour’s permission to stop the other opening for it would be in his territory, but I decided to waive the formality and assume an extraterritorial jurisdiction, for this could only mean unnecessary delay. The man had proved to be most unhelpful and casual in the matter of this bandicoot when I had approached him earlier. You see, it was not his house that the vandal raided each night.

  I sent a couple of men over the wall to locate the end of the tunnel and sure enough they found it, about ten yards away to the west of the cleft, surrounded by fresh earth. They closed the hole with mud and gravel and finally rolled a huge stone over it to seal it against the burrowing claws of the bandicoot. Armed with a long, flexible bamboo, and with MacInnes in attendance, I stood guard over the shaft in my garden while the men set to work with their spades, digging away at it. After a while it ceased to be interesting. MacInnes was obviously bored and so was I. The men dug on and on, right under the wall, and nothing happened. And then we were enlightened, literally. A thin pencil of sunlight appeared slowly in the dark cavity that the men were digging; it was apparent that there was an opening much nearer at hand than the one to the west of the cleft. There it was, right across the other side of the wall under an Ixora bush, barely a couple of feet from the original mine shaft in my garden. The farther opening had no connection at all with this; there was no ‘mine shaft’. The thing was simply a subterranean passage connecting my neighbour’s compound with mine under the wall. The bandicoot had scored again.

  Such is the bandicoot. His nocturnal habits, his profound distrust of traps and baits, his incredible cunning—all these make him an exceptionally difficult creature to deal with. And still he is clubbed to death in the streets and flattened out beneath the tyres of passing cars on the roads. For the bandicoot is anything but agile. He is inordinately fond of the ditch and gutter and will come out after dark, mooching around the
garbage heaps and dustbins. And in the open, away from burrows and convenient nooks and corners, he is more or less defenceless. His gait is a slinking hobble and when hard-pressed he accelerates into an intoxicated lurch, but at all times his speed is negligible. A rat or mouse will make straight for the nearest cover, galloping along with swift, low bounds; but the bandicoot is handicapped by a certain lopsidedness, an inability to run straight. And you can always anticipate his line of retreat for he will never attempt to cross the road or any clear space unless he is forced to; he prefers to have something to run alongside and hugs the nearest wall or gutter, for he seems to be aware of his helplessness in the open (and dislikes to expose himself). Not that he is a coward. He will fight desperately when cornered. I have seen a bandicoot escape from between the jaws of a Poligar dog, biting and clawing his way to the safety of a nearby drain. His thick body with its cover of loose hide and coarse, straight hair gives little purchase to canine jaws, and it takes a powerful dog to hold and kill him.

  However, sticks, and not dogs are his worst enemies. I have not studied the skull of a bandicoot with special attention to the frontals and parietals, but I know (strange metaphor!) that his head is his heel of Achilles. A quick tap with a cane on the head is sufficient to check his disreputable career. And so they kill him with sticks, or else they stone him to death, and then they fling his carcass on to the road to be crushed under the wheels of carts and for crows to peck out the eyes and entrails. I hope I am sufficiently human, and have enough civic sense, to feel disgusted at such things, but I must confess to a feeling of satisfaction when I see the foul remains of a bandicoot flattened out on the road. It is such an artistic end to his life.