Mr. Hornaday's War (18 page)

In India, the local people said there were three different kinds of tigers, Hornaday explained in his book.
6
First were the “game-killers”—animals
who lived in the wild and hunted wild game, as nature intended. They were what Hornaday called “bold, honest hunters.” Next were the “cattle-lifters”—tigers who had grown lazy and indolent after discovering that killing a dumb, slow hog or a bullock was much easier than taking down a nimble-footed axis deer or gazelle in the forest. The losses to poor farmers from these scavengers were staggering.

But by far the most frightening kind of tiger was one who had discovered the taste of human blood. There were various theories about what caused a tiger to “cross over” and become a man-eater. Hunters said that many of these animals were too old to hunt in the forest, or they had a painful wound, like a mouthful of infected porcupine quills or badly decaying teeth. Others said that it was because there was no longer enough game in the bush. Still others said the man-eaters were evil spirits, sent by the gods to exact retribution for some sin in this or a previous life.

But whatever the cause, a single man-eating tiger or tigress was enough to instill abject terror in a whole district. Generally, a man-eater would prowl through one area of several square miles, snatching a woman hanging clothes to dry one day, slipping into a village at dusk and making off with a child sitting on a doorstep the next, perhaps leaving nothing but a sad, tipped-over basket, an upended toy, or a bit of splintered bone. Other times, there would be a sighting of a huge, famous man-eater in one place, and by nightfall that same day, it would snatch a child out of a village five miles away.

In one case, in central India, a ravenous tigress caused the complete emptying of thirteen villages and threw out of cultivation fifteen square miles of farmland. The great Indian-born British big-game hunter Jim Corbett once killed a famous man-eating tigress called the Champawat Tigress, which alone was responsible for the deaths of 436 men, women, and children. “There is no more terrible thing,” he wrote, “than to live and have one's being under the shadow of a man-eater.”
7
The Champawat Tigress, who never killed in the same village twice and never revisited a kill, terrorized a region hundreds of square miles in size. She would carry off her victims at any time of day or night and consume them whole, eating their heads, hands, and sometimes even their clothing.

Most people, of course, were desperately frightened of tigers. But for Hornaday's purposes—that of securing specimens for Professor
Ward, and by extension for museums throughout the United States and Europe—he would have dearly loved to see a tiger. Unlike the farmers and villagers of India, William Temple Hornaday wanted to encounter a tiger, man-eating or otherwise—meet it face to face, at close range, with nothing but his trusty little .40-caliber Maynard rifle between them. “I had enough faith in the accuracy of my little Maynard rifle, and my own steadiness, to believe that between us we could floor a tiger if we ever got a fair chance,” he wrote, with serene self-confidence.

It was quite a boast: the .40-caliber Maynard fired such small bullets that it took twenty-nine of them to make a pound. Four-bore big-game rifles could throw a four-ounce ball, eight times as heavy. And Henry Stanley, when he left for Africa to find Dr. David Livingstone a few years earlier in 1869, had reported taking with him “two muzzle-loading Holland half-pounders that carried an iron lead-coated explosive shell, containing a bursting charge of half an ounce of fine grain powder”
8
—armaments of almost preposterous destructiveness, meant to knock down an elephant, or perhaps two. By contrast, the Maynard rifle was practically a toy. The only way to stop a charging tiger with a weapon like the Maynard would be to hit a dead-on bulls-eye on the very first shot. A shot that wounded but did not kill would create an enraged 500-pound monster, a supreme carnivore, exploding out of the bush with its jaws wide open.
9

In the midst of all this, there was one thing that brought William Hornaday almost unalloyed joy. It was that, just before he had left on this trip, he had returned to Battle Creek, Michigan, gone down on one knee, and asked the Empress Josephine to be his wife. She agreed, without hesitation (or at least, none that he noticed). It was a bold, almost reckless thing for her to do, because she knew well enough that her freshly minted fiancé would be gone for two or three years on an expedition that would be fraught with dangers of all sorts—charging elephants, venomous snakes, quicksand, illness, infections, assault, robbery, and drowning, to name just a few. Will was strong as a bullock, seemingly fearless, competent in any number of ways, and filled with a young man's conviction that he could overcome any peril. Even so, there was no getting around the fact that this expedition was dangerous in the extreme, and their engagement akin to getting betrothed
to a soldier boy going off to the front. (Hornaday did not mention this to Josephine, but the whole expedition was so perilous that the Travellers Insurance Company had refused to underwrite it at all.)

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.