When the Philippinos tell you now of the swagger of the Spaniards, which was the sorest of the sorrows that drove them into revolt, they often mention that the Spaniards called them “water buffaloes.”

“To call you geese would have been kind in comparison?”

“Oh, quite polite!”

Indeed the water buffalo known to us in Burma, also, is not smart at all. Slow, heavy and dull, amphibious in his habits, he moves like a very fat pig, with almost less agility. Slipping through the muddy slush, in the sleekness of his prime, he looks almost “like a whale?” Yes, round enough for that, and almost like a little whale, except for his awkwardness, for his legs are not yet atrophied or sea-changed, and he has only his legs to move by; and also except—a big exception—his huge horns. These are extended like the [85] arms of a gesticulating orator or other creature that flings his arms wide and turns up his hands; but never were arms flung out so gracefully as those horns, with a sweep like that of a scythe or scimitar, symmetrical and pointed. They lie on the back, when the owner lifts its nose to sniff the wind, harmless and out of the way, like a sword in its sheath. There is nothing ornamental about them, any more than about the Forth Bridge; and yet so beautiful is fitness that perhaps no bovine head has finer ornaments.

It always surprises one to see how cool the beast remains with these exclamatory horns. But it is these very horns that let him remain cool and at leisure in the haunted woods. From tigers down, all possible enemies are afraid of them. So the Burman water buffalo never needs to hasten; and, like a gentleman of independent means, not needing to exert himself, grows slow. His gait is dignified. His mind is dull.

This is not rhetorical conjecture, but natural history. Every healthy, living organism is harmonious, meaning all of a piece, such as men try to make their pictures and songs, and everything else they want to make well; and this particular collocation of cause and effect might be illustrated and proved by many modern instances.

[86] Not to be offensive to our fellow-men, who in every country exhibit the same tendency; averting our gaze from all who are happy in “having something else than their brains to depend upon”; avoiding politics, which is a legitimate field of natural history, but obscured by vapours which make observation difficult, let us take the skunk—not meaning any kind of men, who are really miscalled skunks, for they have none of the beast’s qualities but one, and in general have the nimbleness of rats—let us come among the animals and candidly consider the four-legged skunk.

He is a little beast, no bigger than a house cat, and lives, as puss would do in the woods, on worms and insects and mice and birds and such small game. But he is not nimble, like the cat, or fox, or any other hunting and hunted creature. He is as leisurely as the water buffalo, and as careless of observation in the wildest country as a dog in a farmer’s yard. However hungry, the bigger beasts of prey, whose natural food he might seem to be, prefer to leave him alone. The fact is that he can make himself be smelt in a sickening way for nearly a mile off; and so “the skunk,” according to an observer, “goes leisurely along, holding up his white tail as a danger-flag, for none to come within range of his nauseous artillery.”

[87] “Call me a skunk?” a man might say, “I wish I were, sometimes.” There is perhaps no kind of life that is not worth living; so we need not wonder that there is something to envy in the skunk. The water buffalo is a perfect gentleman, compared to him; but the same security against enemies has produced in both the same leisurely habits. The horns protect the buffalo, and are at once his weapon and his danger-flag.

2. HUNTING THE BUFFALO

On the last day of 1908, in a morning walk at Myaungmya, Lower Burma, I met two acquaintances, Messrs Dunn and M‘Kenzie, riding home. They had elected to enjoy their Christmas holidays a-hunting, and been away for several days.

“Hunting what?”

“Buffalo.”

“I believe the buffalo is a dangerous beast to tackle.”

They looked at each other in a way that showed they had an adventure to tell. They had gone with another European and a crowd of followers to a muddy island in the delta, where a wild bull buffalo lived. They had failed to find him, and were all walking carelessly away, when he accidentally [88] met them. The sight of a mob where he had lived alone, like Robinson Crusoe, startled the old bull, and he charged. Then magistrates, policemen and followers stampeded in many directions. With the instinct inherited from our forgotten arboreal ancestors, the fugitives sought refuge in the trees; but the trees were too small to lift them above the reach of the horns, and one or more would have been killed if Mr Dunn had not stumbled and fallen in the mud. This stopped the buffalo, which tried to pick him up, but could not do it, as he had the sense to lie flat. So it passed on; and Dunn then crawled to where his servant had dropped his gun, and recovered it, and shot the buffalo.

3. TAMING THE BUFFALO

This adventure shows how easily lives might be lost in hunting the wild buffalo, about which the herdsmen who know him best have told me what should, perhaps, be better known, were it only to prevent misunderstandings. There is not the slightest need for war between buffaloes and us. They are not natural enemies, like the tiger. They are not even troublesome to tame, like the deer.

[89] “Though terrible to kill, they are easy to catch,” say the herdsmen familiar with their haunts. “You have only to decoy them into a pen, and once there they can sell for a price at once, like those born in the village. They are more valuable,” said one herdsman.

“But the taming?”

“That’s nothing. Let them starve till they are weak. Then feed them up, slowly. Make them feel they are being fed by men.”

“They can see that.”

“No, for you generally bandage their eyes. You have to speak to them and not leave them to eat as if they found the food themselves. Let them know they owe it to you.”

“You don’t think of that at all,” said another man. “Neither do they. This is what happens. There’s generally a lot of them, like a herd. Some would be dead, before others were weak. If you just flung the food in anyhow, the weaklings would be the last to get it. You keep an eye on them, so as not to lose any; and whenever you see that one is weak, you feed that one.”

“It comes to the same thing,” rejoined the man who spoke first. “They learn that men are their friends, and then they’ll do anything you want.”

“Do they work willingly?”

“Who ever did? They do what they have to, like [90] other people. A buffalo is so mighty that he hardly needs to make an effort to pull the plough. The one new caught and tamed does as well as the rest.”

“Why is he worth more?”

“He isn’t,” said the other man, quoting figures. An argument followed, and in the end they agreed. A newly-tamed herd might sell for less per head than village-born cattle, if the wild ones caught included more old animals and calves. Compare contemporaries, and the wild one is the better.

“Why?”

Various reasons were suggested, including one that was oddly expressed. “The wild animal is the more vigorous, because he has never been spoiled by working. Think how different I would have been if I had never had to work for my living!”

This was absurd. Till we came here, with our commercial creed that money makes the man, education in Burma was universal and free to the poor, and, however it be in England, where factory workers breed in slums and breathe polluted air, in Burma the working man lives mostly in the fields, and is sturdier, and often more sensible, than the idler. The herdsmen reluctantly admitted this; and it led to a digression.

In a Socratic way, I explained the gospel of work, with half-and-half acceptance as long as I [91] quoted only Chinese maxims and examples; but, happening to hint that the English also had that to teach the East, I spoiled the lesson. There was a general laugh. “When do the English work?” Then one asked the other: ”Did you ever see an Englishman working?” They said to each other that the only Englishmen who worked were one or two, whom the others did not speak to, but treated like the Pagoda-slaves of native Burma. We returned to the buffaloes.

“Why is the wild one the better?”

“He is stronger, and fresher, and quieter.”

“Quieter?”

“Yes. He thinks of men, women and children as his feeders, and will never hurt anybody, and a little child can lead him.”

“A child can drive the village cattle.”

“The wild ones tamed are safest of all.” (It should be noted that the domestic buffalo is dangerous occasionally, and people are sometimes hurt or killed by them.)

“Don’t they notice that men caught them?”

“They’re not clever enough for that.”

“Don’t they try to escape?”

“Never. Why should they? They have all they want. It is our business to keep them contented, and it’s easy.”

[92] “Their calves are at times obstreperous,” a man added, after a pause, and the others agreed, but said, “All you need do, at the worst, is to cut their horns, that is, cut off the tips.”

“Why not do that to all the calves? There’s somebody killed or hurt by buffaloes every year in Burma.”

“The glory of a buffalo is his horns. It would be wrong, because it would not be natural to blunt them. We would never do it unless we could not help it, when a particular beast is bad.”

“It’s too much bother, I suppose.”

“No, it’s easy. But it does not look natural. The buffalo with his horns blunted is disfigured, and seems to feel it.”

“No, no, it’s not natural at all,” said one after the other, with emphasis.

“How do you hunt the buffalo?”

“We never hunt the buffalo. No Burman ever did. At any rate, none ever does now. It is much safer and easier to catch and tame them; and it pays better.”

A buffalo went by as our talk was ending; and on its withers was sitting a little boy of six or seven years of age, drumming merrily on its broad neck with his heels. At sight of us, he signified to it, by slaps and shouts, to move aside, so as not to splash us; and the big buffalo gently obeyed.