Читать книгу Sinners and Saints - Phil Robinson - Страница 8

A solitary coyote was loitering in a hungry way along a gulch, and I could not help thinking how the most important epochs of one's life may often turn upon the merest trifles. Now, here was a coyote ambling lazily up a certain gulch because it had happened to see some white bones bleaching a little way up it. But in the very next gulch, which the coyote had not happened to go up, were three half-bred greyhounds idling about, just in the humour for something to run after. But they could not see the coyote, though it was really only a few yards off, nor could the coyote see them. So the dogs lounged about in a listless, do-nothing, tired-of-life sort of way, thinking existence as dull as ditch water, while the coyote, unconscious of the narrow escape of its life that it ran, trotted slowly along—scrutinized the old bones—scratched its head—yawned out of sheer ennui, and then trotted along again. Now, what a difference it would have made to those three dogs if they had only happened to loaf into the next gulch! And what a prodigious difference it would have made to the coyote if it had happened to loaf into the next gulch!

The prickly pear, that ugly, fleshy little cactus, with its sudden summer glories of crimson and golden blossoms, fulfils a strange purpose in the animal economy of the prairies. In itself it appears to be one of the veriest outcasts among vegetables, execrated by man and refused as food by beast. Yet if it were not for this plant the herds of prairie antelope would have fared badly enough, for the antelope, whenever they found themselves in straits from wolves or from dogs, made straight for the prickly pear patches and belts, and there, standing right out on the barren, open plain, defied their swift but tender-footed pursuers to come near them. For the small, thick pads of the cactus, though they lie so flat and insignificantly upon the ground, are studded with tufts of strong, fierce spines, and woe to the wolf or the dog that treads upon them. The antelope's hoofs, however, are proof against the spines, and one leap across such a belt suffices to place the horned folk in safety. These patches and belts, then, so trivial to the eye, and in some places almost invisible to the cursory glance, are in reality Towers of Refuge to the great edible division of the wild prairie nations, and as impassable to the eaters as was that girdle of fire and steel which Von Moltke buckled so closely round the city of the Napoleons.

But here we are approaching Denver. The cottonwood has mustered into clusters, a prototype of the future of these now scattered ranches. Dotted about here and there in suitable corners, on river bank or under sheltering bluff, single trees are growing side by side with single stockyards or single cow-boys' huts, but every now and again, where nature offers them a good site for a colony, the trees congregate, select lots, and permanently locate. It is not very different after all, with human beings.

Nature here is undoubtedly tempting, and Denver itself must surely be one of the most beautiful towns in the States. Through great reaches of splendid farm-land, with water in abundance and the cottonwood and willow growing thickly, we pass to our destination as the twilight settles on the country.

A whole day has again been spent in the train! We had awaked in the morning to see from the car windows the people of Nebraska going out to their day's work in the fields, and here in the evening we sit and watch the Colorado folk coming home to their rest after the day's work is over. Truly this steam is a Latter-Day apocalypse and this America a land of magnificent distances.

I found out on this trip that my fellow-travellers (and the fact holds good nearly all over America) took the greatest interest in British India, and finding that I had spent so many years there, they plied me with questions. On some journeys it would be the political aspect of our government of Hindostan that interested, at others the commercial or the social. But going through Colorado, one of the haunts of the "grizzly" and the "mountain lion," I had to detail my experiences of sport in India. Above all, the tiger interested them. It is the only animal in the world that may be said to give the grizzly a point or two. And there are some even who deny this; but I, who have shot the tiger, and never seen a grizzly, naturally concede the first place in perilous courage to Stripes, the raja of the jungle. In one particular aspect, at any rate, the tiger is supreme among quadrupeds. It has the splendid audacity to make man his regular food.

Now, it is generally supposed that the "man-eater" is a specially formidable variety of the species; that it is only the boldest, strongest, and fiercest of the tigers that preys on man. But the very reverse is of course the truth. When hale and strong the tiger avoids the vicinity of men, finding abundant food in the herds of deer and other wild animals that share his jungles. But when strength and speed of limb begin to fail, the brute has to look for easier prey than the courageous bison or wind-footed antelope, and so skulks among the ravines and waste patches of woodland that are to be found about nearly every village. Then when twilight obscures the scene, he creeps out noiseless as a shadow, and lies in ambush in a crop of standing grain or bhair-tree brake, and watches the country folk go by from the fields in twos and threes, driving their plough cattle before them. After a while, there comes sauntering past alone, a man or a woman who has lagged behind the company; yet not so far behind but that the friends ahead can hear the scream which tells of the tiger's leap, though too far for help to be of use. During four years 350 human beings and 24,000 head of cattle were killed by these animals in one district in Bombay, while many single tigers have been known to destroy over a hundred people before they were shot. One in the Mandla district caused the desertion of thirteen villages and threw out of cultivation two hundred and fifty square miles of country; while another, only one of many similar cases, was credited with the appalling total of eighty human victims per annum! The yearly loss in cattle and by decrease of cultivation through the ravages of these fearful beasts has been estimated at ten million pounds sterling!

No wonder, then, that even these doughty grizzly-slayers of the Rockies respect the tiger's name.