Mr. Hornaday's War (19 page)

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”;
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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.
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“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!”
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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 fearlessly 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.
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One of the larger purposes behind the flurry of orders coming in to Ward's Natural Science Establishment in the late 1870s, and the pressing need for Hornaday's expedition to the Malay and Borneo, was the keen competition among unversities and museums to prove or disprove, by means of comparative anatomy, the world-rattling theory of Charles Darwin. The theory was so simple that T. H. Huxley later exclaimed, “How stupid of me not to have thought of it!”
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Plainly stated, Darwin's idea was that species do not remain fixed and stable over time—they change through a process called
natural selection,
which favors organisms better adapted to their surroundings. (Darwin himself did not use the term
evolution
until the sixth edition of his book, preferring instead the term
descent with modification.)

Darwin had been working on his theory for more than twenty years, in his small, cluttered office at Down House, in Kent, but had never published anything about it. Then, in the early summer of 1858, he received a long letter and a draft of a scientific paper from a young British naturalist named Alfred Russel Wallace. Wallace, at the time, was on an eight-year-long collecting expedition to the Malay Peninsula and Borneo (exploring some of the very same areas that Hornaday would visit two decades later). In what he later described as a “flash of insight,” Wallace had hit upon almost precisely the same ideas as Darwin had—in fact, Darwin later wrote, Wallace's paper was so similar, “I never saw a more striking coincidence.”
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Darwin and Wallace eventually decided that they should give a
joint presentation about their theory, so that they could both fairly claim credit. The theory was unveiled to the world on July 1, 1858, at a meeting of the British scientific group called the Linnean Society. The meeting was attended by about thirty people; the Darwin-Wallace paper—now considered by many to be the greatest scientific paper ever written—was greeted with no comment at all. One attendee, Reverend Samuel Haughton of Dublin, later wrote that “all that was new in [it] was old, and what was true was false.”
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Neither author was in attendance. Wallace was in Malaya, and Darwin was burying his youngest son, who had just died of scarlet fever.

But when Darwin's book
On the Origin of Species
was published the next year, in 1859, it lit a firestorm of controversy in the life sciences, as well as in the letters to the editor of almost every popular periodical. Even Darwin himself felt deeply conflicted about his book, saying that revealing the theory was “like confessing a murder.” Cartoonists found Darwin all too easy to lampoon, with his vaguely simian features and overhanging Neanderthal brow. He was forever being depicted with a man's head attached to the body of an ape. In his book, Darwin had barely mentioned how his theory might change man's kinship with the great apes, but people had been quick to connect the dots, and the resulting controversies rained down out of pulpits and lecture halls in a hail of fire and brimstone.

Museums and unversities began to compete to build ever more complete collections of natural history specimens and thus bring some facts into the debate about whether species remained fixed and stable over time, and whether—God save us—humans might share a common ancestor with the apes. It was an alarming and preposterous idea, and it was not only churchmen and politicians who were skeptical. The great naturalist Louis Agassiz, of Harvard, had always been steadfastly opposed to Darwin's ideas and hoped that his museum's collections—including the specimens gathered by Hornaday for Professor Ward, especially those of the higher primates—would demonstrate the falsity of the “Darwinian theory.”

The same year Darwin's book was published, Paul Du Chaillu emerged from the equatorial jungles of the Gabon with the bodies of creatures as otherworldly as corpses from an alien spacecraft. They were covered in black hair, had elongated arms, handlike feet, black, smashed-in faces, and overhanging brows. Even so, a fair-minded observer would have had to admit there was something more than
vaguely human about them. Was it really true that these hairy “apemen” were the missing link between apes and humans, as the Darwin-Wallace theory seemed to suggest? The theory was one thing, but how did it hold up in the face of these creatures? The public, thronging to museums and menageries, was terribly curious to see for themselves. Hence, Professor Ward's great interest in sending William Hornaday to the island of Borneo, which was said to be home to more apes and monkeys than any other place on the planet, especially the odd, long-haired, reddish ape known as the “orangutan.”

On his way to the penultimate destination of Borneo, Hornaday collected and hunted on the spice island of Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), following blunt instructions from Professor Ward: “Plunder Ceylon. Rake the island over as with a fine-toothed comb; catch everything you can, and send me the best of it.”
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Hornaday also spent a couple of months on the Malay Peninsula, following in the footsteps of Wallace, whose famous book
The Malay Archipelago
(published a couple of years earlier, in 1869) he had read. Hornaday was in awe of Wallace's scientific acumen—Hornaday himself had admitted, at a fairly early age, that “I will never amount to much, scientifically.” Wallace, by contrast, had discerned that in the Malay Archipelago, there was a distinct dividing line—later known as the Wallace Line—in which animals on one side of the line were more closely related to Australian species, and on the other side, to the species of Asia. It was a breathtaking insight that, like the idea of evolution, required an almost godlike perspective spanning vast panoramas of time and space.