Beastly tales and other stories

BOOK EXTRACT

The author, who prefers the letters EHA (Edward Hamilton Aitken, 1851-1909), writes wittily about birds, beasts and insects that are to be found around his house in "Dustypore".

The author was among the best-known naturalist-writers of his time and a founding member of the Bombay Natural History Society. His descriptions of Indian seasons and creatures continue to have a quaint charm. Part of a series, the books have an introduction by Ruskin Bond.

In such an arrangement snakes, scorpions, centipedes, and the biscobra would all be included under one genus, since, in that aspect of them which I am now fronting, they all present one salient feature, viz., that they all carry about with them an instrument to be used for the purpose of injecting a poisonous liquor into our persons.

That which makes a scorpion a scorpion is clearly not that it has claws like a crab, nor that it has eight legs like a spider, nor that it has a tail curved over its back like a pariah dog; but the fact that it can by a single flick of that tail put you to the necessity of howling for the next twenty-four hours. Thus the scorpion by its tail, the snake by its fangs, and the centipede by its jaws, are linked together into one family to which, in accordance with scientific usage, I have ventured to give a name.

For the sake of brevity and simplicity I would call them Hypodermatiko syringophoroi.

These are the Ghazis on our borders, that come among us unnoticed to stab and murder, and India is generally understood to be infested with them to an extent that renders life precarious. In deference to this general understanding our paternal Government has been moved at times to sanction the expenditure of vast sums of public money, in efforts to compass their extermination.

Out of a lakh of rupees or so paid away annually in rewards for the slaughter of wild beasts, a large portion is always devoted to this chimera of extirpating venomous serpents.

The deaths from snake-bite, or supposed snake-bite, in a year throughout India, average less than one in ten thousand of the population; so, if the reward system leads to the destruction of one deadly snake out of eighteen thousand in the country (which of course it does not), then by the expenditure of the moiety "" more or less "" of a lakh of rupees, Government may be considered to have saved the life of one man out of the one hundred and eighty millions of India.

Precious man! I wonder who he is! And, while money is thus thrown away, the trees all over the country remain to this day unprovided with lightning conductors, in open disregard of the known fact that men (and bullocks too) are sometimes struck while standing under trees during a thunderstorm!

Of all our frontier tribes snakes are pre-eminently unsociable, and avoid us so anxiously that we see very little indeed of them, except in the baskets of snake-charmers; and of those we do meet only one in many is venomous. You may distinguish a venomous one at once by opening its mouth and running a penknife or a small flat bit of stick over the teeth of the upper jaw. This will raise the poison fangs, which generally lie folded down on the jaw.

Of course all this is looked upon by all the servants as "fatuous flapdoodle." They are not much disposed to believe in non-venomous snakes, and at any rate, one which has had the honour of being killed by master is, ipso facto, almost certain to be a do guntawalla, which means that if it had bitten you, or even given you a blow with its tail, you would have died within two hours.

Even after it is dead you are not safe unless you take the precaution to pound its head into a jelly. This prevents it reviving during the night and coming and coiling itself up in your bosom.

---

THE TRIBES ON MY FRONTIER

Author EHA
PUBLISHER Penguin
PAGES 167
PRICE Rs 295