Under the Sun. Philip Stewart Robinson

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      Visitors in Fur, and others

       Table of Contents

      III.

       Table of Contents

      VISITORS IN FUR, AND OTHERS.

AS a contrast to the fidgetty birds, glance your eye along the garden path and take note of that pink-nosed mungoose^[1] gazing placidly out of the water-pipe. It looks as shy as Oliver Twist before the Board; but that is only because it sees no chance of being able to chase you about, catch you and eat you. If you were a snake or a lizard you would find it provokingly familiar, and as brisk as King Ferdinand at an auto-da-fé, for the scent of a likely snake is to the mungoose as pleasant as that of valerian to cats, attar to a Begum, aniseed to pigeons, or burning Jews to His Most Catholic Majesty aforementioned; and when upon the war-trail the mungoose is as different to the every-day animal as the Sunday gentleman in the Park, in green gloves and a blue necktie, is to the obsequious young man who served you across the counter on Saturday. Usually the mungoose is to be seen slinking timorously along the narrow watercourses, or, under cover of the turf edge, gliding along to some hunting-ground among the aloes; whence, if it unearths a quarry, it will emerge with its fur on end and its tail like a bottle-brush, its eyes dancing in its head, and all its body agog with excitement—reckless of the dead leaves crackling as it scuttles after the flying reptile, flinging itself upon the ​victim with a zest and single-mindedness wonderful to see. That pipe is its city of refuge, the asylum in all times of trouble, to which it betakes itself when annoyed by the cat who lives in the carrot-bed, or the bird-boy who by his inhuman cries greatly perplexes the robins in the peas, or when its nerves have been shaken by the sudden approach of the silent-footed gardener or by a rencontre with the long-tailed pariah dog that lives in the outer dust. The mungoose, although his own brothers in Nepaul have the same smell in a worse degree, is the sworn foe of musk-rats. “All is not mungoose that smells of musk,” it reasons, as it follows up the trail of its chitt-chittering victim; but although it enjoys this le sport it sometimes essays the less creditable battue. Jerdon says, “It is very destructive to such birds as frequent the ground. Not unfrequently it gets access to tame pigeons, rabbits, or poultry, and commits great havoc, sucking the blood only of several.” He adds that he has “often seen it make a dash into a verandah where caged birds were placed, and endeavor to tear them from their cages.” The mungoose family, in fact, do duty for weasels, and if game were preserved in India would be vermin. Even at present some of the blame so lavishly showered on the tainted musk-rat might be transferred to the mungoose. A little more of that same blame might perhaps be made over to another popular favorite, the grey squirrel.

      The palm squirrel, as it is more properly called, will come into a room and eat the fruit on your sideboard, or into a vinery and incontinently borrow your grapes. A rat-trap in such cases may do some good, but a complete cure is hopeless. Nothing but the Arminian doctrine of universal grace will save the squirrel from ​eternal damnation, for its presumption is unique. The plummet of reflection cannot sound it, nor the net of memory bring up a precedent. It is gratuitous, unprovoked, and aimless. It is all for love. There are no stakes such as the crow plays for, and in its shrill gamut there is no string of menace or of challenge. Its scrannel quips are pointless—so let them pass. Any one, unless he be a Scotch piper, has a right to stone the Seven Sisters for their fulsome clatter, but the tongue of the squirrel is free as air. There is no embargo on it; it is out of bond, and wags when and where it lists. Let the craven kite (itself the butt of smaller birds) swoop at it, but give your sympathy to the squirrel. A woman who cannot kiss and a bird which cannot sing ought to be at any rate taught, but who would look for harmony from a squirrel? Was wisdom ever found in Gotham or truth in the compliments of beggars? Would you hook Leviathan by the nose, or hedge a cuckoo in? Again, besides its voice, people have been found to object to its tail. But Hiawatha liked it. There is no malice in the motion of a squirrel’s tail. It does not resemble the cocked-tip gesture of the robin’s or the wren’s. It does n’t swing like the cat’s, or dart like the scorpion’s. It is never offensively straight on end like a cow’s on a windy day, nor slinking like a pariah dog’s. It has none of the odious mobility of the monkey’s, nor the three-inch arrogance of the goat’s. Neither is there in it the pendulous monotony of the wagtail’s, nor the spasmodic wriggle of the sucking lamb’s. Yet it is a speaking feature. That fluffy perkiness is an index of the squirrel mind. With an upward jerk it puts a question, with a downward one emphasizes an assertion; gives plausibility with a wave, ​and stings with sarcasm in a series of disconnected lilts; for the squirrel is as inquisitive as Empedocles, as tediously emphatic as the Ephesians, and in self-confidence a Croesus. It would not have hesitated to suggest to Solomon solutions to the Queen of Sheba’s conundrums, nor to volunteer likely answers to the riddle of the Sphinx. It is impervious to jibes. Scoffs and derision are thrown away upon it as much as solid argument. Hard names do it no hurt. It would not be visibly affected if you called it a parallelopiped, or the larva of a marine ascidian. Perhaps it is a philosopher, for, since squirrels dropped their nutshells on Primeval Man, no instance is on record of a melancholy squirrel. Its emotions (precipitate terror excepted) are shallow, and though it may be tamed, it will form no strong attachments; while its worldly wisdom is great. Like the frog in Æsop, it is “extreme wise.” Given a three-inch post, the squirrel can always keep out of sight. You may go round and round, but it will always be “on the other side.”

      Squirrels excepted, the most prominent members of Indian garden life are ants, for they stamp their broad-arrow everywhere; their advertisements may be read on almost every tree-trunk, and samples of their work seen on all the paths. They have a head office in most verandahs, with branch establishments in the bathrooms; while their agents are ubiquitous, laying earth-heaps wherever they travel—each heap the outward and visible sign of much inward tunnelling, which, towards the end of the rainy season, will fall in. Engineering seems to be their favorite profession, although some have a passion for plastering, and when other surfaces fail will lay a coat of mud on the level ground, for ​the after-pleasure of creeping under it. Others are bigots to geographical discovery, and are constantly wandering into dangerous places, whence they escape only by a series of miracles. Of some a pastoral life is all the joy, for they keep herds of green aphides—better known as “blight”—which they milk regularly for the sake of the sweet leaf-juice they secrete. Others, again, are hunters and live on the produce of the chase. They organize foraging parties and issue forth a host of Lilliputians to drag home a Brobdignag cricket; or, marshalled on the war-trail, file out to plunder the larders of their neighbors. The bulk, however, are omnivorous and jacks-of-all-trades, with a decided leaning towards vegetable food and excavation; and it is in this, the enormous consumption of seeds in the ant nurseries, that this family contributes its quota to the well-being of creation, a quota which after all scarcely raises it, in point of usefulness, to the level of butterflies and moths—popularly supposed to be the idlest and least useful of created insects. It ought, however, to be kept in mind that butterflies are only beautified caterpillars; and when we see them flying about, we should remember that their work is over and they are enjoying their vacation. They have been raised to the Upper House. From being laborious managers they have become the sleeping partners in a thriving business. While they were caterpillars they worked hard and well; so Nature, to reward them, dresses them up to look attractive, and sends them out as butterflies—to get married. The ants, on the other hand, did no work when they were grubs, so they have to do a good