The Noisy Slinger

I

CALLIPER, our temperamental Forest Officer, used to tell a story which never became a part of local Anglo-Indian tradition. Queer as it was, it remained peculiarly his, not so much because it pretended to represent his own experience as because his odd personality was the breath of its life. No one else, in fact, was capable of telling it properly.

For Calliper was much more than a mere Forest Officer. He posed as an interpreter of Indian forest lore in all its wonder-whispering branches. He was an active hunter, and a capital teller of hunting stories; but he took an even greater pride in regarding himself as a successor, and setting himself up as an imitator, of the Vedic hermits. Now those earlier denizens of his domain are supposed to have written, or rather composed, the real and original ‘Jungle Books,’ which are not stories about animals, but abstruse philosophic treatises. Calliper, ‘sophist and sage, from no Athenian grove,’ actually wrote an Aranyaka (for that is the Sanskrit synonym) of his own, which was full of curious wisdom. But he was equally well qualified to have produced a Jungle Book in the lower sense of Kipling. His story of the noisy slinger had latent possibilities in both directions. It was a hunting story with metaphysical implications. Most of us could have managed the hunting story, but its metaphysical overtones were quite beyond us.

Calliper’s own treatment of his supernatural machinery was a miracle of craftsmanship, or rather a series of such miracles. Although I heard him tell the story many times, I cannot give it, as I should like, in his own words, because he nearly always told it differently. Every version was a separate work of art, and I find myself unable to prefer one to another, while the group as a whole interested me more than any of its components. Calliper was an artist in life and pose rather even than a philosopher, and his stories always bore directly on the topic in hand. This particular story, with suitable modifications, could be used to illustrate several of his favorite philosophical and quasi-philosophical opinions. The modifications were noticeable enough to incline a casual hearer to disbelieve so strange a story altogether, but I came to the conclusion that a real experience lay behind the subtle forester’s variations and embroideries. Having carefully collated his different versions as they lay shredded and blurred in my memory, like scraps of classic manuscript in a long-forsaken rubbish heap, I propose to relate what I suppose, with more or less confidence, to have actually happened. At the same time I shall try to suggest in passing the chief directions in which the narrator was wont to elaborate his raw material.

The thing happened, if I am not mistaken, in an out-of-the-way village of the Vizag Agency called Aladu. Calliper was lying on his camp cot in the resthouse at noon, trying to sleep, He was tired out, and had work in hand which would shortly require the liveliest use of his wits. He had traveled all night by bullock cart at short notice on the chance of getting a shot at a tiger which was reported to be in the neighborhood.

So far the chance had looked uncommonly favorable. Calliper had arrived to find that the tiger had killed a buffalo there that very night. The kill had occurred within a mile of the resthouse, and the buffalo, partially eaten, had been considerately left by the tiger close to a large tree, in the branches of which Calliper had been able to arrange for the erection of a comfortable platform, or machan, where he could sit and wait until the tiger chose to come back to his dinner. Tigers dine late, like sahibs, and are even more unpunctual at meals, so that the comfort of the machan was an important consideration. The moon would be nearly at the full, and Calliper saw every prospect of bringing off his adventure with neatness and success. He had made all his preparations, even to the trimming of the visiting card which he always used on these occasions.

Calliper, unlike many philosophers and foresters, was punctilious in matters of social etiquette, and boasted that he never went anywhere without his cardcase. But the cards which he used when paying a call on a tiger were always cut in a peculiar V shape, and were placed, not in the tiger’s not-at-home box, — as represented, shall we say, by the abandoned carcass of his victim, — but on the far sight of Calliper’s rifle, so as to catch the moonlight when he took aim.

These preliminaries had occupied his forenoon pleasantly enough. All that was needed now was a few hours’ quiet sleep, which would steady his nerves after the night-long jolting in the bullock cart and enable him to endure, if necessary, the yet more wearisome and cramping quiet of a night on the tree platform.

But at this point his troubles began. He was conscious of a hollow tooth, which made him restless; but even so, he thought, he could have slept well enough but for the voluble and skilled vociferation of a naked farmer’s boy, who stood upon a wooden platform (also called a ‘machan’) in a maize field adjoining the resthouse compound, and performed the office of a living scarecrow.

For this duty, Calliper had to admit, he was uncommonly well qualified. The reference would not be to his appearance, though that was forbidding enough; his goblin features, and especially his enormous mouth, were plainly visible from the resthouse, which was about a hundred yards away from the wooden watch tower in the maize. But the operation of the living Indian scarecrow, like the imagery of the poet Milton, is rather musical than visual. He has invented, and brought in the course of ages to perfection, a kind of semi-articulate bellow and prolonged hullabaloo, which is quite eerily calculated to shatter the nerves of birds and men at an indefinite range.

In the art of rendering this diabolical ululation the watcher at Aladu seems to have been a master. Calliper would never have believed that such a note was within the compass of mere knack and lung power. His description of it was convincing enough to anyone at all familiar with the Indian countryside. It achieved without instrumental aid, he used to explain, the effect of a megaphonic ventriloquism; at a hundred yards it seemed to be dinning at your very ear. Moreover, although Calliper could distinguish no syllable of any language known to him in the long gabble of the rigmarole, it seemed nevertheless to mean something, or rather it seemed to carry a variety of precise and menacing intimations, like a spell in some sacred and unintelligible tongue.

Like others of his cloth, or lack of it, the rustic wizard punctuated his ornithological oratory with stones delivered from a wheeling four-foot sling, many of which crashed from time to time into the cactus hedge that separated the maize field from the resthouse yard. Yet all his artillery of noise and stones and metaphysical suggestion succeeded less completely in balking the depredations of parrots and mynas on the fringes of the maize field than in scaring away the winged dreams from the weary eyelids of the forester.

II

Calliper cursed the too faithful hireling for the tenth time, and for the tenth time turned upon his other side. He tried vainly all the known means of inducing slumber. His mind wandered endlessly. He thought of his preparations, of his rifles, of the machan in the forest, of the half-eaten buffalo, and whether the tiger would come early to the kill. The tiger also, he reflected, must be ‘lying up’ somewhere in the neighborhood, waiting, poor innocent, for the same hour of the night as himself, dreaming of the same carcass under the tree, but not of the platform in the branches! Calliper wondered whether the clamor of the watcher was disturbing the tiger’s slumbers as well as his own. Did tigers ever find it hard to sleep? Did they ever suffer from a hollow tooth?

He was minutely conscious, against his will, of everything that happened in the sunlit compound of the resthouse, a strip of which was visible through the open door. He watched the caretaker’s little daughter, clad in a skirt and nothing else, fetch the family calf in out of the heat. Then an old woman appeared, carrying a small bundle. Her business was not so easy to guess. She climbed through a gap in the cactus hedge, and disappeared into the maize. The crop was taller than a man’s height, but the level of the resthouse floor was higher than the field, and Calliper could see the dreadful slinger on the platform outlined with painful distinctness against the pale purple hills beyond, where the heat of noon set all the air aquiver above the crowded cones of maize.

Presently the watcher ceased shouting and got down from his perch. The relief was so grateful, and seemed so gratuitous, that Calliper at first could hardly believe his eyes and ears. He inferred that the old woman with the bundle, perhaps a grandmother, had taken the boy his midday meal. A certain respite was apparently assured, while the actors in this tedious masque of the maize field (including those pretty vices, the parrots and mynas) had lunch.

Blessing the old woman from the bottom of his weary heart, Calliper settled down to make the most of his opportunity.

He was well on his way to blissful unconsciousness when the grisly protagonist returned to the stage and the recitation was renewed.

Even then Calliper succeeded in holding for some time a condition of uneasy sleep; and it was at this point, according to his own account, that he was visited by a curious dream, a dream so curious, indeed, that he doubted afterward if it was a dream at all. He was still consciously striving for sleep in the face of his double affliction — the ache in his mouth and the nerve-racking clamor at his ear; but now he was doubtful whether he lay on his camp cot in the resthouse or under a thicket in the open jungle on the far side of the maize field. The voice of the slinger, though veering vaguely in direction, remained about as loud as before, but the volume of his own toothache seemed somehow to have increased, as if the tooth itself had grown to thrice its former size. His other teeth seemed likewise to be growing larger, until he was aware of the possession of a set of splendid fangs, to which the ache of the ailing molar was apparently proportioned. Slowly his hovering consciousness condensed upon a point. Bristling, sun-splashed feelers stirred under his half-open eyes; hot smells of the underwood, strangely intensified, were in his nostrils. His irritation at the urchin’s clamor assumed a new and savage vigor, confused and shaken occasionally by spasms of a vague, inhuman dread, but nevertheless fast gathering to a frenzy. . . . In fine, without losing his place, so to speak, in the order of time, and even without straying very far from his proper position in the space dimension, he had apparently ceased to be Calliper the would-be tiger killer and become the tiger himself.

Suddenly a stone from the field watcher’s sling struck the Venetian shutters of the resthouse with a loud report, which promptly recalled a portion at least of Calliper’s roaming soul to its usual habitation.

It took the forester several seconds to recover even confusedly his original bearings in space-time and to apprehend something of the nature of this final outrage on his peace and privacy. Then he sat up and glared at his tormentor in a transport of speechless fury.

Every European who has lived in India knows those tropic tempests of the mind. They are often founded, like this of Calliper’s, in righteous indignation, but Calliper’s, he declares, was so strangely cruel and savage that the very recollection of it used afterward to frighten him. Half awake, and only half himself again, he felt a desperate need to put his uncouth passion into words, but he could find no word or image vigorous enough to give it expression. He merely sat and glared at his enemy in an attitude of tense and silent execration. But though he spoke no curse, he willed perhaps a wilder doom than any that his powers of language could convey.

And then a dreadful wonder happened; for, even as the forester sat glaring and malevolent, there arose out of the sunlit maize behind the slinger a gigantic shape of flame, which seemed to the astonished Calliper like some hellish minister and embodiment of his own unspoken imprecation. The figure was luridly articulate with what looked like arms and head and hideous features, and it towered above the unwary slinger and struck him a terrific blow that felled him, suddenly silent, from his perch. Then it relapsed into the maize as swiftly and silently as it had arisen.

All Calliper’s wrath went out of him as if the apparition had indeed been its deliberate fulfillment and exact expression. He stared aghast at the vacant stage among the maize cobs, he listened appalled to the silence that he had so furiously willed. He soon realized, in a sense, what had happened. Something, his reasonable self, or the hunter in him, was already shouting, ‘Tiger, tiger in the maize!’ But the solution gave him no relief; he took no notice of the trumpet call. Confused by his dream, and abashed by the reaction of his own rage, he was overpowered by a dreadful sense of blood-guiltiness, as if he had stricken the field watcher himself. All the wild jungle tales of werwolves and witch tigers that he had ever heard and repeated, tales of men and women who turned into beasts and back again at will, or against their will, assailed his half-awakened consciousness. With these in wild confusion occurred equally fantastic Brahminical fables about the early sages, his pretended exemplars, whose curses, fortified by lonely meditation, materialized and blasted like the lightning.

Calliper had so often pretended, I suppose, to believe both kinds of marvel, and even laid claim to the possession, or at least to the occasional and partial achievement, of such occult powers and impulses himself, that he had almost succeeded in imposing on himself. He was like a sham necromancer who is suddenly confronted by a ghost.

III

With a desperate effort he collected his faculties and leaped from the cot. The bewildered dreamer disappeared and the hunter took charge. He seized and loaded his Winchester, shouted to his shikari, rushed out into the sunlight, and began to push through the maize with all the speed which necessary caution allowed.

He reached the platform without incident. The unhappy boy lay among the stalks at the foot of the scaffolding. His mouth was still open, and there was an expression as of stupid surprise on his face, which was twisted back into what should have been an impossible position. It was clear that his neck was broken. Beside him in the shadow of the platform lay the old woman who had brought his meal. At first Calliper supposed that she too was dead. Then he saw that she was comfortably asleep. The tiger’s tracks were visible within a yard of her. She must have been asleep when the tiger came, and it had gone away without even waking her.

What first struck Calliper as astonishing in this discovery, he used to say, was not that the old woman should have slept undisturbed through the tiger’s tragic visit, but that she should have been able to fall asleep at all while her hapless grandson was yet alive and vocal within six feet of her!

Then the full strangeness of the situation broke upon him. The tiger was evidently not a man-eater, or the dead would not have been thus left and the sleeper spared. More sensitive, in one direction at least, than the old dame herself, it had struck and killed, apparently, merely for the sake of peace and a quiet nap. There was something ludicrous in the contrast between the humane refinement of the motive and the brutality of the method.

But in view of Calliper’s dream the resemblance between the tiger’s case and his, and between their several reactions, was not so much ludicrous as uncanny. The brute indeed had ruthlessly and irrevocably enacted what the man had merely conceived and felt; but that, granted the rest, seemed natural. Even there in the white sunlight of the maize field Calliper found it hard to resist the persuasion that here was more than a coincidence, that some secret current of sympathy, some mysterious fusion of experience, had occurred between them.

The supposed coincidence was to prove even more exact and startling in the sequel. Calliper carefully tracked the tiger through the maize into the jungle beyond, where he preferred to leave it for the nonce. That night, in spite of unwonted nervousness, he shot the tiger very neatly with a single bullet from the tree platform. The following morning he made the final discovery and received the crowning thrill of his weird adventure.

The tiger also, it seems, had a hollow tooth. It was a very badly decayed molar, a visible nightmare of the toothache which must have troubled even a tiger to desperation. Calliper used even to declare that it was situated in the same part of the jaw as his own affliction, but here, perhaps, though true to the spirit of jungle mythology, he comes within the danger of the Higher Skepticism.

I have heard Calliper tell this tale in support, or at least in illustration, both of the witch-tiger superstition and of the legends about the materializing maledictions of the forest sages. Only in his more daring moments did he claim that it was a definite instance of either sort of wonder. It was on these occasions, perhaps, that his variations in detail and emphasis were most ingenious and amusing, but he was more persuasive when he contented himself with offering his experience as a mystery only vaguely related to the topic in hand, perhaps an unknown genus of the species. Once he told it with unusual impressiveness in support of a theory which he had evolved somewhere in the jungle, and which he used as a corollary to his beloved fatalism — the theory, namely, that the divine soul immanent in ‘all sentient beings’ (as the Buddhists have it) always makes the same reaction to similar circumstances. Under ’circumstances’ he usually included physical and mental character, but this tale illustrated his main point (at which I would not mock, for I believe it) without obviously calling for this refinement.

My belief that Calliper’s exercises upon this theme of the slinger and the tiger were founded on fact is itself based chiefly on internal evidence and general considerations, but I ought to have mentioned that Calliper, whenever he told the tale in his own lair, always finished by actually producing the tiger’s hollow tooth. This gesture reminded me of Longfellow’s ingenuous Viking and his walrus tooth, but the exhibition in Calliper’s case was always highly effective. Whatever else happened or did not happen, that tiger, or another of the name, certainly knew what it was to have the toothache.