LIONS ’N’ TIGERS ’N’ EVERYTHING

By Courtney Ryley Cooper

The Cross-Cut
The White Desert
Under the Big Top
The Last Frontier
Lions ’N’ Tigers ’N’ Everything

CAGEMATES. Frontispiece.

LIONS ’N’ TIGERS
’N’ EVERYTHING

BY
COURTNEY RYLEY COOPER

ILLUSTRATED FROM
PHOTOGRAPHS

BOSTON
LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY
1924

Copyright, 1922, 1923, 1924,
By Courtney Ryley Cooper.
All rights reserved
Published August, 1924
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

TO
CARL BRANDT
WITH THE GENUINE AFFECTION
OF
“THE DEAR OLD RHINOCEROS”

CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS

INTRODUCTION
“HURRY! HURRY! TH’ BEEG SHOW IS STARTING-G-G-G-G!”

OF course, you’ve been to the circus. You got there just in time to hear the sideshow spieler tell you that there was fortay-y-y-y-y-five minutes for fun an’ amusement beforah th’ beeg show, th’ beeg show, would begin! Fortay-y-y-y-five minutes in which to view those stra-a-a-nge people, to see The Cannibal Twins, the Skeleton Dude, the Fat Lady who has taken everay-y-y-y known method of reducing in an attempt to rid herself of her half a ton of flesh, but who gets biggah, biggah and fattah, Ladies-s-s an’ Gents, everay living-g-g breathing-g-g moment of her life!

You’ve given yourself plenty of time, so you think. You want to see the menagerie and the lions and tigers and elephants, but the first thing you know, that sideshow spieler has inveigled you inside the tent and the next thing you know, somebody with a fog-horn voice is yelling in your ear:

“Hurry! Hurry Everaybodi-e-e-e-e-e-e! Th’ Beeg Show is Starting-g-g-g-g!”

Then you have to rush through the menagerie and get into your seat before you exactly know what’s happened.

Well, it’s about the same way with the beginning of a book. You set yourself to have a lot of fun seeing the main show, and then somebody drags you off to a side performance and before you realize it, your time for reading’s up and all you’ve gotten is a lot of advance information as to what you’re going to find out if you finish the book.

I suppose I’ve a lot of the boy in me. I hate introductions. Despise ’em. Yet, in a way, they’re necessary. I’ve always wanted to write a book where I could put the introduction at the end, or something like that. Because, really, an introduction seems terribly necessary.

But since I couldn’t do that, I waited until I had finished writing the rest of the book, and then I wrote this, which I am busily trying to keep from being an introduction. But it seems that there’s no way out. I might as well break down and confess—that’s what it is. Th’ sideshow, th’ side-show-w-w-w-w, Ladies-s-s-s an’ Gents, th’ sideshow, while farther on, the main performance band is tuning up for the grand-d-d entrée!

So, if you’re like me, and detest introductions, just let this part of the book slide on by and wait until you’ve finished the rest. Then maybe, some day when you haven’t anything to do, you can come back and see what I’ve been doing all this talking about. It’s simply this:

I’ve often been asked why a circus carries so many animals around with it; whether it is merely because it wants to “fill up space” or because they are cheap or to take up time before the rest of the performance. It really is none of these. Questions like that hurt a circus man’s pride. He really thinks a lot of his animals, and he’s terribly proud of the fact that he carries them around the country, because he knows that from the fact that he does like animals a great portion of America gains its knowledge of natural history.

There are comparatively few big zoölogical collections in America and all these are in the big cities; especially is this true where jungle animals are exhibited. The rest of the country must depend on the circus to make possible a close knowledge of the various beasts of faraway lands—and there is hardly a man or woman in America who was reared in a rural community who did not gain his or her early studies in this manner. And that pleases the circus man, because he always wants to feel that he is something else than merely a purveyor of amusement. Nor does he do it cheaply!

For instance, the next time the Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey Circus comes to town, you’ll find in its menagerie a total of forty-four elephants. A number of them are babies, purchased at an average price of about $2500 apiece, when all costs are considered. Half of them are full grown, worth from $5000 to $10,000 each, according to their performing ability. Lump them all at an average of $4000 apiece, and you have an investment of $186,000 in elephants, to say nothing of the food they eat, and of all animals, elephants are the champion hay eaters.

That’s one item. The four giraffes are another, and in case you should desire to purchase a first-class giraffe some day, just write out a check for $15,000 and then trust to good fortune to get you the animal. Giraffes are scarce. So are hippopotami and rhinoceri and great apes, to say nothing of pythons, and jungle-bred tigers and lions and leopards and other animals of their kind. Figuring the interest on the investment alone, for the number of performance days which are granted to the circus, it costs nearly $2000 a week to carry that menagerie around the country. That is the amount the original outlay would earn if it were invested in the ordinary channels of business. Nor does that include the items of trainers, of food, of assistants, cage men, dens, horses for transportation, railroad equipment and repairs, and steam haulage. So a menagerie really isn’t such a cheap adjunct, is it? Nor is that all.

A few years ago, John Ringling learned that there was a wonderful ape in England. He had heard that it was a real gorilla—but didn’t believe it. He went to England and to the home of the man and woman who had reared the beast to health from a disease-ridden little thing which had been landed in London from a tramp steamer. It was a real gorilla, the first one that ever had thrived in captivity. John Ringling wanted that animal for his circus. It meant that the people of the United States would be given an opportunity to study something which neither the combined efforts of scientists nor the hunting parties of the animal companies of all the world had been able to give. He didn’t need the gorilla. The menagerie was full as it was. But there was the urge of the true circus man—to bring forth the thing which had not been seen before, to present something new. It meant a gamble of thousands of dollars. He took the chance. The check read for $30,000. John Daniel, the gorilla, was brought to the United States—and lived less than a month! Such are the risks taken by the circus man to keep his menagerie up to the plane which he desires. This is not the only instance.

Expeditions have been fostered, men sent away from the United States for months, even years at a time, to gain some special animal. Perhaps the expedition is a success. More often it is a failure. But the crowds which throng through the marquee into the menagerie see nothing but the gilded cages and the picket line of elephants, giving but little thought to the effort and expense behind it all. Which worries the circus man not at all. What he is after is to get people into that menagerie.

That, in the final analysis, is of course the real reason behind the menagerie—to help get people into the circus. But in doing that, a number of other things are accomplished. In the first place, the rural population is thereby given its knowledge of natural history. The farmer’s boy and the boy of the city not large enough to support a zoo get their first sight of the lion, the tiger, the elephant and giraffe and hippopotamus in a circus menagerie. With that, there comes the inevitable human attribute of making comparisons—and following that, study comes easier. It’s much more pleasant to read in the newspaper about some one you know, than it is to read about some one wholly abstract. The same is true of animals. After a person has seen the tigers in a circus, he wants to know more of them. That’s when the books come in.

Nor is science neglected by the circus. It was due to the importation of John Daniel by the Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey that the anthropologists of New York were able to dissect a gorilla brain and carry on their studies through an actual autopsy upon a specimen of an animal group which has been almost as mysterious as the fabled Dodo. The same thing was true with a giant animal called Casey, which was imported several years ago from Cape Lopez, Africa, by way of Australia, by a man named Fox. The animal was a mystery, and it still is a mystery. It looked like a chimpanzee, yet had characteristics and size which marked it as different from any other chimpanzee which ever had come to this country. It also had gorilla characteristics, yet it was not a gorilla. It died on an operating table in Tampa, Florida, of acute appendicitis, and following its death an autopsy was performed, showing surprising indications. For one thing, the speech centers of the brain displayed remarkable development, giving the hint that had the animal lived, there might have come the time when it would have been able to speak with the articulation of a low order of humanity. Other developments showed a close relationship to the human brain—at least a tendency in that direction. Had the circus which exhibited it known all that beforehand, it might have advertised it as the missing link. But the circus didn’t, which was perhaps just as well.

However, one thing remains—Casey was a mystery, and to the circus world belongs the credit of bringing into general knowledge an animal which hinted, at least, of a strange race of ground apes which may yet be discovered in Africa, showing a development different from that of the chimpanzee and of the gorilla, yet combining both, and aiding the scientists in their researches into the beginnings of man. That Casey was a certain type of chimpanzee was, of course, true. But what type? And what gave him his peculiar, closely human countenance? And his great size? He was nearly twice as large as his friend and companion Biz, an ordinary chimpanzee, and one saw in them the dissimilarity that one notices between two widely different races of men. If Casey could only have explained!

Some day another Casey may come to America. And another following that. Circus men will bring them when they come, and the investigations which follow may cause many a surprising result.

And by the way, the next time you go to the circus, just try an experiment and see how much more real amusement and interest you get out of looking at the animals. Try a new viewpoint. Just remember that we are all animals; we all belong to the same kingdom. With that in mind, experiment with the idea of looking at those animals not as just so many mere brutes, but as merely a different branch of the animal kingdom to which you belong. Look upon them as foreigners, as visitors to your land from a different shore, strange but willing to learn, and with far greater perceptive powers, perhaps, than we have.

As I have mentioned before, the human race is egotistical. It likes to believe that it knows everything. But a close study of animals will reveal that perhaps they can teach us things, and that, in their way, they may have every bit as much sense as we have. A dog, you know, can understand his master’s slightest whim and mood. But few indeed are the masters who can understand their dogs!

The Author

LIONS ’N’ TIGERS ’N’ EVERYTHING

CHAPTER I
INSIDE THE TRAINING DEN

I REMEMBER, rather distinctly, the first time I ever went into the steel arena. I was to meet three lions and an equal number of tigers, all full grown, and unintroduced, so far, to any one but their original trainer. Naturally, I believed I knew beforehand just about what would happen.

Outside the arena, on one side, would be three or four men with long iron rods, the points of which were heated white hot,—sufficient to halt any beast in the attack. On the other side would be an equal number of attendants, equipped with an invention which I never had seen, but which I knew all about, a thing called an “electric prod rod,” coupled up with the electric light wires and capable of spitting thousands of volts of electricity at the lion or tiger which might seek to devour me. I, personally, would have two revolvers, one loaded with blank cartridges, for use during the ordinary course of the visit and to cow the beasts into a knowledge that I was their superior; the other equipped with steel-jacketed bullets in case of a real emergency.

There was a certain amount of foundation for my beliefs. Back in childhood days, when I had been a runaway clown with a small, tatterdemalion circus, the menagerie had consisted of one lion, vicious to the extreme and permanently blinded by blows from a leaden-tipped whip, and three scarred and scurvy-appearing leopards which hated humans with enthusiastic passion, and which eventually accomplished their much desired ambition of killing the trainer who had beaten them daily for years. From that menagerie experience I knew that all animals were beaten unmercifully, that they were burned and tortured and shot, and that the training of any jungle animal could be carried out in only one way—that of breaking the spirit of the beast and holding it in a constant subjection of fear. But—

Only one man was in the menagerie house of the circus winter quarters when I entered—the trainer. The steel arena stood, already erected, in the center of the big building, but I looked in vain for the attendants with the electric prod rods, and the men with the white-hot irons. As for the trainer himself, I failed to notice any bulges in his pockets which might denote revolvers; in fact, he carried nothing except two cheap, innocent-appearing buggy whips. One of these he handed me in nonchalant style, then motioned toward the arena.

“All right,” he ordered, pulling back the steel door, “get in.”

“Get in?” Everything was all wrong, and I knew it. “Where are the animal men?”

“Over at the cookhouse, eating dinner. I’ll let the cats into the chute. Go ahead inside so I can strap the door.”

“But—”

“I’ll come in after I’ve let the cats through from the permanent cages. I want you in there first, though, so they can see you the minute they start into the chute. Then you won’t surprise ’em, see, and scare ’em. Just stand still in the center as they come in. If any of ’em get excited, just say ‘seats!’ in a good, strong voice, and tap ’em with that buggy whip. By that time I’ll be in there.”

“But where’s my gun? And aren’t we going to have any of the men around with hot irons or electric prods—”

“Electric what?” The trainer cocked his head.

“Electric prod rods—you know, that throw electricity.”

“Cut the comedy,” came briefly; “you’ve been readin’ them Fred Fearnot stories! Nope,” he continued, “there ain’t going to be any hot irons or electric prods, whatever they are, or nothin’. Just you an’ me an’ the cats an’ a couple of buggy whips!”

Whereupon, somewhat dazed, I allowed myself to be shunted into the arena. The door was closed behind me—and strapped. Shorty, the animal trainer went to the line of permanent cages, shifted a few doors, then opened the one leading to the chute. A tiger traveled slowly toward me, while I juggled myself in my shoes, and wondered why the buggy whip had suddenly become so slippery in my clenched hand. While this was happening, the Bengal looked me over, dismissed me with a mild hiss, and walked to the pedestal. Then, almost before I knew it, the den was occupied by three tigers and three lions, none of which had done anything more than greet me with a perfunctory hiss as they entered! Already Shorty was unstrapping the door, himself to enter the den. Then, one by one, the animals went through their routine, roaring and bellowing and clawing at Shorty, but paying no attention whatever to me!

“Part of the act,” explained the little trainer as he came beside me for a moment, “trained ’em that way. Audience likes to see cats act vicious, like they was going to eat up their trainer. But a lot of it’s bunk. Just for instance—”

Then he turned to the lion which had fought him the hardest.

“Meo-w-w-w-w-w-w-w!” he said.

“Meo-w-w-w-w-w-w-w!” answered the lion, somewhat after the fashion of an overgrown house cat.

Following which, a loose purring issued from Shorty’s lips, to be echoed by the tigers.

“That’s their pay!” came laconically as the trainer walked to the chute. Then, “All right, Kids! Work’s over!”

Whereupon the great cats bounded through the doors for their permanent cages again, and still somewhat hazy, I left the steel arena. Everything had gone wrong! There had been no firing of a revolver, no lashing of steel-tipped whips; something radical had happened since the old days when Pop Jensen had beaten those three leopards about on the Old Clattertrap Shows. Either that or Pop Jensen had been an exception!

Since that first introduction, I’ve learned a few things about animals. A great many of these little facts have been gained by personal visits, often in as narrow a space as an eight-foot permanent cage in which the other occupant was anything from a leopard to a lion. And I’ve learned incidentally that Pop Jensen wasn’t an exception. He just belonged to another day, that is all, and his day is past. The animal trainer of the present is a different sort, with a different attitude toward the beasts under his control, different theories, different methods, and different ideas. Ask a present-day trainer about hot irons and all you’ll gain is a blank look. He wouldn’t know how to use them, and if he did, he wouldn’t admit it. He wants to hold his job, and with present-day circuses; hot irons or anything like them are barred. All for one very simple reason besides the humanitarian qualities. Jungle animals cost about eight times as much to-day as they did twenty or twenty-five years ago. No circus owner is going to mar a thousand-dollar bill if he can help it—and hot irons produce scars.

Which represents the business side of animal training as it exists to-day. There are two reasons; one being that the whole fabric of the circus business had changed in the last score of years from the low-browed “grifting” owner and his “grifting,” thieving, fighting personnel to a new generation of men who have higher ideals and who have realized that the circus is as much of an institution as a dry-goods store or the post-office department.

IN THE STEEL ARENA.

A TIGER BEING TRAINED TO RIDE HORSEBACK.

Where the canvasmen and “roughnecks” and “razorbacks,” the laborers of the circus, once were forced to sleep beneath the wagons, or at best upon makeshift bunks, they now have sanitary berths, car porters, and sheets and pillow cases. Where they once ate the left-overs of stores; stale bread, old meat, and “puffed” canned goods, they now have food that is far better than that served in the United States Army. Where they formerly were the victims of hundred per cent. loan sharks, feeding upon them like so many human leeches; forcing them to pay double prices for every commodity and bit of clothing, and practically at the mercy of brutal bosses, their lot has been bettered until there is now at least one circus where the lot superintendent never allows his men to be commanded without a prefix unknown in a great many business institutions. He doesn’t swear at them, for instance, when he orders the tents strengthened against a possible blow. Instead, it is:

“All right, gentlemen, take up them guy ropes!”

When the weather is foul, and the circus lot is hip-deep in mud, when men have struggled to their utmost and can go no longer on their own power, he doesn’t brace them with bootleg whisky. Instead, he keeps a man on the pay roll whose job is to laugh and sing in such times as this—the superintendent knowing full well that one laugh begets another, that singing engenders singing, and that the psychological value of that laughing man is worth barrels of booze. It has saved the show more times than one!

Just as conditions have improved with the human personnel of the circus, so have they progressed in the menagerie. The circus animal trainer of to-day is not chosen for his brutality, or his cunning, or his so-called bravery. He is hired because he has studied and knows animals—even to talking their various “languages!” There are few real animal trainers who cannot gain an answer from their charges, talking to them as the ordinary person talks to a dog and receiving as intelligent attention. It is by this method that cat animals are trained for the most part, it being about the only way, outside of catnip, in which they can be rewarded.

In that last word comes the whole explanation of the theory of present-day animal training, a theory of rewards. Animal men have learned that the brute isn’t any different from the human; the surest way to make him work is to pay him for his trouble. In the steel arena to-day, the same fundamentals exist as in any big factory, or business house, or office. The animals are just so many hired hands. When they do their work, they get their pay envelope—and they know it. Beyond this lies, however, another fundamental principle, by which in the last score or so of years the whole animal-training system has been revolutionized. The present-day trainer doesn’t cow the animal or make it afraid of him. On the contrary, the first thing he does is to conquer all fear and make friends with the beast!

A study of jungle animals has taught him that they exist through fear; that the elephant fears, and therefore hates the chimpanzee, the gorilla and any other member of the big ape tribes that can attack from above, and therefore, simply through instinct, will kill any of these beasts at the first opportunity. In like manner does the hyena or the zebra fear the lion, the tiger fear the elephant, the leopard fear the python. It has taken little deduction to find that with this fear, hatred is inevitably linked, and that if an animal fears a trainer, it also hates him and will “get” him at the first opportunity. Therefore, the first thing to be eliminated is not fear on the part of the trainer, but on the part of the animal! I am no animal trainer. Yet, as I say, I’ve occupied some mighty close quarters with every form of jungle beast. Nor was it bravery. It was simply because I knew the great cats wouldn’t be afraid of me, and that, having nothing to fear, they would simply ignore me. Which happened.

Perhaps the best example of the change in training tactics lies in the story of a soft-hearted, millionaire circus owner who is somewhat of a crank about his animals being well treated. One day, several years ago, we happened to be together at a vaudeville theater, in which an old-time trainer was exhibiting a supposed “trained” monkey band. The audience seemed to enjoy the affair; but there were two who didn’t. All for the reason that we could see the cruelty of it.

The unfortunate monkeys were tied to their chairs. To their arms were attached invisible piano wires which ran to a succession of pulleys above and thence to the wings, where they were pulled and jerked by an assistant to create the illusion that the beasts were obeying commands. By an elaborate network of wires, the monkeys were made to raise horns, which also were tied to their hands, and apparently play them. Time after time, as he watched, the circus owner snorted his displeasure, and, at last, the act finished, rose from his chair and sought the stage entrance.

“Swell act you got!” he announced to the owner. “What do you want for it? You know, I own a circus; I’d kind of like to have that layout in the kid show.”

It was the beginning of a series of bickerings, which ended in the purchase of the act—why, I could not quite understand. So I asked the reason. The eccentric little owner waved a hand.

“Going to have it in my show.”

“But with those wires—that’s torture, Boss!”

“Now, nix, Kid! Nix. Wait till I’ve got my bill of sale.”

Incidentally, when he received that, the new owner of the monkey band gave to the old-time trainer a tongue lashing as artistic as anything I ever heard, a little masterpiece on cruelty, on the cowardice of the human, and on decency in general. Following which, he bundled up his newly purchased monkeys, together with the properties which went with the act, and took them to winter quarters.

The next day I went out there with him. The monkeys were in their chairs, apparently waiting for something exceedingly important. No wires were visible. At a signal, an attendant ran forward with a small table, upon which were heaped the band instruments which at one time had represented so much torture to the little prisoners. Instantly there was chattering and excitement. The simians leaped from their chairs, scrambled toward the table, grasped a band instrument apiece and ran back to their places, each holding the musical apparatus tight to his lips and producing faint sounds that bore the resemblance of music! Yet the cruelty was gone! The wires had vanished! The monkeys were doing all this of their own accord and actually taking a delight in it! Like a pleased boy, the little circus owner walked to one of the simians and, against the monkey’s squealing protests, took away his horn.

“There,” he said, with a shrug of his shoulders, “that’s all you have to do.”

The mouthpiece of the horn had been refashioned overnight. Extending slightly outward from the interior was a metal standard bearing a thin reed; which would sound at the slightest suction, while just beyond this, at a point which would necessitate some effort on the part of the monkey to reach it, was an ordinary piece of old-fashioned, striped stick candy! When the monkey sucked on the candy, the reed sounded. By such a simple method had cruelty been changed to pleasure!

The same thing holds true for practically every other animal act. Instead of making animals pretend to work because they are afraid, they merely work for wages now. For years, in the old days, trainers had kicked and mauled and beaten a slow-thinking, lunk-headed hippopotamus in an effort to make him perform. It was impossible. The hip neither fought nor obeyed. It didn’t have enough sense to know that it could escape punishment by doing a few tricks. Then, with the coming of the newer régime into the circus business, the effort was discontinued. For years the big river hog merely wallowed in his trough. Then, one day, an animal trainer slanted his head and stood for a long time in thought.

“Believe I’ll work that hip,” he announced. And a week later, the miracle happened!

“Ladies-s-s-s-s-s and gentlemen-n-n-n” came the bawling outcry of the official announcer, “I take great pleasuah in announcing to you a featuah not on the program, a race between a swift-footed human being-g-g-g and a real, living, breathing hippopotamus-s-s, or sweating be-hemoth of Holy Writ. Wa-a-a-tch them!”

Into the hippodrome track from the menagerie connection came the trainer, running at a fair gait, while striving his best, seemingly, to outpace him, was a goggle-eyed hippopotamus, trotting as swiftly as his wobbly avoirdupois would permit. All the way around they went, the hippopotamus gaining for an instant, then the trainer taking the lead again, finally passing once more into the menagerie. The audience applauded delightedly. It was the first time it ever had seen a trained hippopotamus. Nor had it noticed the fact that, about fifty yards in advance of the racing pair, was a menagerie attendant, also running. The important thing about this person was that he carried a bucket of bran mash, and the hippopotamus knew that it was for him! He wasn’t racing the trainer, he was merely following a good meal; the old, old story of the donkey and the ear of corn!

Likewise the pig which you’ve seen squealing in the wake of the clown in the circus. The secret? Simply that His Hoglets has been taken from his mother at birth and raised on a bottle. His feeding has been timed so that it comes during circus hours. The pig follows the clown because he knows he’s going to get a square meal. At certain places in the circuit of the big top the clown pauses and gives him a few nips from the bottle. Then he goes on again and the pig runs squealing after. Simple, isn’t it?

In the same manner is the “follow goose” trained. The person he trails has food, and the goose knows he’s going to get it. Likewise the pigs which you’ve seen “shooting the chutes.”

A pig isn’t supposed to have much intelligence. Perhaps he hasn’t—but you can have a trained-pig act all your own very easily.

Simply build a pen leading to a set of stairs which lead in turn to a chute, the chute traveling down into another closely netted enclosure. In this enclosure put a bucket of favorite pig food. Then turn the hogs loose and let then make their own deductions.

First of all, the pigs will try to reach the food by going through the netting. That’s impossible. So at last they turn to the runway, go up the steps, hesitate a long while, then finally slide down the chute and get what they’re after. Then—here’s the strange part of it: after a week or so, remove the food. The pigs will keep on shooting the chutes just the same. By some strange form of animal reasoning, the pleasure of food has become associated with that exercise of sliding down that incline. Like a dog that gains a form of stomachic satisfaction from the sight of food, so do the pigs derive a certain amount of pleasure from going where the food ought to be! And they’ll shoot the chutes for you as often as you please. Particularly if you feed them directly after it’s done!

In fact, the system of rewards and payment for work holds true through every form of trained animal life. Sugar for dogs, carrots for elephants, fish for seals, stale bread for the polar bears, a bit of honey or candy for the ordinary species of bear, pieces of apple or lumps of sugar for horses; every animal has his reward, for which he’ll work a hundred times harder than ever he did in the old and almost obsolete days of fear. Even lions, tigers and leopards have their likes, but with them the payment comes in a different fashion.

Jungle cats are primeval in their instincts. They’re unable to control themselves at the sight of food, and a few strips of meat distributed in the training den might lead to a fight. Therefore the new style of trainer has a different method. He talks to the cats!

Nor is that so difficult as it sounds. A short association with animals and one easily can learn the particular intonation by which they express pleasure. With the lion, this takes form in a long drawn-out meow of satisfaction; with the leopard and the tiger it is evinced by purring, as with house cats. The trainer simply practices an imitation of these sounds until he masters them, with the result that he is almost invariably answered by the beast when he emits them! The animal seems to understand that the trainer is seeking to convey the fact that he is pleased, and the beast appears pleased also. As to the reward extraordinary, there is the joy of joys—catnip!

To a house cat, catnip is a thing of ecstasy. To a jungle cat it holds as much allurement as morphine to a dope user, or whisky to a drunkard. A catnip ball and the world immediately becomes rosy; the great cats roll in it, toss it about their cages, purr and arch their backs, all in a perfect frenzy of delight. Therefore, when they do their work, they get their catnip. When they don’t work they’re simply docked their week’s wages; that’s all.

Old principles, naturally, and perhaps all the more efficacious for their age. In fact, there is one circus in the West which regularly depends upon this age-worn idea of food to save itself in wet weather. It possesses one of the largest and strongest elephants existent in the United States, an animal capable of pulling any of the show’s wagons from hub-deep mud with but little effort. There is only one trouble. When Nature made that elephant, it put concrete where the brains should be. Training is next to impossible. The elephant simply doesn’t seem able to assimilate a command. Which worries the circus not at all.

When bad weather comes, they simply bring out “Old Bonehead” and hitch him with a rope harness to whichever wagon happens to be stuck. Then a workman takes his position slightly in front of the beast, with a bucketful of carrots, and practices a little animal Coueism. He holds out a carrot. The elephant reaches for it but can’t quite achieve his object. Whereupon he takes a step forward—and drags the wagon with him. Which forms the end of that particular vehicle’s troubles. He is unhitched and taken to the next scene of difficulty. For every wagon a carrot, and the circus counts it rather cheap motive power at that!

However, the training of animals does not mean that they’re simply given food, in return for which, by some magical process, they realize that they are to do certain work. Far from it. It is a long, patient progress, in which the trainer, if he is a good one, grits his teeth to hold his temper and smiles many and many a time when he would like to swear. He has three jobs which must be synchronized into one objective—to teach the animal that there is nothing to fear from this strange human who has suddenly made his entry into the beast’s life, to plant certain routines into the beast’s mind, and to place there at the same time the knowledge that, for doing these things, the animal is to be rewarded. But there is this consolation: once a single trick is learned, the whole avenue is unlocked; and the way to other stunts made easier. Here and here alone is the whip used, but for the most part it is only the light, cheap affair which once adorned that ancient vehicle, the buggy.

The lessons start in much the same manner in which those of a human child begin; the primary object being to accustom the charges to the fact that they are going to school. And so the lion tamer merely takes his position in the center of the arena and calls for the attendants to release the animals from their permanent cages.

Often the lesson consists of nothing more than that. The beasts have become accustomed to mankind through seeing them every day in the menagerie and through being fed by them. Therefore they catalogue them as merely other animals which are harmless and upon which the beasts themselves depend for a livelihood. Again is the road to the brain opened through the path to the stomach!

However, there also are times when the cats seem to realize that they no longer are protected by intervening bars, and the old instincts of fright and self-preservation overcome them. One by one they attempt to rush their trainer. The answer is a swift, accurately placed blow of the whip, usually on the nostrils. In force it corresponds to a sharp slap on the lips, such as happens to more than one child, stinging it for the moment and causing it to recoil. Unless the beast is intractable, an inbred or a “bad actor,” about two of these blows are sufficient to teach the animal its first combined lesson: that a whip hurts, that the man in the arena commands that whip but, most important of all, he uses it only as a means of self-protection. The good trainer only strikes an animal to break up an attack; he has a specified task, to make the beast respect the whip, but not to fear it. After the first few minutes, the trainer can sit down in the center of the arena and wait in peace. His charges have ceased attacking and now are merely roaming the big enclosure, accustoming themselves to the larger space of their quarters and assuring themselves that they have nothing to fear. So ends the first lesson.

After which comes the second and most important period of all. The animal already has learned three things, that the trainer will not hurt him unless the animal tries to hurt the trainer, that the whip is something that can sting and it is best to keep away from it, and that there will be a reward for doing what the trainer desires, and that, taken all in all, he’s a pretty good sort of a being after all. Therefore, the trainer selects one beast at a time and falls into a routine. He cracks his whip just behind the beast, not striking the animal, but close enough to make his charge move away from it. At the same time, he keeps repeating his rote:

“Seats, Rajah! Seats—seats!”

Which the beast doesn’t understand at all. But by “crowding,” by the constant repetition of that command, and by desisting with the whip when the animal moves in the right direction and cracking it to hold him from the wrong course, the trainer gradually works the cat to its pedestal. Once this lesson is implanted in the mind of the beast, the whole door to a trained act is unlocked, for everything else is accomplished in the same manner.

More than once I have happened into a menagerie house to find the arena full of cat animals and a trainer seemingly nowhere about. The animals were doing as they pleased, some lolling in the spots of sunlight which came from the high windows, others playing, still others merely pacing. It was as though a recess had been called at school and the teacher had departed. Instead, however, he was hiding!

Hiding and watching the animals with hawk-like eagerness, as, left to themselves, they followed the dictates of their own likes and dislikes. It was not a recess; on the contrary, it was one of the most important features of present-day animal training, that of allowing the animals themselves to choose their own acts! In other words, the trainer was playing the part of a hidden observer, watching his tawny charges, and from his unseen point of vantage learning their true natures and the things which they liked best to do.

Some animals are natural climbers and balancers; others are not. Weeks could be wasted in an effort to teach a beast to walk a tightrope, for instance, when the power of balance simply was not in his brain. So the trainer of to-day, being a believer in efficiency, allows his animals to volunteer for the various services of the performing arena. During the recess time, in which the animals are left to their own resources, their every mannerism is catalogued. In their play, for instance, it may be found that two lions or two tigers will box each other in mock fighting; two pals of the feline race that have selected each other as playmates. Naturally, there is fierce growling and a sprinkling of flying fur. The trainer notes it all, and when the show goes on the road, the audience gets a thrill out of two great cats which leap at each other in a seeming battle of death. For the trainer has taken advantage of this play instinct and made it a part of the show. The audience doesn’t know that the big beasts are growling and hissing in good humor, and wouldn’t believe it if the trainer announced the fact.

Another animal will be found to have a love for climbing and for balancing himself about the thin rails of the arena. This is the beast which is turned into the “tightrope walking tiger” or the “Leonine Blondin.” Another will be a humorist, cavorting about in comical fashion, and he becomes the “only-y-y-y, living-g-g-g, breathing-g-g-g cat clown in existence.” In fact, the animal trainer has learned one great truth, that animals have tempers, likes, dislikes, moods, frailties and mannerisms just as a human has them, and that the easiest way to present a pleasing act is to take advantage of the natural “histrionic talent” of the beast. For instance, on one of the big shows was an “untamable lion.” At the very sight of the trainer, he would hiss and claw and roar and appear obsessed with a mad desire to eat that trainer alive at the first opportunity. His act was a constant thing of cracking whips, of shouts, of barking revolver shots, and of scurrying attendants outside the arena, on the alert every instant for the leap of death. Old Duke, to tell the truth, seemed one of the fiercest beasts that ever went into a steel arena. His every mannerism carried the hint of death; he hated humans; you could see the malevolent glare in his eyes, the deadly threat of naked teeth, the—

By the way, did you ever play with a dog that mocked fierceness? A dog that growled and barked and pretended every moment that he was going to take off an arm or a leg, while you, in turn, pretended just as hard as that you were fighting for your very life? Of course, I shouldn’t reveal circus secrets, but I once spent half an hour with Old Duke in a cage so small that he slapped me in the face with his tail every time he turned round, and I didn’t even have the customary buggy whip!

The explanation is simply the fact that it was discovered early in Duke’s training days that he was an animal humorist. Pompous appearing, dignified in mien, yet possessed with a funny streak, which the trainer soon recognized and realized, Old Duke played his rôle so excellently that upon his death a short time ago, a large newspaper published an editorial regarding him, and the laugh that he, the lion, had on the “smart” human beings who had watched him!

“If Old Duke only had possessed a sleeve,” said the editorial, “he would have placed many a snicker in it during his long and useful show days. For Duke had a mission, that of showing at least a few persons who really understood him and who knew, that we who call ourselves humans are only super-egoists, that because we can talk, and build edifices and go scurrying about this ant hill we call life, we think we are the only beings existent who possess a brain. That was Duke’s mission, to prove, after all, that we are only wonderful because we think we are wonderful, that we believe animals are soulless things because we do not understand them. No doubt there are many Old Dukes in the animal kingdom, supposedly our inferiors, that go through life tickling our egoism, and quietly, to themselves, giving us the laugh!”

In the old days of animal training, Duke would have been just a lion doing routine things, because the trainers of those days didn’t know enough to realize that animals might possess individuality. But those days are gone. It is a different deal now; far more acts are suggested by the animals themselves than by any trainer. The man in circus demand is the person who knows enough to stand at one side and watch, then take advantage of what he has seen.

Which explains perhaps a sight many circus-goers have noticed—of a herd of young elephants romping in the mud of a show-lot, and an interested group of men standing at one side, cataloguing every move. Mud makes elephants actors. From a beginning of mud and rain come the balance artists of the elephant herd, the dancers, the “hootchie-kootchie” experts, and the comedians. All for the reason that mud to an elephant is like catnip to a lion or tiger. It is part of an elephant herd’s routine of health to send it forth into the mire and rain of a “wet lot” and let the members play like so many tremendous puppies. And while they play, the trainer observes.

No two do the same thing in the same way; the individuality is as marked as in the members of any human kindergarten class. The trainer therefore has simply to pick his “bulls” for the various things he wants them to do when they have graduated into performers, one to walk upon his hind legs, another to dance in the ring as he danced in the happiness of sticky mud, one more to sit on still another’s head, and so on throughout the routine. There is hardly an elephant act that has not been first done voluntarily at some time in the antics of a play-fest in the mud.

However, after learning an elephant’s aptitudes comes the real job, that of making him know that he is to do these tricks as a part of his livelihood, and to recognize them by cues. An elephant doesn’t measure his weight by pounds; he runs to tons, and to teach him the rudiments of his life-work under canvass is a matter of everything from blocks and tackle to lifting-cranes.

Combined with one ultra-essential point: the elimination of pain. There is no braver beast than an elephant, and no greater coward; no better friend and no worse enemy. Injure an elephant when he is a baby, combine the thought of pain with the idea of work, and some day it all will come back in a furious, thundering engine of destruction that not only wrecks the circus, but signs his own death warrant. Bad elephants must be killed; and when that happens a circus checks off anything from $4000 to $10,000 on the wrong side of the ledger.

Therefore, the early training of a pachyderm is a delicate affair. First of all, the student is led to the “class-room” accompanied by an older and more experienced “bull.” Then, while the new applicant for performing honors watches, the older elephant is padded about the legs and tied; following which the blocks and tackles are pulled taut, causing the beast to lose its balance and fall on its side, the trainer meanwhile repeating and re-repeating the “lay-down” command. At the end of which the performer is allowed to rise and is given a carrot. Time after time is this done, while the student watches—especially that part where the feeding comes in. It all has its purpose—to attempt to fix in the new performer’s mind the fact that, in the first place, this schooling won’t hurt, and secondly that all a “bull” has to do to earn a nice, fresh carrot is to have a couple of ropes hooked to his legs and be pulled over on his side. So quick is the intelligence of some elephants that instances have been known of the beasts learning their primary lesson on the first attempt. Others, hampered by fear, have required a month.

In the same way is every other rudimentary trick taught. The elephant is shown how to stand on his head by having his trunk pulled under him and his hind legs raised. After which he receives carrots. The reverse system is used for teaching him “the hind-leg stand”—and again the carrots appear. After this, the block and tackle is not a necessity except as a means of support, while hitherto unused muscles are strengthened. The animal has learned his alphabet; now it is simply a matter of putting the letters together, the words themselves being furnished largely by his own antics.

Incidentally, this new order of things in the training field has led to a different relationship between the man and the beast. There was a time when animals were only animals, to be taken from their cages, pushed through their tricks, then shunted back into their cages and forgotten. Things are different now. The average menagerie has become more of an animal hotel, with conveniences. The superintendent must be a person who has studied not only the beasts themselves, but their anatomy, in other words, a jungle veterinarian.

The boss of the circus menagerie of to-day doesn’t merely content himself with seeing that his charges are well fed. By a glance at the coat of a lion or tiger he can tell whether that beast has indigestion; ventilation is watched carefully to dispel the ammonia smell of the cat animals and thereby prevent headaches on the part of the beasts; teeth are pulled, ingrown toenails doctored, operations performed, and every disease from rickets to pneumonia treated and cured. And the fact that man at last has learned that beasts possess temperaments, individuality, emotions and a good many things that humans brag about has seemed to place them on a different plane. Where there once was cruelty there now is often affection, both on the part of the trainer, and also on that of the animal!

In the Al G. Barnes Circus, in California, for instance, is a great, sleek-muscled, four hundred-pound tiger, that is ever watching, watching, his eyes constantly on the crowds about his den, seeking but one person. At the sight of any blond-haired woman, he rises excitedly, hurries close to the bars, growling in gruff, yet pleased fashion. Then, with a second look, he turns and slumps to the floor again. It is not the person he seeks!

That tiger is a killer. He has murdered four other cat animals, two lions and two tigers, yet if the woman he awaits should appear, she could tie a cord string about his neck and lead him around the tent in perfect safety.

He is one of the few wrestling tigers in captivity. Twice a day for two years, in the steel arena, his claws unguarded, his great jaws unmuzzled, this four hundred-pound Bengal wrestled in almost human fashion with Mabel Stark, the woman who had raised him from cubhood, and whom he loved with a genuine affection. Once, in a motion picture, when it was necessary for the “double” of the heroine to appear as though she were almost killed by a tiger, Mabel Stark took the job. The tiger leaped and knocked her down. Then, while the cameras ground, he seemingly crushed her skull in his giant jaws. Yet those who watched saw that those jaws were closed so carefully, in spite of the swiftness of their action, that they barely dishevelled the trainer’s hair.

There came the time when Mabel Stark was called away to become one of the featured trainers for the combined Ringling Brothers-Barnum and Bailey Circus, the biggest circus of them all. Mabel Stark is far better known to-day than she was back in the days with Al G. Barnes. But with the circus she left behind, that tiger still watches, still waits and seeks constantly for one woman out of the crowds which daily throng through the menagerie, rising with hope, then dropping forlornly again to the floor, while, in the midst of her greater fame, Mabel Stark smiles and sighs, and talks of how wonderful it would be if she could only have her wrestling tiger!

It’s only one instance of hundreds. Up in Bridgeport, Connecticut, at the winter quarters of the Barnum show, lives Captain “Dutch” Ricardo, “the man of a thousand scars.” There was a time when they called “Cap” the biggest fool in the animal business—for “Cap” was one of the pioneers of the newer methods of animal training. It was he, for instance, who once walked into the office of H. H. Tammen, then owner of the Sells-Floto Circus, and made him a proposition.

“I understand,” he said, “that you’ve got a bunch of bad cats. Been beaten, ain’t they?”

“Yep,” came the answer. “Just about ruined too. That idiot I had got ’em so flighty they’ll kill anybody that goes into the arena with ’em.”

“I’ll fix ’em up for you,” announced “Cap,” laconically. “Say the word and I’ll go out there and start in on ’em.”

The circus owner swallowed quickly then reached for a liability contract.

“Er—just sign this first,” he announced, and “Cap” signed, releasing the circus from any possible damages for his death. Then together they went to winter quarters, Ricardo to make his first effort at training, Tammen to see a new trainer get killed.

“Want any help?” he asked.

“Nope—just two kitchen chairs.”

“Kitchen chairs? What for?”

“To train ’em with.”

Whereupon “Cap” got his chairs and a buggy whip. Then he ordered one lion into the arena, where he awaited it.

The lion took one look and sprang. Midway in the air, it struck something, roared in victorious fashion, then settled to chew it to pieces. But it wasn’t a man—it was that chair. He disentangled himself and leaped again, only to tangle himself with the second chair which “Cap” had tossed in his path. A third time, while again Ricardo broke the leap with the first chair which he had retrieved while the lion was breaking away from the second; then the cat paused to look his new antagonist over. So far he hadn’t been hurt at all. Merely foiled. Here was some one who could outwit him, and who really had him at his mercy, who didn’t beat him, but who, instead, talked and purred and meowed continually in friendly fashion. The lion didn’t leap again.

One by one the whole group was introduced to its new trainer. Not once was a gun fired. Not once was a cat struck, other than a sharp tap with that buggy whip. That season the “hopeless” act once more went on the road, and “Cap” Ricardo worked it!

In fact, “Cap” is a man of individual theories. Just as his kitchen chair was an idea of his own, so there are others.

“I’ll stick my head in any lion’s mouth on earth,” he says. “But,” with a wink, “I got a trick about it. Always chew tobacco, see? If the lion should happen to close down, I’d just let that tobacco go in his mouth. Ever notice how you’ll open your jaws sudden-like when you’ve got hold o’ something that tastes bad? Huh? Well, it’d be the same way with a lion. He’d turn loose and I’d take my head out.”

Which is an optimistic manner in which to look at things. The billing of “Cap” as “the man of a thousand scars” is only a slight exaggeration. He possesses them by the hundreds, for “Cap” is a specialist on undoing the misdeeds of others.

“It’s just this here old principle of red-hot coals, or coals of fire, or whatever you call ’em,” he explains. “Now, for instance, if you hit a man that’s tryin’ to be good to you, you’re goin’ to feel bad about it, ain’t you? Well, a cat, when he’s clawing you up—he knows what he’s doin’. Don’t ever get it in your head that he don’t. Particularly a tiger cat. I always did like tiger cats better’n I liked lion cats, at that. ’Course, lots of trainers will tell you different, but I’ve seen ’em all; I’ve been among the slums and I’ve been among the aristocrats, and what I claim is, the lions ain’t the king of beasts. But, be that as it may, a cat knows what he’s doing. And when he finds out he’s done a friend dirt, ain’t he goin’ to be sorry about it and do his best to make up? That’s my theory, and it works out too.”

Incidentally, one of these little coals of fire took shape one day while “Cap” was standing on the ballyhoo stand of a circus sideshow, a lion by his side. Inadvertently, he poked the lion in an eye, and the lion in turn bit off the middle finger of “Cap’s” right hand.

“But he didn’t mean to,” says “Cap”. “Figure yourself how surprised a guy gets when he bumps his face into a door in the dark. He never meant it.”

Which may sound as an unusual example. To a certain extent it is, for “Cap” and his theories have an outstanding place in the show world, the surprising thing about them being the fact that they have worked out to such an extent that he “breaks” a great many of the animal acts for the biggest circus in the world. However, there are other instances of affection between trainer and animal, almost as remarkable.

Out on a ranch in Colorado live a man and a woman who once were featured on the billboards of every city in the country. He was a menagerie superintendent, she a trainer of lions, tigers and elephants. But they troupe no more.

The circus does not represent to them what it once did. There seems a certain bitterness about it, a grimness which they are unable to dispel, and so they remain away. The elephant which they raised together from a three-year-old “punk” to one of the really great performers among pachyderms in America is dead, felled by volley after volley of steel-jacketed bullets during a rampage at Salina, Kansas, several years ago, in which he all but wrecked the menagerie and endangered the lives of hundreds of persons.

Loneliness on the part of the elephant for his old trainers is commonly accredited for his “badness.” But the circus had no other recourse; there were human lives to guard and only one thing was possible, to slay the maddened beast before it, in turn, became a slayer. But that argument doesn’t go with his former trainers.

“They surely could have found some way of holding him quiet until we got there,” is their plaint, “they just didn’t understand him! If they had even told him that we were coming, he’d have quieted down. He just wanted us, and we weren’t there, and he went out of his head for a while. If they’d only penned him up in the cars and then wired us, we’d have come; we’d have gotten there somehow!”

In answer to which the circus points to pictures of wrecked wagons, smashed ticket boxes, torn side walling, and overturned animal dens—in vain. The trainers can’t accept the argument.

“The circus wouldn’t be the same—without Snyder,” is their reply, and the big tops go traveling on without two stellar performers.

A similar incident came in Texas, during the necessary killing of another elephant on the same show, which had become maddened through “must,” and was virtually insane. He had torn the menagerie almost to shreds, injured one man, and was holding a whole town at bay. And while circus men hastened for army rifles, the executive staff struggled with a woman who strove by every means of feminine aggressiveness to break from their grasp, and go to that elephant.

“Let me go, you idiots!” she screamed in hysterical fashion. “I can handle him! I’m not afraid—let me go! Let me go!”

She had trained the elephant for two years, and it had obeyed her every command. With any other pachyderm, she would have understood that the natural condition of “must” brings insanity, and that, when in this condition, it recognizes no one, understands no command, and knows nothing save the wildest sort of maniacal antagonism toward everything, animate or inanimate, which may come into its path. But her faith in this particular beast had transgressed even beyond good sense. It was necessary to drag her from the circus grounds by main force before the first shot could be fired at the unfortunate beast!

Nor does the love of animals always confine itself to the trainer. Workmen of the circus are shadowy beings; few persons know whence they come, what their life before they drifted into the nomadic, grim life of the “razorback,” the “canvasman” or the “big top roughneck.” There are stories by the scores in the unshaven beings who sleep about the lot in the afternoons; stories of men whose finer cast of features tells of a time when all was not work and long hours, hints of hidden things in the shadows; they are men who seldom write a letter or receive one. And they are lonely.

Human companionship often does not appeal to them. But the friendship of animals is a different thing. Perhaps it is because they can talk to these beasts during the long hours of the night, as the circus train rocks along on its journey from town to town, knowing that their confidences will not be revealed. Nevertheless, the fact remains that more than one workman has been left behind in an alien burial ground, with no close human friend to know of his death, and with only a lion or tiger or elephant to watch for a companion who never again appears.

More than once also I have seen laborers of the circus volunteer to “sit up” with a dying orang-outang or chimpanzee, doing their work by day, remaining awake at night and nursing the beast in the hours of darkness; at last, lonely again, tears in their eyes, to shuffle on out to their hard, grim, dangerous labors, while a still form remains behind, to be buried behind the big top, after the matinée. It was such a case as this that formed a story which a certain circus owner likes to tell, as he explains one of the reasons why the workmen of his show are better treated than they were in other days, and furnished with more conveniences and accommodations. For in this case it was the man and not the animal that suffered tragedy.

No one around the show even remembers his name. They only know that his loyalty and devotion in a strange friendship caused a soft-hearted circus owner to become far more interested in the workmen than ever before, almost to the point of sentimental solicitude. The recipient of that loyalty, incidentally, was rather grotesque,—Bon, the baby hippo, or, in circus language, “the blood-sweating behemoth of Holy Writ.”

Four men carried Bon to the show when he arrived, a fat aimless-appearing baby river hog from the Nile Country. The press agents properly exploited him. Which Bon didn’t seem to relish whatever, for all that the baby hippopotamus did was whine. One day the menagerie superintendent received an inspiration.

“That hip’s lonesome,” he announced to an assistant. “Round up one of them there ‘roughnecks’ and put him in with it—see if that does any good.”

The “roughneck,” known only as Mike, was obtained, and paid a few dollars extra a week for the discomfort of sleeping in the same cage with a hippopotamus. A silent, taciturn individual, he had told nothing of himself when he came on the show; his name had been plainly a makeshift, and the circus, with other things to think about, had made no inquiries.

The baby hippo ceased to whine. Gradually, it was noticed that the “hippopotamus nurse,” was taking more and more interest in his charge, pilfering bread for him from the cookhouse, or cutting fresh grass from around the circus lot, when he should have been resting during matinée hours. A month passed. The hippo seemed cured.

“Guess you can go back to your bunk now,” said the menagerie superintendent.

The “hippo nurse” nodded. But the next morning, the superintendent found him again in the behemoth’s den.

“Just thought I’d sneak out an’ see how he was gettin’ along,” came the explanation. “An’ he was whinin’—so I stuck with him.”

The superintendent winked—to himself. Two dollars a week extra is a fortune to a circus roughneck.

“Nix on that stuff,” came finally; “the pay’s stopped.”

“Yeh. I know it.”

And Mike continued to sleep in the hippopotamus den—without pay. Another month passed. Two more after that. The circus rounded into its trip down the west coast, for its final effort at possible dollars before the cold weather closed in. Then, one night, the emergencies suddenly clamped hard. There had come a shrieking cry from the shrouded wagons atop the flat cars, the warning of that feared thing of the circus:

“Fire! F-i-r-e!”

FEED A HIPPOPOTAMUS AND HE’LL DO THE REST.

BON, THE BABY HIPPO, FOR WHOM A MAN GAVE HIS LIFE.

Hurrying men “spotted” the cage where a red glow had shown for an instant, then faded—the hippopotamus den, evidently set afire by a spark from the engine. The train stopped. Workmen and performers rushed forward.

The den was dripping with water, evidently carried from the circus water-cart just ahead. A bucket lay beside the cage. But Mike the “hippo nurse” was not to be found.

Then came a shout. They had discovered him by the right of way, his neck broken; in the fight for his grotesque comrade’s life, he evidently had slipped on the top of the den and fallen from the train. Death had been instantaneous.

But that last bucket of water had extinguished the fire.

CHAPTER II
TRAMPING IT TO CAGEDOM

ALL the romance about a circus isn’t confined to its sprawled tents, its beauty and rhythm of performance, its life of the padroom and dressing tents, its screaming calliope, bringing up the rear of the parade. Nor does it always concern its people, romantic as their lives may be. Oftentimes there is another angle, of which the public hears little; even the sideshow lecturer doesn’t touch upon it. That angle concerns the animals.

All because there are often animals with a past in the circus, which have come to it by far different means than the customary ones. Beasts that greet the little seaport towns of the coast countries with strange yowlings and excitements, which only the circus people understand. Those animals might not even recognize a jungle. But they recognize the sea—often it means the happiest home they ever knew, a home to which they went as babies, forgetting the natural habitat where they had come into the world, and gaining their impressions of life from the deck of a rolling vessel, with every member of the crew for a friend and playmate. The next time, for instance, that you see one of the great apes, and notice a strange, wistful expression in his eyes, don’t fancy that he is grieving for his jungles. Rather, he may be longing for the fo’c’stle of a tramp steamer wallowing in the great waves, the phosphorescence of a tropical sea gleaming at the prow and wake, the sailors sprawled about and this great ape a seaman also, counting it all as his home and his happiness.

For the tiger, the lion and the other members of the cat tribe, for most of the elephants and for practically all the ruminants or hay eaters which find their way into the menagerie of a circus, there is an organized business which provides the channels by which wild beasts become the tamed, or at least, the occupants of zoölogical cages. A business in itself, with branches in various parts of the world, training quarters, shipping facilities and all the other necessities for the capture and handling of anything from a secretary bird to a rhinoceros; this form of enterprise, conducted principally by Hagenbeck of Hamburg, forms the principal means of providing the hundreds upon hundreds of wild animals which go to make up the zoölogical collections of the country. But opposed to this is a different form of entry in which the lines are not laid in such regular fashion, and by means of which some of the greatest animal personalities of circusdom have found their way to America—those off-course wanderers of the sea, the West-coasters or tramp steamers which rarely touch port in America without making an addition to this country’s menageries. This portion of the cargo never appears on the records. It’s a sideline which has yielded many a story of animal importation, and without which, in all probability, some of the most widely known giant apes that ever have been in captivity still might be wandering the jungles.

Apes, the chimpanzee, the orang-outang, the gorilla, look upon bars and cages in the same light that a human being views them. They mean prison. It is only when a friendly relationship has been established, and the beast knows that incarceration is not a form of punishment, that close captivity is accepted. Therefore, these beasts cannot be simply taken from the jungle, slapped into a cage, and brought to the circus. More, they cannot endure the cold weather so often attendant upon a landing upon the eastern coast. The result is that the Pacific Coast is the natural landing point for these animals, and their means of entrance in the majority of cases, the captain or first mate of a tramp steamer, augmenting his earnings by bringing new specimens of apedom to captivity. Where the tramps touch on foreign shores, there the natives know that a jungle animal, and particularly one that can be given the run of the ship, is a thing desired. With the result that rarely does one of these tramps start, America bound, without an extra passenger; which comes to know the ship as home, the sailors as friends and the sea as a place to love. That memory lingers.

A number of years ago, I happened to walk into an unpretentious little “bird store” in Portland, Oregon. A bell, attached to the door, jingled in the rear, whence came the noise of a hammer, pounding against tin. A voice sounded, guttural, yet kindly.

“See who it is, Bill.”

A cooing, squealing call responded. Then, while I gaped, there came from behind the partition, walking sloppily erect, a great, bowlegged, long-armed orang-outang, which trundled behind the counter, rested one arm upon it, gazed at me for a moment, handed me a package of birdseed from a shelf, then with excited cries and cooing ran behind the partition again. A moment later, a grinning German, hammer still in hand, came forth.

“He vould nott be happy unless he answered dot bell!” he announced.

Which was fine for Bill. But, as the store-owner confessed laughingly, it was a little hard on the customers, especially those who didn’t know that Bill was amiable and harmless. His response to my entrance had been an extraordinarily tame affair; he usually jumped to the top of the counter, slapped his hands excitedly as if in an effort to understand what the customer wanted, then with a wild swoop descended to the floor again, seized a paper sack, filled it with sunflower seed and passed it forth. If the customer became frightened, the old bird storekeeper was very, very sorry. But Bill must have his joke!

For Bill, to his old German master, was all but human. Before his bird store days, the owner had sailed the seas as the captain of a tramp freighter, and his ship never had been without a simian mascot. Then he had taken to land and as a present, his former first mate, now the Captain, had brought him, after nine months of wandering about the ocean, this orang-outang. Bill had been one of the crew aboard ship. Now he became one of the proprietors of the bird store, for he was something more than an orang-outang to the owner of the little “emporium”—he represented the life that the old skipper loved, and if the customers didn’t like the association of the strange, grinning creature, that was just too bad. The owner liked him and that was enough.

So there they lived together, Bill and the Old Man, as he was known. Several years went by. Then one day, the old first mate came for a visit to his one time captain.

A scream sounded from the orang-outang. In the years which he had spent in the bird store Bill had learned to walk erect, but now, with swift jungle leaps, he ran toward the visitor, crawled up into his arms and clung to him, cooing and chattering. During the hours of the visit, he would not be separated, but at last the parting came.

“Stay there,” said the former first mate, “I’ll be back.”

They never met again. But those who knew the store told of a big orang-outang who sat for hours each day, watching the boats of the Columbia River which flowed behind the store; the whistle of a vessel, signaling for a bridge upstream would cause him to leap with excitement and hurry for the door that he might wait and wait until the ship had gone downstream. But he did not grieve. Apparently it was enough to watch the ships which represented the life whence he had come; he was happy in merely looking at them, as was the old Captain. Persons who knew the store told of the twain of them sitting on the steps together, the old salt’s arms about the shoulders of the orang-outang, and both of them looking out toward the river, where traveled the boats which represented the life which both once had lived. Then the proprietor died. The orang-outang went to a circus—and to a cage, away from his visions of the sea. He died of grief within three months!

Strange, but the sea seems to have a fascination for simians—sentimental for the most part; sometimes otherwise. One of the money-making enterprises of tramp steamers which ply the West Coast is the landing of rhesus monkeys from South America, brought to this country in huge crates containing sometimes as high as fifty of the small creatures. It is inevitable that now and then a seaman should take a fancy to one of the monkeys and, taking him from the cage, make a ship’s pet of him. Naturally, it is a gradual affair, the seaman watching his charge until he has become familiar with his surroundings, and devoid of fright. This little diversion, however, in one instance led to tragedy.

The one simian which had gained the run of the ship evidently believed the same sort of life would be good for the rest of his comrades. He returned to the crate where, more by accident than anything else, he managed to release the latch which held the crate door. A moment later, the hold was swarming with monkeys.

This would have been all right, except for the intervention of another ship’s mascot, a large bull dog, which happened into the hold about that time, saw the strange occupants, and began an excited chase. The monkeys moved for the deck, scampering across it and at last bringing up, huddled and excited, upon a life raft. Then one of them glanced below and saw the sea beneath, rushing past as the ship moved on its journey.

He chattered and gesticulated. The others crowded about him, dazed, hypnotized, it seemed, by the movement of the water. Evidently the same fascination which attacks a person at the edge of a high roof had come over these tiny animals. A moment more and with a weird cry, one of the monkeys leaped—to his death in the sea. Then another, and another and another—before the crew could rescue a single member of the escaped band, every one of them had yielded to the strange power of suggestion and had leaped into the ocean, there to struggle wildly for a moment, then be lost in the swirling wake.

But the lure of the sea, as a general thing, is of a different sort. Whether it is the movement of the ship, the kindliness of the sailors, the association of human beings and the knowledge of freedom, little is known, for simians cannot speak our language. But the certainty remains that for the animal which has lived on shipboard as a mascot, the memory remains, pleasantly, appealingly. Several years ago, a circus was in Seattle, and the menagerie superintendent was approached by a townsman, offering for sale five red faced apes, a female with a baby, and three males, one adult, the other two half grown. They had been landed a week or so before by a tramp steamer, bought as a speculation by the man who now offered them, and who apparently knew little of animals or their care. The price was exorbitant and was refused. The owner persisted that they were unusual specimens, and that, if the superintendent would only look at them, he would be attracted sufficiently to pay the price. The superintendent agreed to a visit—then went back to the circus, grieving that he could not pay the price. For those apes were being mistreated.

They were incarcerated in an old, dirty barn, lightless, damp, chilly. The speculator, knowing nothing of simians, believed it necessary to beat them at every opportunity, and to this end, made his entrance to the barn, armed with a broom handle which he used to drive the unfortunate beasts before him. The superintendent was soft-hearted. He went to the owner and begged for the increase in price necessary—at last to receive it. Then, that night, he hurried for the shed in which the apes had suffered, only to be met by the surly announcement of the speculator that the beasts had slipped past him when he had gone forth to feed them that evening, and had escaped. It seemed that the episode had ended. But there was to be a sequel. Four weeks later, in San Francisco, a sea captain approached the superintendent.

“Want to buy five red faced apes cheap?” he asked.

The circus man nodded in assent and asked the price. The sea captain scratched his head.

“Darned if I know what they’re worth,” he announced. “Guess I can make it pretty reasonable though. They didn’t cost me anything. Just came down from Seattle with a load of lumber. Two days out one of my men notified me that there was a monkey down in the hold. I thought he’d been drinking too much and went down to see for myself. Then I decided that I’d been the one that was doing the drinking. There were five of ’em, scared to death! Three males and a mother and a baby—.” “What’s that?” The superintendent stared. “Let’s take a look at ’em!”

The captain led the way. Down at the ship, the superintendent found five apes, now tame and apparently happy in human association. The seaman waved a hand.

“Haven’t got the slightest idea where they came from. They must’ve stowed away with the lumber. Still, they’ve been used to people. Scared of us at first and huddled together and chattered. But when they saw that we weren’t going to hurt ’em, they came round all right and have been regular pets.”

The superintendent went forward to an examination—and an identification, by means of a scar on the right hip of the female. He asked the captain for his sailing date from Seattle, and found it to have been early on the morning following the escape of the five apes from the barn in which they had been cruelly imprisoned. After that the explanation was obvious.

The animals had been brought to this country on a tramp steamer upon which their associations had been happy ones. Like all simians they had come to love the sea, and naturally, with their liberation, they had turned toward the shipping docks by instinct. In the darkness, they had clambered aboard the first ship they found, which happened to be this coastwise freighter. With the result that the circus recovered its red faced apes, and a sea captain went back to his freighter announcing that romance wasn’t dead on the blamed old ocean after all!

In fact, romance is very much alive, as far as simians are concerned, for it is due to the tramp steamer that most of the big apes reach America alive. There is no more sensitive creature than the chimpanzee or the orang-outang. Grief, moodiness, sorrow—these things sap the life of a great ape as surely as any malignant disease; refusing food, water, the big simian that is captured and brought to America by the usual methods of caging, too often dies before it ever reaches the circus. But with the tramp steamer, all is different.

In the first place, the West-Coasters travel for the most part, through warm climates an essential to the health of the average “big monk.” But above all things, there is association.

The great apes are usually purchased in their youth and taken aboard merely as a speculation. An adult ape is worth more than a young one, with the result that the chimpanzee or the orang-outang often becomes an occupant of the ship for several years, becoming the mascot and the friend of every man aboard. He runs the rigging and climbs the masts, he loafs about the forecastle and dances in awkward fashion to the playing of the accordion or the singing of the songs with which the seamen pass their idle hours. He is the pest of the galley, the comedian of the mess room; there have been cases known where the beasts have been taught simple tasks, following the sailors about at their duties and making ludicrous efforts to work also. It is a happy life for these animals; through their imitative natures they learn tricks and comicalities. Above all, they have health and strength, and when full growth does come, the sea captain knows that he is going to gain a heavy return on his investment. With the result that one day, a ship’s mascot goes ashore, ambling past harbor officials who have seen him take the same kind of a trip many times before. But this time he doesn’t return and a circus begins to advertise an addition to its menagerie.

Nor are the simians all which arrive in this fashion. The next time you see a particularly expert boxing kangaroo, inquire into his past. In all probability that “kang” learned his tricks while a laughing crew lolled about the deck of a lumbering freighter for which he formed the mascot and general humorist, while some particularly burly sailor tried his best to outbox him, only to fail.

Outside this, the list of “regulars” which come to cagedom via the tramp steamer, is small. There are other importations, it is true—Little Hip, perhaps the most famous performing baby elephant that ever came to this country, arrived via trampdom, the pet of every sailor on the ship. Now and then members of the cat tribes are brought in also—but this is not a good cargo. When there’s an animal aboard, the sailor likes to be one in which he can exhibit friendliness, and there’s little of the chummy spirit about the lion, the leopard and the tiger. Then too, there is the matter of food; fresh meat in quantities sufficient to feed a three or four hundred-pound cat animal, does not abound upon the tramp steamer. But there are enough exceptions to prove the rule; among them the case of “Nig,” a queer-shapen, mysterious appearing black jaguar which is now a feature with the Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey Circus, midnight hued, apparently the most vicious beast in the whole menagerie, continually “fighting” his trainer, Mabel Stark, yet subservient to her with a queer sort of cat-love which amounts almost to worship. For it all there is a reason.

“Nig,” far in his past, was a ship mascot. In his cubhood days, when he was no larger than a house cat, he appeared at a South American port in the arms of a native who had found him in a swamp, saw in him a few pieces of silver and hurried seaward. A tramp steamer lay in port, a captain bargained grumpily for him and “Nig” went aboard, to play about the decks, and to look upon this rolling, tossing ship as home.

The seamen amused themselves with him as one would fondle a housecat. “Nig” was nothing more to them than a big black tabby, and the ship was his to wander at will. But he grew steadily, to surprising proportions, and there came the time when the captain, fearful that he might some day lose his playfulness, began to look about for a purchaser.

The buyer appeared in the person of a South American circus owner and “Nig” went forth to a cage, and to a new life which he did not understand. All his days he had been free—why should he be caged now? And because he was caged, he became fierce; because he was fierce, the unknowing, unskilled menagerie men of the small circus regarded him as a thing to be passed by or merely shunted to one side with a feeding fork; to be cursed, and reviled as a hateful beast. Then a scout for the big American circus saw him and purchased him. They put “Nig” aboard a steamer, bound for America.

With that, “Nig” went wild. A ship to him meant freedom, the association of friendly persons, playmates. He roared and bellowed and tore at his shipping den. Night and day his heavy fore-legs lashed and clawed, his big body pushed and bounded and leaped; gradually the fastenings of the wooden shifting den began to weaken. The crew of the ship became frightened. No one would go near him to feed him. And as the days passed, “Nig” worked at his confines like a convict struggling to escape from prison.

A wireless flashed into New York—for armed men to go to the docks that they might be ready to kill him in case he broke loose during the unloading process. But American circus men are different from those of other countries. The armed men went, but with instructions to do everything possible to save the beast’s life. His future trainer, Mabel Stark, went also. A roomy cage was provided. Out from the hold came the shifting den, weakened in its every fiber, while a loathsome appearing black thing, his head already through a gaping aperture, strove at escape. Down to the docks and a hasty transfer to the big cage. Then the crooning voice of a woman:

“Hello Nig! There, Nig, old boy! You’re all right—you’re among friends! Nice old Nig!”

Gradually the beast ceased to roar and bellow and leap. At last he came to the bars, and the hand of a woman scratched at his head. The fierce beast was dangerous no longer. All he had wanted was kindness and companionship!

CHAPTER III
CHARACTER IN THE CAGES

ONCE upon a time I saw a gang fight, down in the gas-house district of New York. The street had been quiet a moment before, save for two men walking toward each other, and a group of be-capped, furtive-eyed individuals lounging in front of a cigar store, intent upon nothing, apparently, save loafing. Then the first blow was struck as the two men met!

Immediately that crowd of loafers leaped into action; soon they were crowded about the fighting pair; darting and leaping in their attempt to reach the man whom they strove to overcome. At last the struggling twain broke for a moment, giving an opportunity for the gang to reach its victim; soon the overpowered man lay an unconscious thing of welts and wounds upon the pavement, while the gang slunk away into places of hiding lest they be discovered upon the arrival of the police.

Not so long ago, I saw another gang fight. This time the scene was not a city street but the “permanent cages” of a menagerie in the winter quarters of a big circus. The victim was a hyena; the gang composed of striped Bengal tigers. But the tactics were just the same!

One began the fight, centering every attention of his victim upon himself. Then while the howling, loathsome hyena strove his best to ward off the attack of a superior foe, the three other Bengal tigers crept upon him unaware, caught him with their heavy claws, dragged him through an opening beneath the sliding door of the cage partition—then ripped him to pieces! It was the gas-house district fight all over again!

In fact, when quarrels and bickerings and temper are concerned, one encounters some strange things in the menagerie of a big circus—and for it all, there is only one parallel. For once a person becomes interested enough to look behind the scenes. The menagerie ceases to become such; it metamorphoses into a distinct community. The investigator finds that everything with which a chief of police is forced to cope in an ordinary town is work for the menagerie superintendent also. The same fights, the same quarrels, the same hatreds are there; the only difference is that the chief of police has the advantage. He copes with human beings, to whom he can talk, and whom he can warn against future infractions of the law. The law-breakers under the supervision of the menagerie superintendent are animals; one can’t punish a lion by fining him five bones. He doesn’t know what is meant by it and simply stores up a new grudge because he’s been deprived of his food, while the rest of the menagerie is glutting itself with an extra portion.

With the result that there is far more lawlessness in the menagerie than there is in the community. When Bill Jones comes home to dinner with a headache there may be a quarrel because of his grouch, and he may tell his wife that she’s the world’s worst cook, or make a few other choice and personal remarks, but as a rule, he doesn’t pick up the ax and carve his initials in her head with it. But when some one crosses a lion that’s suffering from headache, the sky’s the limit. Into action leap his claws and teeth, and unless there are plenty of prod bars and feeding forks handy, the result, all too often, is another family murder. When a jungle beast is the owner and possessor of a side-splitting headache, he doesn’t care how soon he kills his mate, the quicker the better. After which, perhaps, he can get a bit of uninterrupted rest.

More, in the menagerie, a headache is a perfectly good alibi. It wouldn’t amount to much for a man to stand in court and announce that he killed his wife because his head or tooth ached, or because he had an ingrowing toenail. But in the menagerie, the justifications are a bit different. Animal men realize that the caged charges under their care cannot know what is wrong with them, and what gives them such a terrific grouch, and so they blame themselves when these things happen and render a verdict:

“We, the jury, find that the Lioness Trilby came to her death because she bothered Duke, who was suffering from indigestion.”

For, let it be known, all these things happen with animals. Headaches, indigestion, sore feet, tuberculosis, pneumonia, rheumatism, toothache, ingrowing toenails and even insanity are all logical excuses for assault and battery, even murder, when the culprits are the caged beasts of a menagerie or zoo. To say nothing of the hundred and one other and more natural causes which bring trouble, and which, by the way, can be found also on the police blotters of any large city. For, just as greed, hate, avarice, theft, the desire for power, the difference between races, viciousness and downright cantankerousness cause trouble for the police of a community, so do these things breed excitement in the menagerie. Behind every quarrel of the cages there is a reason, such as one finds in the records of the emergency hospital, or upon the complaint books of the police and justice courts.

INDIGESTION MAKES A LION VICIOUS IN THE ARENA.

NEVER TRY TO DO THIS IF THE LION HAS A HEADACHE.

Of all the causes, perhaps the physical ones are the occasions of the most brawls, those brought about by indigestion, headache and the sort. Sounds a bit unusual, doesn’t it, that animals should be subject to the same ailments as humans? Yet, on consideration, it shouldn’t. The mechanical construction of the body is about the same; why shouldn’t it be subject to the same ills? Headache, for instance, or rheumatism.

However, rheumatism with animals comes most often from a certain thing—inbreeding. When the father and the mother of the beast are too closely related, the result is a knotty, stumbling cub, practically saturated with rheumatism. The further result is a mean-minded animal, built upon the same principles as the human incorrigible. More than one “untamable” beast has been cured of rheumatism and become perfectly tractable. No mind in the world can be peaceable with every joint of the body aching!

The same is true of toothache, and in one instance, at least, I’ve seen it lead to some surprising things. Whether you know it or not, the hippopotamus, contrary to general belief, is one of the most amiable animals of the whole menagerie. A great river hog, he has little thought save his tank, his carrots and hay, and to be let alone. With one of the big shows is one of these beasts that is so tractable that he is allowed to wander at will wherever he cares to do so, and until a few months ago, his wanderings, especially when the show was in winter quarters, were made a thing of continual woe by two baby elephants who persisted in tormenting the poor old hippo by every sort of trick which came into their brains. They would slap him with their trunks, then move swiftly away. They would butt him about the yard, steal his food, and in general make life a burden, while the hippopotamus did nothing save grunt in piteous fashion and strive his best to get out of their path. Then came the change.

Bon, as the river hog was called, on a warm day this spring, waddled as usual into the winter quarters yard. The two elephants were there to receive him and to start their usual pranks. But the first move brought disaster. Wide open went the long-toothed mouth of the hippo, a bellowing grunt came from his big throat, and the elephants started hurriedly in the other direction, while Bon, pig-eyes gleaming viciously, short legs spraddled, strove his utmost to overtake them. At last he cornered them behind a parade wagon under one of the sheds and there he held them, trumpeting and squealing, until the animal men came to their assistance. But even then Bon would not release his victims. Instead he rushed at the caretakers, and for a time held the whole menagerie yard at bay, until his heavy cage could be pushed into position, other dens placed about him to form a barricade, and the hulking beast at last forced into his prison. Even there he continued to bellow and “open up,” until the circus men believed they had found something new, a hippopotamus that had gone “bad.” However, the superintendent held a different idea.

“Thought I noticed a hole in one o’ them tushes when he opened up the last time,” he announced. “I’ll wait until he quiets down and take a look.”

More, when the time for the investigation came, it was found that Bon possessed a cavity in one of his big teeth almost large enough to admit two of the superintendent’s fingers, and so deep that it was quite evident that the nerve was exposed. A veterinary was called and given the biggest dental job he ever had tackled, that of killing the nerve of a hippopotamus tooth, extracting that nerve, filling the root canals and then plugging up the hole. Nearly three weeks was required for the task, as it was necessary to kill the nerve by degrees, with the hippopotamus lashed by a perfect network of chains, and his big mouth held open with blocks and tackles. But it was accomplished, and since then, Bon has been his old, amiable self again.

As to the indigestion and the headaches, sometimes they go together, and sometimes they don’t.

On the circus, life is a matter of constant travel. The show is here one day, a hundred miles farther on the next, while always a day in advance is an overworked individual called the “twenty-four man,” whose task it is to provide the circus with everything it needs, even to the meat which is fed the carnivorous animals. Naturally, with one town a metropolis and the next a village, there are various grades and conditions of meat. One day the food will be a cold-storage product, the next perfectly fresh, and perhaps on the third slightly tainted. The result is indigestion on the part of the cat animals, a headache, a bad appearance, dull eyes, and a mammoth grouch. Those are the times when the trainers look sharper than usual. A lion with indigestion and a headache doesn’t care much for consequences. He’s looking for trouble. As to the specific headache, have you ever noticed that a menagerie carries a peculiar odor all its own? That’s what brings the headache: too much “aroma.”

Every cat animal gives off this particular body-odor, which is saturated with the fumes of ammonia. The result is that unless there is plenty of ventilation, the ammonia so loads the air that the breathing of it clogs the brain and brings a terrific headache. I have seen everything, man and brute, suffering from this cause in menagerie houses poorly equipped for ventilation, and forced to be closed tightly because of extremely cold weather. In the summer, the beasts themselves suffer on “long runs” where the cages are “boarded up” for an unusual length of time; there is not sufficient air circulation to carry away the ammonia smell and the result is an ear-splitter of a headache. It’s often also the cause of some twenty or thirty encounters that may run all the way from a sharp spat between two caged animals to an actual murder! Which explains the fact that on hot days—if you’ve ever seen a circus on the move—the side boards often are let down from the cages, and a virtual menagerie display of cat animals is given by the show trains as it moves through the small cities along its route to the next show stand.

As to the other natural causes, the surest way to bring bad temper to an elephant is to neglect his feet. The great weight of the beast and the constant succession of pavements results in “corns” between the big toes, or great patches of callous on the ball of the foot, and unless these are carefully “chiropodized,” there is a bad elephant in the herd. An elephant weighs from two to three tons. You can imagine that weight pressing on a “corn!” He becomes fretful, irritable and dangerous. The result is that the feet of circus elephants are inspected regularly, and that every “bull-keeper,” as the superintendents of the herds are called, is an expert in elephantine chiropody!

The same, in a measure, is true of the cat animal keepers, except that their greatest care regarding the feet of the beast must concern the claws, lest they turn back into the flesh. A circus with which I once was connected possessed a big leopard, and one that was considered the most tractable of the whole group of performing “pards.” One morning when the cage was opened, it was to reveal a hissing, red-jawed brute, his body splotched with blood, and his mate dead in a corner of the den. An investigation brought the reason: he had been maddened by the pain of a claw which had turned back into his flesh, and which drove like a knife thrust with his every step! He hadn’t really desired to kill his mate; he merely had become so frantic with pain that his senses for the moment left him, and he murdered while under the influence of a thing he could not control. So the animal men chalked it up to mental aberration, and let it go at that. For even with animals they’ve encountered insanity in its true form, even hallucinations!

BABY WILD CATS, AND THEY LOOK THEIR PART.

It came in the being of Buddha, a great, beautifully striped Bengal tiger on one of the shows a few years ago. The beast belonged to a performing group and was trained to refuse to enter its den at the conclusion of the arena performance until the trainer, apparently at the end of his resources, would bring forth his revolver and fire twice at the recalcitrant brute. Then the tiger would turn, and with a rush seek its cage, making a leap of some ten feet at great speed, for the entrance. However, one afternoon, it misjudged, leaping slightly to the right, with the result that it struck its head with crashing force against one of the steel uprights of the arena. For a second it scrambled wildly, then dropped to the ground. The trainer, seeing that the beast was unconscious, hurriedly unstrapped the arena gate and allowed the entrance of assistants, who loaded the stricken tiger into the cage. Once out of the circus tent, the trainer worked over the beast until consciousness returned, then boarded the cage up for the day, believing that rest and darkness would repair the damage.

But the next morning the glare of insanity was in the great cat’s eyes when the side boards were removed. It hissed. It roared. Then it leaped, as the trainer sought to approach. In vain the friend of other days tried to soothe it; all to no purpose. And the queer thing was that the gaze of the striped brute was far above the head of the trainer, and when it leaped, it struck at the steel bars at the very top of the cage. A hurry call was sent for the owner-manager, and that wise old showman stood for a long time in thought. At last:

“Bring me a piece of canvas,” he ordered, and an animal man hurried to comply. The owner placed the fabric on the end of a stick and pushed it to the very bars of the cage. The beast growled, hissed, then leaped again. But the claws struck the steel of the bars and fully two feet above the offending canvas! The owner grunted.

“Hallucinations!” he announced. “Sees everything about twice as big as it really is. That’s why it strikes so high.”

Following which test after test was resorted to, with the same result and the same verdict. Rest and darkness, pampering and quiet did not aid, though the circus man strove for months to return the tiger to its natural self. At last came the only remedy for a suffering thing,—a shot from a high-powered rifle, and the entry of a menagerie loss in the cause of humanity.

The same sort of action was necessary a few years ago in another circus when one of a group of four tigers suddenly developed fits while the show was on parade. But before Fred Alispaw, the menagerie superintendent, could perform an act of mercy, the companion tigers had given an example of cruelty toward one of their kind. The unusual actions of the Bengal seemed to madden them; before the shot could be fired, they had nearly torn their cage-mate to bits! When the hide of the beast was examined, it did not show a space larger than a six-inch square that had not been pierced by the claws of the other fright-maddened occupants of the cage.

Fear—fear of man, of unusual happenings, even of a flag which drops awry and flaps against the bars of a cage—is the biggest problem that the animal trainer has to face. The minute an animal becomes possessed of fear, he becomes possessed also of murder, nor is his best friend, man or beast, exempt from the effects of the desire to kill the first thing he sees. Mabel Stark, one of the widely known animal trainers, bears many a tiger scar simply because a “towner” horseman insisted on riding too close to the cage which she occupied with three tigers during a parade. The animals became frightened; they fought first among themselves, then turned almost simultaneously upon their trainer. When at last she was rescued, she was a mass of claw and tooth marks—and a hospital inmate for more than three weeks!

Greed and avarice too are always present. The exemplification of greed is especially apparent at a time when one would think it farthest away, at the time of mating. When the springtime comes and the birds twitter in the trees, when the young man walks up the maple-lined street with a box of candy under his arm, and when the unselfishness of love is in the air, that is when the cat animal of the menagerie becomes greedy. The lion or the tiger doesn’t woo his wife by offering her the best of the portion of horse-meat that is shoved to him through the bars. Instead, he eats his supply as rapidly as he can, then rushes toward his mate, gives her a good wallop on the side of the head, and takes her breakfast away from her. Or if the mate happens to be a bit stronger than he, she does the robbing. It’s all a matter of strength and determination, and the result usually is a glorious marital fight.

Incidentally greed, in one or two instances of menagerie life, has brought strange denouements. In one case, at least, it made a hero out of a coward, and reversed the regular rules of menagerie supremacy.

Although the lion may be the king of beasts in looks, actions, and honor, he is far from it in fighting ability. The clash between the lion and the tiger invariably ends in a victory for the striped beast, and in several encounters between King Edward, a big black-maned Nubian, and Dan, a Royal Bengal tiger, the “king of beasts” had moved out second best. Evidently Dan realized the fact, for when the two were in the arena together, it was a constant succession of bullying on the part of the tiger, of cuffing matches in which the striped beast stood on his haunches and slapped the lion with quick, shifting blows, for all the world like those of a lightweight boxer, and of rumbling growls which sent King Edward hurrying to his pedestal whenever he came in the proximity of his enemy. But at last there came a reversal.

They were cage-mates, that is, they occupied a cage together, but not in company, if it thus can be explained. A two-inch wooden partition divided them, and while each had half a cage, neither ever was actually placed with the other. For several days King Edward had been “off his feed,” and to tempt his appetite, Lucia Zora, his trainer, conceived the idea of feeding him a live chicken. The fowl was thrust between the bars to squawk and flutter wildly, and at last to be captured in the big claws of the excited lion, which, like some overgrown house cat, began to toy with the tid-bit for a moment before devouring it. But just then, a new element entered, Dan the Bengal.

The tiger had scented the fowl and noticed the commotion on the other side of the cage. Frantically he had begun to work at the partition which divided him from the lion; finally in some fashion, he loosened the clamp, and then raised the dividing board, even as a person would raise a window, and rushed through toward the tormented King Edward. But this time the lion did not skulk away. Instead, the beast turned, a raging engine of destruction, and the fight that followed was the fiercest thing that the menagerie had seen in years. The animal men sought to separate them. It was useless. King Edward had reached the end of his submission, and Dan, through his greed, the end of his life. For the lion, disregarding all the usual leonine methods of fighting, suddenly adopted the tiger’s tactics, attacking from a position straight on his haunches, and with both forepaws working, instead of the usual one. The result was that soon the tiger’s claws were tangled in the greasy, heavy, armor-like mane of the lion—and useless. While those of King Edward ripped at the foe until Dan sank to the cage floor, a stricken, gasping, disembowelled thing. Then—and not until then—King Edward ceased his attack, disengaged his mane from the now useless claws of the Bengal, and went back to his feast!

In fact, the usual end of a quarrel which has its inception in greed or avarice is death. And those elements can be typified in queer incidents. An ostrich possesses three things, the smallest brain of any bird or animal of its size, the most powerful kick of anything except a mule, and a positive obsession for anything that glitters. A few years ago, a circus made a feature of two ostriches trained to draw a small cart in parade and in the entrees, keeping the big birds in a net-wire enclosure in the menagerie tent as an exhibition. The owner of the show possessed a large diamond ring, and it was one of his amusements to raise his hand over the enclosure and watch the antics of the weak-billed birds as they strove vainly to pull the glittering stone from its setting. Then one day a loose prong allowed the gem to drop within the enclosure!

A wide-eyed and somewhat excited owner gulped as he saw two thousand dollars worth of diamond fall into the straw and the two ostriches rush wildly for it. Then his eyes grew even wider as one of the birds raised a heavy foot, and with a straight, outward kick, sent his be-plumed companion reeling half across the enclosure. However, before the kicker could reach the diamond, the kickee was back on the job again, to release a series of blows, and the fight was on.

It continued for a half an hour, and ended only when one of the birds, by a swift and well-aimed blow, caught his adversary just at the junction of the neck and head, decapitating him. By that time, all idea of what the fight was about had left the tiny brain of the victor, and gasping, his wings raised, he wobbled to a far end of the enclosure and settled there, while the owner thrust a hand hurriedly into the straw, rescued his diamond and rushed for a jeweler.

“Lucky at that,” he mused, as he went out of the menagerie entrance, “you can buy ostriches for a hundred dollars apiece!”

So the list runs, even through to that of racial hatreds. The oft-repeated chase of the dog and cat, and the enmity which seemingly is never overcome between them, is repeated in the menagerie, with the exception of the fact that here it is the cat which chases the dog. It is almost impossible to work a leopard group in the same arena or ring in which a dog act has been worked; the canine scent arouses them to such an extent that they can think of nothing else than hunting their hereditary enemy. The same is true in a measure with tigers, and in a lesser degree with lions. In a few instances, cases have been known where lions and dogs actually have become friends, but with a tiger or leopard, never. The sole result of their meeting is a swift lunge, a crackling impact, a setting of the feline jaws at the base of the dog’s skull, and the breaking of its neck, all happening in an instant. Then the dog is devoured, nor can all the efforts of animal men or trainers drag the enraged beast from its prey.

In fact, the only thing that can arouse greater excitement among felines than a dog is that outcast of the animal world, the hyena. Here the racial lines are drawn sharply and distinctly; it is an enmity which is at high pitch always; the very proximity of a hyena cage will drive a tiger or leopard to madness, and if a feline is placed in the compartment opposite to a hyena, it seldom ceases its efforts until the day when some careless animal attendant leaves the partition door unclamped, when the feline can claw and tear until it raises the barrier and rushes through to annihilate its foe.

In lesser degree is shown the hatred of a tiger for a horse, the hatred of a puma for a bear, the hatred of a chimpanzee for an elephant.

REPRESENTATIVE CIRCUS DOGS.

Just as a warning, if you are a father or mother, and you decide some time to take your baby to the circus, never allow it to get within “reaching distance” of a leopard’s cage. Why, no animal man can explain, but the hatred of a leopard for a baby amounts almost to a mania, and the beast will fret itself into a frenzy in its attempts to reach through the bars, and catch its victim in its poisonous claws, pull it into the cage, there to kill and devour it!

So the list of emotional causes for menagerie quarrels is nearly run. But there remain two things in which the line is rather closely drawn between the beast and the human. One of them is the irritation of annoying things and the other is just general cussedness.

Have you ever been in a crowd—a tremendous, jostling, packed crowd—where every one is talking at once, where somebody steps on your toes, where the air is stifling, and there doesn’t seem room to breathe? And have you ever been able to come out of one of those crowds with your temper actually whole? The same is true of animals; it is a rule with the circus that when the crowd reaches unbearable proportions, the side boards of the animal cages must be put in place and the brutes allowed to rest in darkness and quiet. The irritation of constant, thick-packed throngs before their cages gets on their nerves to such an extent that there is danger of a general fight throughout the whole menagerie! More, in several cases the beasts have been known to vent their rage upon the crowd itself, and there is the constant danger that some one will be pushed too close to the cages. This would mean the instant extension of a poisonous set of claws, a roar and a slashing blow which might mean death. So, while the crowd may protest, the circus knows best, and closes the cages.

Cussedness? There are just two things to remember. Never try to make friends with a rhinoceros or a camel. They are the two crabs of the animal universe; evil-tempered, selfish, mean and vengeful. Not even the animal attendant ever knows when a rhinoceros is going to turn upon him; there does not seem to be a single element of the big, armored beast’s nature that admits of friendliness.

And the camel! He is the supreme grouch of the menagerie. He’s never in good temper. He’s the bestial dyspeptic of the universe, and he carries a weapon in his mouth that is worse than the far-heralded perfume of the polecat. When a camel decides that he doesn’t like you, he gives you his cud, with an aim that would cause the crack-hitting tobacco chewers of the country store to curl up in envy. And once you’ve become the owner and possessor of that cud, splattered over your person, the best thing to do is to hurry to the nearest store and buy yourself a new suit of clothing!

But the cud isn’t the only weapon of the camel. His temper is such that he uses everything available,—teeth, head and hoofs! He can kick like a bay steer, butt like a goat, and bite like a steel vise. More, once he decides upon a dislike, he doesn’t stop until he has made use of his every item of armament. But there’s at least one redeeming feature; once it’s all out of his system, it’s out!

In the circus, when an animal man discovers that he is the recipient of dislike on the part of the camel, he doesn’t attempt to cajole or threaten. He merely plants a bale of hay upon his back, covers this with a piece of canvas, then, walking close to the camel, does or says something to irritate the beast. The result is a quick thrust of teeth or hoofs, whereupon the animal man dumps the “dummy” on the ground and quickly moves to the nearest hiding place. The camel doesn’t even notice him; its every vengeful thought is bent upon that thing on the ground. For fifteen minutes the “slaughter” continues, in which the beast kicks the canvas-covered hay, bites it, spits upon it, butts it and tramples it. After which the animal man can approach with impunity. To the camel, the old animal man is dead, killed during a personally conducted slaughter. This new person he treats as some one he never had seen before, and all malice is gone.

In which, perhaps, was the beginning of that old circus axiom:

“If you can’t beat ’em—jine ’em!”

CHAPTER IV
KIDS OF THE CAGES

THE circus was in the “cracker neck” district; out at the front gates, there was quarreling and bickering, as time after time the inner ticket takers stretched a hand toward some scrawny woman with a gangly boy in her arms and exclaimed:

“Hey, Leddy! Two bits fer thet kid. An’ Leddy—’tain’t polite no more for gents to let women carry ’em aroun’.”

This was the district of “stair-steps,” of thin, narrow-shouldered women, trailed by processions of children, five and six in a line, thin-cheeked, narrow-necked, ill nurtured, and ill prepared, through too fast progeneration, for a chance in life. More than once the manager personally ushered some gaunt family through the gates when the frightened glance of the mother told all too plainly that there were no funds to take care of the progeny which she had hoped to slip past the ticket takers. For us of the circus, there was something pitiable about it all; the big show likes to take misery only for itself. With the result that the owner lost more than one quarter that day, because of persons admitted without a charge.

“Don’t need many ladders aroun’ this country,” said a facetious animal man. “All they have t’ do is line up the kids and walk on their heads. Ever see so many stair-steppers?”

“Shorty” Alispaw, menagerie superintendent, nodded.

“Reminds me,” he said, “I’ve got to be getting rid of a few of my own. Better be advertising ’em pretty quick; some carnival outfit may want ’em.”

He jerked a thumb toward a gilded cage in which romped what appeared to be three rather thin, but otherwise healthy leonine youngsters. I stepped closer.

“They look all right. What’s wrong with ’em?”

Shorty glanced again toward the cage, then looked out toward the crowded menagerie, where mothers still were herding their numerous broods along the sawdust pathways.

“Same as them,” came his announcement. “Stair-steppers. Second litter in a year. Not much difference between them and the humans. Bring ’em into the world too fast, and they’ll be on the bum somehow. Something always showing up after they get grown. Now you’d say those were perfectly healthy cubs, wouldn’t you?”

“Yes—maybe a little thin.”

“And weak in the hind quarters, and with poor hearts, excitable natures; all wrong on the digestion and a half a dozen other things. Same way as with human kids that’ve piled into the world too fast. Always yelping for the doctor.”

Which brought up the subject of menagerie kids in general, and a good many comparisons. For, after all, the child of the gilded cage isn’t so much different from the human baby.

There are the same trials and tribulations, the same squawks resultant from a bumped head, the same curiosity and mischievousness, and the same troublous times in becoming acquainted with the world and its manners, even to the extent of kindergarten. More than that, there are the personalities, the family traits; the children who are bright, the ones who are dullards; there is family pride, the don’t-care attitude; the mother who neglects her children and the father——

But fathers seem to run a bit short on family affairs in the animal kingdom, with the exception of one beast, the lion. The King of Beasts is the original home-lover, believes, according to his nature, that he has the finest little girl in the world for a wife, and stays with the children when their mother has other things to think about. What’s more, he is willing to protect them. In fact, he often is too good a protector; sometimes he actually kills them with kindness.

It is a menagerie rule that all animal mothers and their children shall be granted seclusion until the baby is accustomed to the circus world with its attendant bawling of ticket sellers, surging of the crowds, and the general excitement of circus day. Hence, ten days before the advent of children, the boards are placed about the cage and the mother is left in solitude. In this seclusion the babies arrive, to crawl and whine in darkness until their eyes open, then to live in the quiet and peace for a week more, until the nervous fears of the mother are over and the babies themselves are stronger and not so easily frightened by the throngs of onlookers about the cages. But sometimes the menagerie attendants make mistakes or are ignorant; the superintendent himself is a busy man. He cannot look after everything.

Thus it was that on a show with which I once traveled, Queen brought into the world three fuzzy little cubs. The menagerie superintendent had fastened the door tight and given his instructions that the side boards were not to be removed until he had given the command. In one half of the cage was the mother and her babies, while in the other compartment was Prince, the proud father, growling gruffly through the bars at his offspring. Parade time came and the menagerie superintendent went forth with the elephant herd, always a source of worry to a circus because of their temperamental natures and the danger of a stampede. Only a new man, hired that morning and not conversant with the details of the care of the cage inmates, was left in the big tent, and in his work he decided, like many another new man, and some new brooms, to be thorough.

Evidently, to his mind, some careless attendant had forgotten to take the side boards from the cage which housed Queen, Prince and their babies. The new man took them down; then, in his efforts to be thorough, decided to sweep out the cage. Queen was docile and made no objections to his interference, although nervous regarding her cubs. But Prince was plainly hostile; the lion father is ever ready to battle for his young. The result was that the new attendant raised the partition separating Prince from his family, and once the male had gone through the opening, the man sprang within to sweep out the cage. This done, he again raised the partition, and by the use of a feeding fork, sought to make Prince return to his own home. The efforts were useless.

The great lion became enraged to a point of fury. He fought the fork, clawing at it and seeking to bite the steel. He lunged against the bars, the great tent echoing with his roars—then suddenly appeared to consider that the attack was not against him, but against his offspring.

Queen, in the meanwhile, had picked up two of the cubs, carried them to a corner and was returning for the third when Prince saw it. A lunge and he had grasped the little ball of fur by the scruff of the neck, and with quick, pacing steps, had begun to carry it, seeking in his ignorant way for some place to hide it and keep it safe from harm. Into his side of the den he went at last and the attendant dropped the partition. But the great Nubian still paced; still the cub dangled from his tremendous jaws. The attendant strove to make him free the cub by harassing him; it only made matters worse. Prince offered no resistance; he only quickened his frightened, maddened pacing, and still carried the cub. When the parade returned and the menagerie superintendent entered the tent, he found the new man facing him with the announcement that Prince had taken one of his cubs and would not release it.

There was little time for reprimands. The superintendent affixed the side boards to the den as quickly as possible, hoping against hope. It was in vain. Prince, faithful, protective old Prince, had killed when he had sought to aid. The baby was dead, choked through the tightening of the throat skin as old Prince had carried it aimlessly to and fro, seeking a spot where it might be safe! That night, when the circus left town, it left also a somewhat bewildered man, still hazy from the volleys of epithets which had flown in his direction from the menagerie superintendent, and a little mound of earth out behind the big top, where slept a lion cub, dead because of a father’s instinctive desire for its protection.