Ride down any village street in India, and a score of lean dogs—brown and lemon-colored and mustard-colored and white—will dash out to bark at you and snap at your pony’s heels. A wave of your whip will scatter them, for they seldom have spirit; though, if your own dog chanced to be disabled and solitary, they might make a concerted effort for the sake of meat. They have much in common with the jackals, for it is with them and the crows and the vultures that they share the spoils of the village rubbish heap. They are pie-dogs—pariahs.
Their name is legion. They are so thick on the ground that few of them have individual names, or, indeed, individuality of any kind. Home and mastership are denied them, for the laborer in the fields has no leisure for imparting his individuality to a dog. He leaves them to fend for themselves and to tussle for malodorous trifles on the dunghill. Sometimes one of them steals from him. Then he breaks its back with a bamboo pole.
If he desires to insult his neighbor particularly, he calls him a dog, or the son of a dog; and, when he uses that term, he has in his mind just one of these. The neighbor is justly incensed, because he also has in his mind one of these. In fact they both picture a scarred, lean cur of nondescript color with furtive yellow eyes, a short coat rubbed bare in patches, a limping fore-leg, prominent ribs, and a skulking gait. And, having bandied so nameless an animal between them, they go their ways and wash.
Such is the village dog in India, and such was the Tailless One, concerned in this story.
He was so called to distinguish him from a score or more whose tails happened to be intact, his own having been severed by the heavy wooden wheel of a bullock cart when he was six months old.
Of his ancestry who shall speak? The like of his forefathers scrambled for Jezebel at the gate of Jezreel, just as he and his like were wont to scramble for perished ox-hide at the gate of Lungipur. Perhaps, long before either Jezreel or Lungipur were built, a sandy whelp of the wild—bigger than a fox, smaller than a wolf, but partaking of the lineaments of both—was taken and tamed by a man; cuffed and stoned and turned on to the dungheap; yet came back and haunted the steps of the man, who, pleased to have discovered a creature which delighted in buffets, called it his dog. Who knows? At least there lurked in the Tailless One some lost look of the wild.
It lay in the shape and the set of the head—a certain alertness—almost a nobility, if the eye rested there and traveled no farther. For the body and legs were degenerate. He had lived on pickings, and the fare had never filled his ribs. He had never been immersed in water, his only bath being of yellow dust, well suited to his color. Save for the head, he was a thing of shreds and patches, and even in the head there were disappointing elements—the eyes for instance. They were utterly expressionless. They never lighted up at the sight of food, or of a friend or a fight. There was no life in them. They were simply dull, yellow orbs, so dispassionate that they might well have been blind.
His mere survival was extraordinary, for he was by no means one of the fittest. He had suffered innumerable catastrophes. Often he had been set on, as the weakest, by all the dogs of Lungipur, and had only escaped, quivering with pain, when they had started scuffling among themselves. He had been bitten by jackals, stoned by boys, and more than once a back-breaking bamboo pole had been aimed at him.
He belonged to Lal Chand, who occupied a tumble-down hovel of mud and straw at one end of the street. He belonged, but he was not owned or recognized. At most he was suffered to exist in an incredibly foul yard at the back of the house, which he shared with gawky chickens, making his exits and his entrances by means of a gap in the wooden fence. If a neighbor, humorously inclined, twitted Lal Chand with the ownership of the Tailless One, Lal Chand would spit and once more register his oft-repeated vow of knocking the dog on the head. However, being loath to soil his hands, he never carried it out, though he ventured to hope that some one else would.
It must not be thought that Lal Chand was devoid of humanity. He was morose, perhaps—-mugra they call it in India—but then he had to keep himself and his son on what he could scrape from one small field—fifty rupees, or about sixteen dollars a year.
His wife had died of starvation, and, being unable to afford a second, he had centered all his hopes and joys in his little son—a brown baby of two years. He was a weazened child, with serious, unsmiling eyes in a big head, and a wretched body—but Lal Chand loved him. Though he went himself with an old rag round his middle, he bought a pink cap for the child at market. So, clad in a tinseled pink cap and a liberal coat of dust, the child would sprawl in the unsanitary yard with the Tailless One.
There was an old friendship between them, which had started prosaically enough. The child’s body had for some obscure purpose been smeared with ghi—a strong-smelling clarified butter, used indiscriminately for garnishing the dinner and the person—and the dog had been hungry. So the dog had licked the child, and the child had liked being licked. Thus a mutual benefit society bad been formed, and it had blossomed gradually into something more sentimental. Some instinct of play in the child and a desire to be owned in the dog had merged into a friendship. They would sprawl together by the hour in the dust. The dog would lick, and the child would play with its ears. But when, in the evening, Lal Chand was heard returning from his field, the dog would creep away through the gap in the fence, and Lal Chand would find his son alone.
Lungipur was on the edge of the jungle; and a wasteland, overgrown with scrub and thorn, pressed to the very fences.
Thus to pass through the hole in the fence meant walking from comparative civilization—as exemplified by chickens and a child—into the wild, where anything might lurk and anything might happen. There were paths in the wasteland, but they were stealthy paths, worn by wanderers—jackals and foxes and dogs. The rank lantana bushes closed over these little alleys and made the place almost impassable for man. No grass grew there and nothing thrived except the poisonous blackberries and the orange-colored blossom on the bushes. The ground was littered with boulders and dead wood and bones. The bones were perhaps the most prominent feature of the wasteland. There were so many of them, and they lay so strangely. Of the many animals that had died there, not one apparently had died naturally. They had all been mauled and dragged. Some bones still hung together. Some had been scattered. Some were white. Some were green with age. But two characteristics they had in common. They had all been picked clean, and they all owed their presence in the wasteland to the same agency—a panther.
For ten years—the age of the oldest and the greenest bones—he had been the scourge of Lungipur. He had first descended on the village in the heyday of his youth, glorious in his ruddy Winter motley, full of fire and zeal. On the very first night he had killed a young buffalo, and had found success so sweet and the village so conveniently placed that he had stayed ever since, living in a thick tangle of thorns on the edge of a nullah, from which fastness not even elephants could dislodge him.
Generally he struck in the dark, but in any case it was useless to attempt to shoot him. Living in the midst of them, he knew mankind too well. But when a young official, fresh from England, came on tour to Lungipur, he was generally shown the bones and persuaded to spend a few fruitless hours in a tree over the most recent corpse, in hope of the panther coming out to feed. But the panther never came on such occasions. He could gauge the unnatural silence and stealth which indicated hunting to a nicety.
The villagers, however, knew him perfectly well by sight. Hardly a man who had not some time or other seen him slinking through the wasteground and recognized him for the scourge he was. His life’s history was written on his body as well as on the ground, for little by little he had abated his early energy and deserted young buffaloes for ponies, and ponies for goats, and goats for dogs—each stage of his kills corresponding to a stage in his physical and moral decay. Thus the recent skeletons of his feasts were small skeletons, and he often went hungry. But there was no going back in this rake’s progress. Having once descended to killing dogs, he forfeited the nerve for the quick leap on to the back of a pony or a buffalo. And, after dogs, there was only one possible kill for him—the unspeakable thing—a child of man.
His once splendid coat had turned dull and patchy. His motley had lost the deep ruddy tinge and the gloss. He was scarred about the shoulders by wild pigs’ tushes, for on occasion he had had to fight for his pride of place. He was hairy-heeled, and lumbered in his walk. All the old, wonderful litheness of tread had deserted him. He was ignoble and mean—a dog stealer, a scavenger—and his days were numbered.
But, as has been said, there remained for him still one stage of degradation, and he took that stage too, when, hearing one evening the laugh of a child, he crept up to the gap in the fence. The unspeakable thing was in his heart.
He sat down, as a cat sits before a mouse hole, and waited for the dusk. Occasionally, as sounds came from the village— a dog’s bark, or the call of a goat, or the sound of a beaten drum—he turned his head. The gesture was furtive—guilty almost—and, though the ears went back angrily and the yellow teeth showed in the sullen, underhung jowl, it was the display of a craven in anger. He made no sound, and no other movement, save when he licked his lips.
The gap in the fance would just admit of the passage of his long, lean body. Just through the gap in the fence, he could hear the child laughing, as if in play. He could see one little brown foot.
The voice of Lal Chand was heard in the street. Slowly the Tailless One rose from beside the child and scratched his ear. Then, stretching his hind legs to take out the stiffness, he walked painfully toward the gap in the fence.
Suddenly he pulled up.
Who can say what passed through his head? It had been his habit to cringe. Cringing was bred in his bone. It was the lesson of his life. A look, a gesture, a sound had always been enough to make him cower and dive for shelter. Yet, at this moment, in the face of the most implacable enemy a dog knows, the thin hackles of his neck slowly rose, and he bared his fangs.
It can only be surmised that some dim spark of that marvelous instinct of service or slavery that makes a dog the friend of man kindled and flared even in this emaciated thing of shreds and patches, so that he remembered his forgotten heritage. For, though the body remained even in defiance the mean shell it had always been, the head took on a carriage almost of nobility, and, for the first and the last time in his life, the eyes lighted up.
At a bound he was through the gap in the fence.
The curious thing is that, if a man calls his neighbor a panther or the son of a panther, no offense is taken. Rather, the reverse.