Chapter IV: On Entering the Menagerie

Back in my kidhood days, when, as a runaway youngster, I was achieving a life ambition—and five dollars a week—as “the clowns” of a tatterdemalion little circus which clattered about through the Middle West, there was a magnet beneath the ragged old menagerie top which compelled me, day after day, to contemplative attention. It was a lion, old and blind and toothless, dragging out the final days of its existence as the “star” of a “collection of beasts of the plain and jungle”, which appeared ferociously numerous on our billing, but which consistently failed to appear when the gates were open and the great or small crowd thronged through to the big top and its moth-eaten, amateurish performance. In fact, old Duke, with the exception of a few goats, a monkey cage, a cinnamon bear and a couple of anæmic native deer, was about all the menagerie we had, and certainly, to me, the most interesting of the lot.

So, in that time of rest between the matinée and the night show, I would wander to the aged Nubian’s cage, to stand staring at the black-maned, toothless creature, majestic even in its senility; wondering what it thought about this life it led, and whether it ever longed for the glorious days of the veldt it never again would see.

One day as I pondered youthfully on the problem of lion psychology, an old animal man came beside me, and we began to talk, one with the romance of youth, the other with the wisdom of experience. And I said:

“Poor old thing. It must be awful.”

“How so?” The trainer looked up quizzically. “’Cause he’s locked up? Don’t you ever think it. Wouldn’t get out if he could.”

“I don’t mean that. He’s taken care of, all right. But everything’s different for him; he doesn’t understand anything that’s going on, and he’s away from everything that has anything in common with him or—”

Then it was that Experience interrupted. The trainer spat disgustedly and poked forth an emphatic finger.

“Shucks! Listen, kid, when you’ve been around animals as long as I have, you’ll find out that a lot of this theory stuff is the bunk. Us humans ain’t the only ones that can use their brains. Get that? And something more; the trouble with us is we’ve got the swell head. We think that because we can talk and use our hands and build houses and do a lot of fool things to our digestions; we think that because we’re what we are, that we’re the real and only McCoy. That’s just where we’re wrong. I never saw a wild animal yet that didn’t show some basic characteristic of the human being. The only trouble is that most of us don’t have the chance or the desire to watch ’em long enough. And I know! I’ve nursed lions with the toothache and carried baby tigers in my arms before their eyes were opened. And I’m saying that the dividing line between animals and humans is mighty thin, that they’re just like us!”

That was fifteen years ago. I’ve traveled with some big shows since then; I’ve known many a trainer, and once I spent twenty years in as many minutes one afternoon as the guest of three lions and three tigers in the arena during the performance of their act. Long ago I forgot what the old animal man looked like, but I’ve never forgotten his words. What’s more, in the years that have gone, instance after instance has piled up, in story and actual experience, to emphasize it all. Under the great spread of a circus menagerie top, from the heavy steel dens, the big tanks, the strong enclosures which house the various animals have come examples of every human emotion: love, hate, jealousy, fear, deceit, faith and all the others which we humans possess; envy, malice, forgiveness, humor, self-sacrifice, gratitude; on and on the list runs until there are times when I wonder if there is any dividing line at all! Why, among animals there’s even nationality!

It all happened long before the war, so the fact that it was a “made in Germany” affair is permissible. We wanted a new elephant, and the order naturally was sent to Carl Hagenbeck, from whom most circus animals were then procured, and who reared, trained and acclimated his beasts at his “Tierpark” on the outskirts of Hamburg, Germany. The answer to the order was an almost tearful letter from Hagenbeck.

Because of his friendship for the owner of the show, he was giving up his greatest prize, Old Mamma, his pet elephant!

She was more than just a mere trained beast, he wrote. The children played with her, and she was all but a nursemaid to them. She did the work about the park; she was gentle and kind and understanding. It was as though Carl Hagenbeck were parting with some dearly beloved relative or a faithful servant, instead of a circus animal. And the show awaited the coming of the new pachyderm with a constantly growing interest. Then Mamma arrived!

The first report came with the sight of a sweating, cussing animal man who plodded wearily to the circus lot, disheveled, disturbed in body and temper. He sought the owner.

“Of all the rotten, no-good bulls I ever seen in my life,” he growled, “that new Hagenbeck elephant’s the worst! She won’t do nothing!”

“But Hagenbeck wrote me—”

“I don’t care what he wrote you; I’m talking about what he handed you! That elephant’s a lemon! We can’t get it to do nothing; it acts like it ain’t even got good sense! Come on down and look for yourself.”

Harry Tammen—he was the owner—went, and Harry Tammen looked. He retired to his circus car that night disappointed and disgusted. The wonderful elephant about which Carl Hagenbeck had written so enthusiastically either could not, or would not, do anything that would indicate former training. Only by sheer tugging with “bull-hooks” and pushing with two-by-fours had it been shunted from its car, and then, once on the ground, it trumpeted and squealed and stared blankly at the shouting animal men,—but obeyed not a single command. Such was Mamma’s arrival on the circus, and such was the daily programme. She was literally pushed and pulled to the lot each day, and pulled and pushed back to the circus train at night, an aimless, useless old beast that was more of a liability to the circus than an asset. Then Hagenbeck came to America and Tammen met him in St. Louis.

“A fine elephant you sold me!” he blurted. “It hasn’t got a brain in its head!”

Hagenbeck almost wept.

“_Ach gott_, Harry!” came excitedly. “Dot old Mamma elephant—she iss human! All day long she played with the children, unt ven day gif her a piece of cinnamon cake—_ach gott_, she’d get on her knees to thank them! I come along to her unt I say: ‘_Wie gehts_, Mamma,’ and—”

“Wait a minute!” A great light was beginning to break in on Harry Tammen. “What would you say?”

“_Wie gehts!_ or _Vas ist lohse?_ Or—”

“That’s enough!” came from the circus owner. “You win! We’ve been trying to talk English to something that doesn’t understand any language but German!”

The next day Tammen returned to his circus, and seeking the picket line in the menagerie where the great, hulking elephants were tethered, he approached the supposedly imbecilic Hagenbeck importation.

“_Wie gehts_, Mamma!” he exclaimed. “_Vas ist lohse?_”

You’ve seen a dog welcome his master after long absence,—the frenzy of joy, the unbounded happiness? Magnify that dog into a poor, lost, three-ton elephant in a strange land, among strange people, hearing only a strange tongue—then suddenly finding a familiar tone of speech—and you have Old Mamma when she caught that sentence in German. She trumpeted, she sank to her knees and rose again, she wrapped her trunk about the little circus owner and tried in her elephantine way to caress him. She squealed and jumped about and pulled at her picket pin; then Tammen called one of the “bull-tenders.”

“Dig up some one around this show who can talk German,” he ordered. “We’ve got to translate everything for a while to this poor old bull. She’s in a foreign country—and we’ve got to teach her English!”

And that was the explanation of Old Mamma’s apparent imbecility. She had been captured by German-speaking members of a Hagenbeck expedition, trained by a German, kept on a German animal reservation and received her every command in German. She never had heard any other language, and it was not until patient animal men, giving first the command in German and then repeating it in English, had “taught” her the language of her new home that she became of value. That was a good many years ago. To-day it is Mamma who leads the elephant herd of the big circus, who tests the bridges before her followers step upon it, who trumpets her orders to the rest of the great pachyderms on parade, who is first to catch the trainer’s command in the ring. She is the head of the herd, and she has become Americanized. What’s more, she’s forgotten German now, in spite of the fact that they say an elephant never forgets.

I’m afraid that story about elephants who never forget is one of the traditions of the circus which can be contraverted, and I think it’s another evidence that there’s the human strain in animals or the animal strain in humans, whichever way you want to put it. I personally once defied the old tradition by feeding an elephant a nice hunk of tobacco one afternoon and going back the next day, expecting to be killed, only to find that the chocolate and sweetening in the plug had been particularly pleasing, and that a second offering was gratefully accepted. I’ve seen elephants forget real injuries, cruel treatment, for instance, and then, on the other hand, I know of an old “bull” which recognized, after some eight years, the man who had trained him in India. Which leads to the fact that memory represents the same quality among elephants that it does in human beings. It’s a matter of personality; some remember, some forget. In the language of the old trainer: “They’re just the same as us!”

Forgive me for being garrulous about elephants; it’s the innate fault of any one who ever has trouped beneath the white tops; there is no circus man who does not love them. But there are other animals and other traits. Among them—jealousy!

Not envy, understand, though I’ve seen that too, but pure jealousy, borne of blighted love, jealousy that once almost led to animal infanticide.

Prince was his name and he was an inbred. That meant he had been under suspicion from the day of his birth, first for illness resultant from his bad breeding, that would rob the circus of a parade animal, then for the evidences of an evil temper which might at any day turn Prince into a “killer.” Prince was the son of a brother and sister, and in the animal world there are the same inflexible rules of progeneration regarding the union of relatives too closely associated that there are among humans. Therefore Prince was not a select specimen of the menagerie, and certainly, in the opinion of the animal men, he was not to be mated with any of the thoroughbred lionesses which the show possessed.

But Prince thought otherwise. Prince selected his mate, Beauty, and roared and growled to be placed in the same cage with her. The animal men refused, and gave Beauty her natural mate, Duke, a great, thoroughbred, black-maned Nubian lion. And that day the trouble began.

Prince became mean and vicious. He tried to attack his trainer. He was sullen and treacherous and grouchy; and he became more so as time progressed. Often, in the arena, when the lions were working together in their act, Prince sought to sink his heavy claws in the form of Duke as that animal passed his pedestal. Once he leaped at the other lion, and only the bull-whip and flaring revolver of Captain Dutch Ricardo, the trainer, drove him off. Prince was jealous—plain, downright jealous—and he was willing to kill to vent the anger that was in him.

Finally, Beauty presented the circus with four little lion cubs, and day after day we would see Prince watching the babies between the bars of his cage, hissing and growling at them. As they grew older, they shared the happiness of every cub around a tent show; they were allowed to wander about the menagerie, or were carried around and petted by the circus children; cubs—lion, tiger or bear—are the most pampered things around the “big top.” But Prince never lost his hate for them.

In fact, that hatred grew. One day the animal act was on, and Beauty was in the big arena with the other lions, while the cubs played about outside. The “leaps” were on, that part of the act where the animals jump through a ring of fire above a hurdle, and the whole great mass of beasts was tumbling and plunging about the enclosure. Suddenly Prince, about to take a hurdle, saw that one of the cubs had come close to the steel bars. He changed his course, a great roar rumbled from his throat, and with a quick swerve, he was at the side of the arena, his heavy paws extended between the bars, trying his best to claw to death the fluffy, scrambling little creature which barely had eluded him. Animal men beat the inbred back, and he turned on Duke. Again a fight between lions was almost an unadvertised feature of the show. Again Ricardo separated them. Soon after that, Prince was relegated to his cage, to be, in the future, only a parade and menagerie feature. Jealousy had made him too dangerous a beast to be trusted in the arena.

Human traits? They’re everywhere about a circus menagerie. Every old animal trainer is full of stories concerning them. The more a person is in the proximity of animals, the more he hears of their attitude toward life, the more he is convinced that in make-up we’re basically just about the same; different only in physical appearance. For instance, you’d hardly expect to find humorists among the savage occupants of a lion’s den, but they’re present just the same. I know of one case in particular.

On one of the big circuses is an “untameable lion” act which works as a special feature of the side show. Never was there a fiercer animal than the crouching, hissing, roaring beast which lunges and plunges at its trainer, fighting away the stinging whip as he seeks to penetrate its fusillade and leap upon the grim-faced man before him. Time after time he lunges, only to recoil before the barking roar of the trainer’s revolver; effort after effort is made in vain to force him to the obedience of a single command, and as the trainer glides from the cage, the roaring beast leaps, claws extended, his great body crashing against the steel door which is closed just in time.

Twenty minutes later a big “group” animal act is shown in the main show. The various stunts are gone through and then comes an announcement:

“Ladies-s-s and ge’llmun. I beg t’introduce the tamest, best-trained lion ever shown in captivity—Old Solomon. Watch him!”

The trainer approaches Solomon, pets him, teases him, mauls him about, pulls his tail, and finally puts his head in his mouth, all without one bit of resistance from the amiable old fellow. And the strange part of it all is the fact that the fierce beast of the side show and the complacent old pet of the main tent are the same! Yet they say that humor is missing in animaldom. Often I have seen a trainer feeding tigers and lions strips of meat with his bare hands, while ten minutes before those same animals were in the arena, hissing and growling and clawing at his every approach. And there is a difference even in the tone of their growls; a trainer can tell in an instant whether the beast is in earnest or whether he is just playing.

So it goes. There’s a story for every cage and a human trait for every story. Some time when you look into a hippopotamus den, at the heavy, hoggish body, at the small, senseless eyes, the big snout and general imbecilic appearance of the beast, just remember that even this hulking thing of the River Nile has its human attributes, and that it can even become lonely.

The evidence of it came while a big western circus was starting forth on its long trip of the spring from the winter quarters at Denver, Colorado, to its opening stand at Albuquerque, New Mexico, several years ago. The run from Denver to Trinidad had been made by daylight, and at the “feeding stop” the animal men made the rounds of the various cages and dens to assure themselves of the comfort of their charges: it would be cold that night; the long trains would travel over the mountains. Cage by cage they visited, then one after another they reported to the manager:

“That baby hippopotamus is sure raising a rumpus. Don’t know what’s wrong with it. We’ve put two extra bales of straw in there, and it certainly can’t be cold. We’ve given it plenty to eat, and it can’t be hungry. But it sure is raising the roof!”

The manager summoned the menagerie superintendent, and together they went to the hippopotamus den. The unwieldy, wobbly thing was backed up against one end of its den, its heavy head sagging, its eyes cocked like those of a dog when it is awaiting its master’s forgiveness. It was whining,—a sort of a drooling whimper that added to the atmosphere of dejection, a full ton of fat sadness, crying for something it could not name. Long the two men watched. Finally the superintendent scratched his head.

“I wonder—” he began. Then, with a sudden impulse, he climbed upon the wagon and, unlocking the door of the cage, went within. There he seated himself on the straw and waited.

For a moment the hippopotamus regarded him in lubberly surprise. Then gradually the whimpering died away as the big animal crawled to the animal man and laid down beside him. The superintendent grinned.

“Nothing wrong with this hip!” he announced. “It’s just a poor, lonesome baby. We’ll get one of the ‘razorbacks’ to come in and stay with him to-night. He’ll be all right.”

The train was canvassed for a razor-back, or train loader, who desired to sleep with a hippopotamus. It was a long search which ended in success only after a promise of double wages. The man clambered into the den where the infant river hog was whimpering again and gingerly touched the beast’s head. The hippopotamus seemed to like it,—and thereby began a strange friendship of the circus.

The “blood-sweating behemoth” did not cry that night, nor the next, nor the next after that; for the razor-back had found that a hippopotamus is an aimless, usually gentle beast, too lazy most of the time to think about anything save his own comfort, and that there was no danger in remaining in his den. More than that, he was earning double money for “doing nothing”, which was agreeable. The razor-back had found a new vocation, that of being a nursemaid to a baby hippopotamus, and he stuck with the job. And, when the “situation” ended, it was in death: he was killed in fighting a fire, born of a flying engine spark, in the straw of his companion’s den as the circus ground along on its night’s journey in the northwest a year or so later. The fire extinguished, the razor-back turned from the top of the den where he had crawled to investigate the damage, and, slipping, fell from the train. Again the hippopotamus whimpered, but this time it was in loneliness for a specific thing, his friend and companion who was gone. Nor could he be satisfied by a substitute.

For grief exists among animals, caged as well as domestic. True, it displays itself more forcibly in some animals than others, but its manifestation is present in them all. I have seen a tiger grieve for its mate, a leopard for her cubs, an elephant for its trainer. And when it comes to simians—

When you lose a simian on the circus, usually through the ravages of that man-made disease, tuberculosis, you almost infallibly lose two. A few pitiful days of grieving, in which the mate grows weaker and weaker, in which its cries almost resemble a human sob, then an animal man takes a little burden out behind the big top and buries it. The second death has come,—to the mate who has grieved itself into the grave.

Particularly is this true of the mated orang-outangs and chimpanzees. In life they seem to be all that is required of a perfectly wedded pair. Clinging to her mate, dependent upon him for everything, the orang-outang “wife”—if Darwin’s theory counts for anything—goes to show that the days of the cave man were perverted ones. For certainly, as representatives of the jungle, the orang-outang’s wedded life is the model for which all human standards strive. Faithful, kind, protecting and gentle, the male constantly cares for the weaker mate, and more than once I have seen an orang-outang “husband” sorting out the choicer bits of food—and, cooing gently, hand them to his wife.

Then, when illness comes, the mate seems to realize the danger. It sits by the side of the stricken companion, moving closer when it whines, even stroking it gently, as though to soothe its pain. Few orang-outang keepers are there who do not stand by their task twenty-four hours of the day, when illness comes to their charges. For it is as though some dumb but understanding human were dying, while a mate sits beside, ready to give its life also in grief. And that is almost inevitable, once death strikes. Refusing food, covering its face now and then as it piteously whines out its grief, it waits for the time when death will take it, too,—and the end usually comes within a week. Out in the West, I know a circus owner who has two stuffed and mounted figures of orang-outangs that he does not want for ornamental purposes, and that he certainly doesn’t need for a study in natural history, since he has a living menagerie that he can watch any time he chooses.

“But I saw them die,” he explains. “The male went first, and it was just like a good husband dying in the arms of his wife. She seemed to know, seemed to realize what death meant, and that her mate never could be with her again. Then she began to waste; soon she was dead, too. And—well, maybe I’m soft-hearted, but I just figured that affection like theirs deserved something better than burial on a circus lot. So I had ’em stuffed so they could be together, in semblance, at least.”

And that is the story of more than one pair of Orangs and chimpanzees. There are few humans who can love more tenderly and more truly than they. So much for the love of man and wife.

But of all the animals that displayed the traits of humanity—at least, of all I’ve seen—it remained for Casey to display nearly every one possible.

More than seven feet tall, with his hands extended over his head, strong enough to seize a man by his feet and simply rip him apart, a three-ton lunge chain constantly about his neck to check him should his nature ever change, Casey was as amiable and boyishly playful as a kid just out of school. He appeared to take a delight in being a show feature; it was fun to him. And he _was_ a feature!

In his heavy cage, he would sit looking aimlessly at the crowds, until his trainer or you or I or any one who knew him would approach with the signal for the ballyhoo:

“All right, Casey! Big mouth!”

The result would be a hideous grimace, heavy fangs showing, skin furled back from the yellow teeth, eyes narrowed, a growling, drooling sound issuing from the heavily muscled throat. Then would come the second command:

“Casey! Go mad!”

He would leap about the cage, screaming and shrilling, pounding the top and bottom almost simultaneously, rocking the big, steel-barred structure, biting and tearing at everything which came in his way, a perfect specimen of an animal maniac. And it was after such a performance as this that the trainer—on the first day of his arrival on the circus at Del Rio, Texas,—suggested that the cage be opened and Casey brought out at the end of his heavy chain for a “lecture” at close range. A side show “talker”—for Casey was being exhibited as a special attraction—moved hastily away.

“Not me!” he exclaimed. “Not with that thing! I’ll lecture on the Aztec Midgets and I’ll even let a bull-snake curl around my neck! But I won’t be caught around that monk!”

And it was the same with the others. They had seen Casey “go mad.” That was enough; they had engagements elsewhere. Fox, the owner, looked at me, a visitor to the show.

“Want to make the talk?” he asked.

I laughed and assented, for I thought I knew Casey. I had played with him at winter quarters, I had seen him under a good many conditions, and I knew him to be an amiable, good-hearted, friendly beast who didn’t know his own power. I went to the platform and started my speech.

It must have been a fizzle. Certainly, I knew nothing about the art of being a side-show talker. And when, halting and struggling for words, I finally ceased, I felt a warm, soft hand glide into mine. It was Casey’s, and he was looking up at me with eyes I know were sympathetic. Even he knew that as a “spieler” I had failed.

Casey ate from a bucket, with a spoon. He wore trousers most of the time, with a penchant for letting the suspenders hang. He smoked a cigar or a pipe and lighted it himself. He could use a hammer and saw to a certain extent, and his chief toy was a heavy block of wood made far heavier by the hundreds of nails he had driven into it, like a child at play. He drank beer—it was before prohibition—and now and then he would become mildly intoxicated and sit in his cage grinning at his trainer, or snoring away the effects of alcohol. He could make a noise that sounded like “no” when he really meant “no.”

Fox, his trainer, found him one day in his heavy cage, doubled in pain. He called a physician, and after the diagnosis had been made, the doctor turned excitedly.

“I can hardly believe it in a monkey! But there are all the symptoms. There is only one chance—an operation!”

Casey was hurried to a hospital and placed under an anesthetic, with all the conditions pertaining to a human being in the same circumstances. The incision was made, the doctor’s theory proven correct, but too late. Things had gone too far. Casey died, and from the effects of that intensely human ailment,—acute appendicitis!