204 
QUAINT BEASTS AND QUEER HABITS. 
BY 
Mavsor C. H. Srocxtiey. 
Every wandering sportsman has at times come across strange animals or 
observed strange habits or actions of more common species which stand out 
clear-cut amongst the memories of shooting or fishing trips. Sometimes it is 
some particular physical feature of the beast, such as the bright orange teeth 
of the Bamboo Rat (Rhizomys badius) found in Central and Lower Burma ; at 
others it is the general build of the beast whose strangeness makes a first 
encounter memorable. For instance the beast known as the Armoured Pangolin 
presents a weird and formidable appearance, sheathed as it is in overlapping 
scale armour, and its four feet or so of length make it a sufficiently alarming 
apparition when met on the lawn of the mess on a moonlight night after dinner, 
which was the manner of my first encounter with the species. Another beast 
which startled me into immediate reminiscences of ‘‘ Alice through the Looking 
Glass,” was a Binturong ; a quaint medley of fox, badger and raccoon, which 
ran across my path when travelling up the Salween valley near the Burma- 
Siam frontier. Then I defy anyone who has really read and enjoyed the afore- 
mentioned book, not to be reminded of the illustration of a “ slithy tove ’’ when 
he sees his first specimen of an “‘aard vark”’. The first one I ever saw was 
discovered by the adjutant of my battalion of the King’s African Rifles under- 
mining his tent in the middle of the night when camped in Somaliland. The 
most strenuous efforts of two lusty officers, who attached themselves to his (the 
aard vark’s, not the adjutant’s) tail, failed to extract him from the hole which 
he had already dug, and which was about three feet in depth. Finally a 
revolver bullet finished him, and he was duly photographed and skinned next 
morning. From the uproar over his capture you might have thought that the 
dervishes had rushed the camp.  ~ 
Occasionally it is the incongruity of the beast with its surroundings that 
strikes one, as any one will agree who has seen a couple of Himalayan Langur 
monkeys sitting on the snew-laden boughs of a pine. One feels that monkeys 
and Christmas trees have nothing in common, and that animals which one associ- 
ates from childhood with hot weather and cocoanut palms should have retired 
to the plains at the end of the summer in company with the Brass Hats, Grass 
Widows and Simla Wirepullers. 
Talking of monkeys, while on a hillside high above the Chenab river, I once 
spotted a troop of monkeys far below on the opposite bank, amongst whom was 
one the colour of whose coat can only be described as a bright orange. At first 
I thought that something had gone wrong with my eyesight or my field-glasses, 
while my shikari stoutly maintained that no monkey was ever coloured like that, 
therefore it could not be a monkey. To settle the point we descended about a 
thousand feet until we were opposite the troop and only separated from them by 
the width of the river, here about eighty yards. We then sat and watched the 
freak specimen with our glasses for half-an-hour. He seemed in every respect, 
save that of colour, to be an ordinary Hill Macaque, such as swarm in parts of 
the Lower Himalayas; and his companions seemed to notice nothing queer 
about him. As we rose to go I asked my shikari what the people of his village 
would say when he told them that he had seen a monkey of such an outlandish 
colour. He replied, ‘‘ They will say, I am a liar.” When we got back to his 
village he proved to be absolutely correct, and on my backing his statement, I 
was obviously looked on as a rather clumsy accomplice. 
It was with the same shikari that I one day lay ona hill-side waiting for a 
serow to come out and feed as soon as the heat of the sun should abate a little, the 
while Lidly directed the telescope on likely placesfor game. In doing so a goral 
