Hunting-Dogs
Project Gutenberg EPUB3 edition
Skeat, Walter William
Hunting-dogs are spoken to continually as if they were human beings. Several examples of this occur in the deer charms.
Thus we find the following passage addressed to the dogs:—
“Let not go the scent,
Formidable were you from the first;
Hot-foot, hot-foot, do you pursue,
If you do not pursue hot-foot,
I will minimise my benediction (lit. my ‘Peace be with you’).
If it (the deer) be a buck, you shall have him for a brother;
If it be a doe, you shall have her for a wife.”
So too, again, after calling several dogs by name, the Pawang gets together the accessories (leaves of the tukas and lĕnjuang, a brush of leaves (sa-chĕrek) and a black cloth), and exclaims:—
“Bark, Sir Slender-foot; bark, Sir Brush-tail.”
The Pawang generally tries to deceive the deer as to his ownership of the hunting-dogs. Thus he will say:—
“It is not I whose dogs these are,
It is the magical deer Pawang whose dogs these are.”
So, too, they are called by certain specific names (according to their breed and colour), which are in several cases identical with the names of the dogs with which the wild Spectre Huntsman (the most terrible of all personified diseases in the Malay category) hunts down his prey.111
Ugliness is by no means looked upon as a disadvantage, but rather the opposite. An ugly dog is apparently formidable. Thus we find a dog addressed as follows:—
“Let not go the scent (of the quarry)
As you were formidable (lit. ugly)112 from the first.”
Again, the description of the “good points” of some of these dogs which is given in the Appendix would, if ugliness and formidability are convertible terms, satisfy the most exacting whipper-in, the so-called good points being for the most part a mere list of deformities. These points, however, are merely the external sign of the Luck to which dogs, as well as human beings, are believed to be born. In a fine passage we are told:—
“From the seven Hills and the seven Valleys
Comes the intense barking of my Dogs.
My Dogs are Dogs of Luck,
Not Luck that is adventitious,
But Luck incarnate with their bodies.
Go tread upon the heaped and rotting leaves,
And never desert the scent.”
Speaking of dog-lore generally, it may be remarked that though dogs are very frequently kept by the Malays, it is considered unlucky to keep them. “The dog ... is unlucky. He longs for the death of his master, an event which will involve the slaying of animals at the funeral feast, when the bones will fall to the dogs. When a dog is heard howling at night, he is supposed to be thinking of the broken bones (niat handak mengutib tulang patah).”113
Even the wild dogs in the jungle114 are warned not to bark, and are addressed as if they were human:—
“If you bark your windpipe shall burst,
If you smack your lips your tongue shall be docked.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
If you come nearer, you shall break your leg;
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Return to the big virgin jungle,
Return to your caverns and hill-locked basins,
To the stream which has no head-waters,
To the pond which was never dug,
To the waters which bear no passengers,
To the fountain-head which is [never] dry.
If you do not return, you shall die,