Castes and Tribes of Southern India. Vol. 3 of 7Thurston, Edgar
History
Castes and Tribes of Southern India. Vol. 3 of 7
Thurston, Edgar
Caste -- India, South; Ethnology -- India, South; India, South -- Social life and customs; Tribes -- India, South
An important ethnographic fact, and one which is significant,
is that the detailed description of tree-climbing by the Dyaks of
Borneo, as given by Wallace, [10] might have been written on the
Anaimalai hills, and would apply equally well in every detail to the
Kadir. "They drove in," Wallace writes, "a peg very firmly at about
three feet from the ground, and, bringing one of the long bamboos,
stood it upright close to the tree, and bound it firmly to the two
first pegs by means of a bark cord and small notches near the head
of each peg. One of the Dyaks now stood on the first peg and drove
in a third about level with his face, to which he tied the bamboo in
the same way, and then mounted another step, standing on one foot,
and holding by the bamboo at the peg immediately above him, while he
drove in the next one. In this manner he ascended about twenty feet,
when the upright bamboo became thin; another was handed up by his
companion, and this was joined on by tying both bamboos to three or
four of the pegs. When this was also nearly ended, a third was added,
and shortly after the lowest branch of the tree was reached, along
which the young Dyak scrambled. The ladder was perfectly safe, since,
if any one peg were loose or faulty, the strain would be thrown on
several others above and below it. I now understood the use of the
line of bamboo pegs sticking in trees, which I had often seen."
In their search for produce in the evergreen forests of the higher
ranges, with their heavy rainfall, the Kadirs became unpleasantly
familiar with leeches and blue bottle flies, which flourish in the
moist climate. And it is recorded that a Kadir, who had been gored
and wounded by a bull 'bison,' was placed in a position of safety
while a friend ran to the village to summon help. He was not away
for more than an hour, but, in that short time, flies had deposited
thousands of maggots in the wounds, and, when the man was brought into
camp, they had already begun burrowing into the flesh, and were with
difficulty extracted. On another occasion, the eye-witness of the
previous unappetising incident was out alone in the forest, and shot
a tiger two miles or so from his camp. Thither he went to collect
coolies to carry in the carcase, and was away for about two hours,
during which the flies had, like the child in the story, 'not been
idle,' the skin being a mass of maggots and totally ruined. I have
it on authority that, like the Kotas of the Nilgiris, the Kadirs will
eat the putrid and fly-blown flesh of carcases of wild beasts, which
they come across in their wanderings. To a dietary which includes
succulent roots, which they upturn with a digging stick, bamboo seed,
sheep, fowls, rock-snakes (python), deer, porcupines, rats (field,
not house), wild pigs, monkeys, etc., they do credit by displaying a
hard, well-nourished body. The mealy portion of the seeds of the Cycas
tree, which flourishes on the lower slopes of the Anaimalais, forms a
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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