"An old man picked up a boy in the jungle with a white skin, green eyes, and very long nails. Taking the boy home his rescuer named him Muhammad Yatim (i.e. 'Muhammad the fatherless'), and when he grew up sent him to school, where he behaved with great cruelty to his schoolfellows, and was therefore soundly beaten by his master ('Toh Saih Panjang Janggut, i.e. 'Toh Saih Long-beard), who used a stick made of a kind of wood called los [290] to effect the chastisement. At the first cut the boy leapt as far as the doorway; at the second he leapt to the ground, at the third he bounded into the grass, at the fourth he uttered a growl, and at the fifth his tail fell down behind him and he went upon all fours, whereat his master (improvising a name to curse him by), exclaimed, 'This is of a truth God's tiger! (Harimau Allah). Go you,' he added, addressing the tiger, 'to the place where you will catch your prey--the borderland between the primeval forest and the secondary forest-growth, and that between the secondary forest-growth and the plain--catch there whomsoever you will, but see that you catch only the headless. Alter no jot of what I say, or you shall be consumed by the Iron of the Regalia, and crushed by the sanctity of the thirty divisions of the Koran.'" Hence the tiger is to this day compelled to "ask for" his prey, and uses divination (bertenung), as all men know, for the purpose of discovering whether his petition has yet been granted. Hence, too, he carries on his hide to this very day the mark of the stripes with which he was beaten at school. The method of divination said to be practised by the tiger is as follows: The tiger lies down and gazes (bertenung) at leaves which he takes between his paws, and whenever he sees the outline of a leaf take the shape of one of his intended victims, without the head, he knows it to be the sign that that victim has been "granted" to him, in accordance with the very terms of his master's curse. I once asked (at Labu) how it was known that the tiger used divination, and was told this story of a man who had seen it:--