Cowboys and Indians

New Zealand Listener, Volume 32, Issue 815, 11 March 1955, Page 26

Cowboys and Indians

BY

SUNDOWNER

FEBRUARY 10

Y the courtesy of a Cambridge correspondent I have been able this week to spend an hour or two every day looking at Brahman buils. A Brahman is a Zebu, and a Zebu at home is the father of the hump-backed cattle of India; but even in the sacred writings

of India there can be no more solemn words about bulls

| than L have found in these half-dozen

magazines trom lexas. Fortunately for the Texans the penalty for illusing their Brahmans is merely a loss of dollars. For killing a Zebu a Hindu "goes to Hell for three successive births," if I understand The Markandeya Purana. But the pains of Hell can follow much less serious neglect. Here are the words of Sumati "instructing" his father: In the seventh birth Preceding this, I was born in the Vaisya race. Formerly I obstructed the approach of kine to a reservoir. For that adverse action I was thrown into a dreadful hell, terrific with flames and abounding in iron-beaked birds; covered with mire of the streams of blood coming out from bodies crushed by _ instruments of torture and filled with the cries of sinners dropping down = sundered. Thrown there and_ oppresed by powerful heat and thirst and burning, I remained a hundred years and more. I can find nothing like that in The American Brahman, produced in Houston, or in The Zebu

Journal and American ----- Breeds, both from San Antonio. But I ‘know more about Brahman now than I was able to discover by merely gazing at the live animals in Queensland, and if I were a cattle-farmer in the tickinfested tropics I should certainly consider injecting a little Brahman blood into my Shorthorns and. Herefords. Better still, I think, would be mixing the blood of polled Brahmans, which Texas is now breeding, with polled Angus and polled Shorthorn. But I am not sure that I could rise to the American names for the crossbreds: Brangus (for Brahman and Angus), Braford (for Brahman and Hereford), Brahorn (for Brahman and Shorthorn). Those are honest names which I could perhaps persuade myself to accept if the crossing never went further; but what would a BrangusBraford cross be called, or a BrafordBrahorn? The fashion is too dangerous for New Zealand. Although Brahman crosses will not worry us for a generation or two yet, we could easily catch the infection in the sheepyards and start selling Mercolns, Mercesters, Ryedowns, Merneys and Corfolks. ate ale he

FEBRUARY 11

he an — weed OR the first time today I saw two watblers feeding an absurdly oversized cuckoo. They were just outside my window, first on a kowhai and then on a

silver wattle, and although the cuckoo was careful not to expose itself too freely,

I was able to watch the performance for several minutes. I

think moths were the chief item in the meal, to which both warblers seemed to contribute; but it was more difficult to keep the little parents under observation than the big baby. When all three moved on, the cuckoo started off strongly to

the west, but turned quickly when the warblers went east and followed them into a row of quince trees. ge he

FEBRUARY 13

te alll Pa WAS pleased this week to receive a re-directed Christmas card from the founder of The Countryman, J. W. Robertson Scott, now in his 89th year. Age itself is an achievement, even when it is 70 per cent. the gift of healthy par-

ents. Unless we show some wisdom ourselves, and much

moderation, our inheritance is likely to disappear. But Robertson Scott is one of that small, very small, band who not only keep alive but keep graciously and usefully alive long after they have passed their statistical limit. I have two correspondents in New Zealand who are over 90, both very much alive mentally. One of them writes about Montaigne to me, and Whitman, and Oliver Wendell Holmes, and the other, when I called on him last year, was reading the morning paper without glasses. I have never met, or seen, Winston Churchill and Bertrand Russell, and do not therefore know what age has done to them physically. Cameras can, and do, lie if we give them the necessary assistance; and it is quite possible that both these men would shock us if we met them face to face. The great

merit of the Graham Sutherland "magnificent portrait," the New Statesman said recently, is that it calls the bluff of Winston as eternally young. Sutherland has committed the indiscretion of letting the public into the wellkept sécret that Winston is actually 80 years old, and, like ‘other men of his age, has scraggy folds in ‘his neck. In fact, Suther- | land is to be congratulated on having seen | | and displayed the greatness and variety of Winston’s character at an age when, as his photographs are now apt to reveal, nature | has blurred and expunged this character ‘from his face. | The great merit of the only painting | I have seen of Bertrand Russell (I | thought it was an Augustus John, Fae can’t find it in that collection) was that | it revealed an intelligence that time will end but can not wither in advance. Winston is 80 and Russell 83, and with Albert Schweitzer they are perhaps the three greatest octogenarians now living. | But Robertson Scott is knocking at the door of 90, with his interest in life still | active and warm. ke 7 ol@ Po

FEBRUARY 14

NEVER hear cen-TEEN-ary on the | air without thanking God that Sir | Joseph Heenan is dead; and lately I. hear nothing else. I am not able to say any longer that Sir Joseph out-gunned, | and finally outflanked, the perpetrators |

of this horror, who | include the compil- | ers of the numerous |

Oxford Dictionaries. All I-can say is that | he kept them on the alert while he lived. When he realised that politicians and | broadcasters were incapable of stressing | the first syllable, he switched to centen- | nial, which everybody understood, and | nobody, he thought, could mispronounce; | though he was wrong there. While he | was alive and in office centennial was the word publicly used. Now he is dead, | and the mutilators are in the saddle | again-though powerless to vex his ghost. | But if I could I would recall him for as | long as it would take "him to say, in his. own words, what he’ thinks of them. I would even, if I had the power to bring him back, put a microphone in front of. him before he began to speak-and then | pass the hat to pay for the damage. (To be continued)