In my previous post I included this quotation without giving a source. It is of course from the final Mowgli story, The Spring Running’ from Kipling’s The Second Jungle Book. I’ve been pondering over those lines, with their elegiac note as the now -adult Mowgli leaves the forest. As the old half-blind bear Baloo ( which is of course the Hindi word for the sloth bear) puts it ‘who shall question Man in his ways?’. I saw a Sloth Bear yesterday in the Park, just long enough to register the thought that the black object shuffling through the bushes looked like an old man in a badly fitting scruffy fur coat. It’s an easy mistake to make as the wealth of names thrown up by bear cults around the world suggest. Many years ago while a research student I came across a lovely book on the Circumpolar Bear Cult in the Northern Hemisphere by an anthropologist in the 1920′s. I wish I had it now to dip into as it is a treasure trove of curious myth and fable about what traditional cultures call the Big Fellow. Kipling of course has a chilling poem about Adam Zad (Son of Adam) the traditional name for the bear amongst the Kashmiris, which is a barely-veiled warning against Russian Imperialism in Asia. He so disliked Russia that his last will insisted that there should be no investment in Russian stocks by his executors.

I’ve reproduced the first two stanzas below, but should say that I was once charged by a sloth bear protecting her cub in Chitwan in Nepal. Luckily I was in a group and she backed off after a threat display but the speed of the angry mother was terrifying.

YEARLY, with tent and rifle, our careless white men go
By the Pass called Muttianee, to shoot in the vale below.
Yearly by Muttianee he follows our white men in -
Matun, the old blind beggar, bandaged from brow to chin.

Eyeless, noseless, and lipless – toothless, broken of speech,
Seeking a dole at the doorway he mumbles his tale to each;
Over and over the story, ending as he began:
“Make ye no truce with Adam-zad – the Bear that walks like a Man!