Chapter 57

She was not quite what you would call refined. She was not quite what
you would call unrefined. She was the kind of person that keeps a
parrot.
--Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar.

So far as I am able to judge, nothing has been left undone, either by man
or Nature, to make India the most extraordinary country that the sun
visits on his round. Nothing seems to have been forgotten, nothing over
looked. Always, when you think you have come to the end of her
tremendous specialties and have finished banging tags upon her as the
Land of the Thug, the Land of the Plague, the Land of Famine, the Land of
Giant Illusions, the Land of Stupendous Mountains, and so forth, another
specialty crops up and another tag is required. I have been overlooking
the fact that India is by an unapproachable supremacy--the Land of
Murderous Wild Creatures. Perhaps it will be simplest to throw away the
tags and generalize her with one all-comprehensive name, as the Land of
Wonders.

For many years the British Indian Government has been trying to destroy
the murderous wild creatures, and has spent a great deal of money in the
effort. The annual official returns show that the undertaking is a
difficult one.

These returns exhibit a curious annual uniformity in results; the sort of
uniformity which you find in the annual output of suicides in the world's
capitals, and the proportions of deaths by this, that, and the other
disease. You can always come close to foretelling how many suicides will
occur in Paris, London, and New York, next year, and also how many deaths
will result from cancer, consumption, dog-bite, falling out of the
window, getting run over by cabs, etc., if you know the statistics of
those matters for the present year. In the same way, with one year's
Indian statistics before you, you can guess closely at how many people
were killed in that Empire by tigers during the previous year, and the
year before that, and the year before that, and at how many were killed
in each of those years by bears, how many by wolves, and how many by
snakes; and you can also guess closely at how many people are going to be
killed each year for the coming five years by each of those agencies.
You can also guess closely at how many of each agency the government is
going to kill each year for the next five years.

I have before me statistics covering a period of six consecutive years.
By these, I know that in India the tiger kills something over 800 persons
every year, and that the government responds by killing about double as
many tigers every year. In four of the six years referred to, the tiger
got 800 odd; in one of the remaining two years he got only 700, but in
the other remaining year he made his average good by scoring