Doubtless, the normally peaceful peasantry of Kiang-su think that evil days have fallen on their fair province, and well may they think so. The armies of China in revolt march and countermarch around them and spread terror amongst them, leaving a broad trail of bloodshed, fire and pillage to augment accumulated troubles already heavy enough to crush the spirit of the most hardy. Rebellion, treachery, plots, bribery and corruption arise like a pestilential mist in the Yangtze Valley until the spirit of man knows not where to turn for rest or refuge, and regret for the things that were is only exceeded by the fear of the things that may come.
Can this be the same Kiang-su of other days? That Kiang-su was a prosperous, smiling country, but above all peaceful—peaceful with the peacefulness of quiet and simplicity and life unstirred by the throb of our rushing, twentieth-century civilization. That was the country I saw but a few years ago when China was an empire, and a jolly party of us who loved to be far from the crowded cities, cruised in a Chinese house boat to the Ta-hu Lakes for hunting and recreation—and that is the country I like to think of as Kiang-su.
However rich potentially China may be, the lives of individual Chinese are dependent upon ceaseless labor and the most diversified industries. No chance, however small, of wresting a living from the lap of Mother Earth is allowed to escape. Some of their industries are quaint survivals of bygone centuries that have lived on almost without change, while their counterparts in other lands have either languished and died, or else have so changed through constant striving for improvement that their very relationship has been obliterated.
On this cruise to the Ta-hu Lakes in Kiang-su I came without premeditation upon a strange combination of human nature and cormorant nature that gives rise to an interesting and unusual industry that can be but little known to foreigners, though doubtless it has existed for many generations. Think of many adult human beings making their living from the labor of trained birds, and this too in our modern machinery-using age.
Let us start from the beginning where we alighted in the heart of Kiang-su Province and stood watching our train speed farther on towards the interior of China. We found ourselves the only foreigners in sight surrounded by a surging crowd of jabbering, gesticulating Chinese, that suggested the mob scene from some lurid melodrama. They were not indicating unfriendliness toward the “barbarians” left in their midst, as one might easily have supposed, but were only struggling with much strenuosity for the opportunity of earning a few cents by assisting our servants in transporting baggage from train to house boat.
These details having been settled without actually bringing on a riot, we took the trail for the Grand Canal, about a mile away, where we trusted we would find our house boat, sent on several days in advance. This we did and, unceremoniously dumping our baggage aboard, we waved a farewell to the curious crowd that watched us from the bank and were off on our cruise to the Ta-hu Lakes.
From the point at which we embarked the canal ran over toward the ancient walled city of Wu-si, and then skirted the walls for a few miles. Here we fairly had to creep along, for the canal was crowded with cargo junks, passenger sampans and the large and richly furnished house boats of the wealthy Chinese. Under humpbacked stone bridges hundreds of years old, past water gates where small canals led through the walls into the city, and frequently stormed at in fluent Chinese by irate watermen, we slowly forced our way along. Just as night came on, having reached the point where the main canal turned sharply away from the city walls, we tied up to the bank and sought our bunks in early slumber that even the discordant noises of the near-by Chinese city could not disturb.
Daylight next morning found us stirring, and we cast off our lines as the sun was rising in a blaze of wintry glory over the awakening multitude in the city behind us, and the crispness of the morning air made one feel like shouting for the mere joy of living. Heading away for Little Ta-hu Lake, we soon lost the noises of the city and began to realize that we were, indeed, “strangers in a foreign land,” beyond the sphere of western civilization.
Even in mid-winter the rural Chinaman has outdoor work to keep him busy. With rakes and improvised dredges the black mud and water-grass were being taken from the bottoms of canals and ditches to enrich the garden-like Chinese farms, while from far and near came the unmusical chanteys of the oarsmen in all manner of misshapen sampans (small boats) that glided by without ceasing. Everywhere haste was the order of the day, from the querulous old women that busied themselves about their mud cabins to the “fly-fly” ducks that passed swiftly overhead, as though fearing to reach the lake too late for breakfast. We alone drifted lazily along and enjoyed the novelty of the scene where the yellow men had not yet felt the oncoming tide of the civilization of their whiter-faced brothers. Down to the very banks of the canal the fields were marked out for cultivation. Dykes and ditches controlled the water, and where nature had placed a pond, the Chinese had walled it about with mud, confining it to its smallest possible limits and wresting from its shallow waters part of the life-sustaining land beneath. A few miles away massive hills reared their somber heads denuded of trees, barren and eroded. In the clear morning light they stood forth as colossal monuments to the stupidity of former generations that had failed to preserve the forests of the hills to be the guardian reservoirs of the fertile plains below, even as we are doing in some parts of our own country today.
Soon after getting underway a sampan passed us that at once attracted our attention. Sculled by two robust Chinamen, it seemed fairly to leap along the canal in eagerness to be out upon the broader waters of the lake. However, it was not its speed that attracted us, but the strange passengers it carried. Projecting from either side of the boat were six or seven short, flat outriggers upon each of which sat a pair of large, dark-colored birds nearly two feet in height. Slim and slick and trained for speed they sat upon their perches swaying gently to and fro to the motion of the boat as it was sculled along and each feature of their featherybodies seemed designed for speed—particularly for sub-surface speed.
While we looked with interest at this sampan another appeared, and another and still others. Calling our interpreter we inquired the meaning of such cargoes. As all Chinese expect foreign barbarians to display ignorance and ask fool questions, the interpreter showed no surprise, but “with the smile that was childlike and bland” informed us that these were merely cormorant fishers! I wonder if other foreign barbarians are as ignorant as I was? I vaguely remembered having heard that the Chinese trained cormorants to fish for them, and in a subconscious way I had placed it along with falconry in early England—a sport that had perhaps passed away. But here were hundreds and hundreds of birds making a living for numbers of horny-handed Chinamen whose ideas of sport were absolutely nil. In some parts of the world cormorant fishing may be a sport for all I know, but here it was surely an industry. We were all anxious to see such an industry in active operation, so the interpreter, calling several of the cormorant boats alongside, appointed a rendezvous for the following morning at our prospective anchorage.
About noon we came to anchor at the chosen spot, under the shadow of a bold and rocky point, with the inevitable joss house (temple) perched upon its summit. We paid our respects to the toothless old priest in charge, and from his appearance and the general dilapidation of his surroundings, his position could have been no sinecure. The joss house contained perhaps a dozen or more hideous wooden images, besmeared with paint and sadly in need of repair. At one end of the principal room, for the reception of offerings, was a large box half filled with imitation gold and silver money made of paper. Your Chinaman parts with his real money with reluctance, to say the least, and credits his joss with a very low order of intelligence in being so easily deceived. However, we “foreign devils” did not get off so easily, as our attention was pointedly called to the half filled box. A few real coins brought forth many “k’ow t’ows” from the high priest, and mutterings of thanks and blessings, supposedly, though for aught we knew he may have been calling down curses upon our barbarian heads for not giving more.
As it was still early in the afternoon, we decided to try out at once the shooting possibilities of the surrounding country. Bidding adieu to our new friend the priest, guns and ammunition were broken out, and we were soon off for a cross-country tramp with direful intentions upon any manner of game that crossed our path.
One had not far to look for game in China then where the possession of a shotgun by a native was of very rare occurrence, and we had gone but a short distance from our point of landing when we found that game was abundant and in great variety. There was a startling whirr, a hurried bang, a more careful second, and there lying upon the ground was our first gorgeous-colored cock pheasant. Modern firearms against the pheasants of ancient China seemed hardly fair, but many others had better luck and sailed majestically away despite the ineffective bangs from our several guns.
We were not looking for any particular kind of game but for any kind so long as it kept us out of doors and possessed reasonable powers of escape, to make the sport worthy of the effort. Each hunter followed his own inclination. One scouted along the marshy ground near the lake for snipe, and the ratio between snipe killed and shots fired was, I fear, a fraction of small proportions, for this is no tale of mighty hunters but of other days in Kiang-su, before internecine warfare had become the national sport of China. Another hunter breasted the mulberry fields to try conclusions with the elusive woodcock, and the most rabid game protectionist could find but little to complain of in the result; a third declared pheasant, shooting along the foothills as his choice, but it must be confessed that he did not qualify as a successful “pot-hunter.” Before making my choice I climbed a small hill to survey the surrounding country. Extending back from the lake I saw a beautiful, broad, well-cultivated valley interspersed with numerous small ponds, and I elected to try these for ducks. Many of these ponds were not more than fifteen or twenty yards in width, while others were larger, and all were held within retaining walls of mud several feet high. Frequently, the fact that there was a pond could not be detected until one stood almost alongside it, and the mud walls effectively concealed any ducks that might be feeding within. Out of almost every pond from one to a dozen ducks would rise with a suddenness that made quick and accurate shooting essential for success. Sometimes I had luck, but more often luck was on the side of the ducks. The size of my afternoon’s bag, I feel sure, would not lay me open to the charge of being a “game hog,” but for comfortable, sporty, exciting shooting, the valleys around the Ta-hu Lakes on a bright winter’s day were surely such as to delight the heart of the most jaded sportsman, which I was not.
As we reassembled at our house boat, late in the afternoon, tired but happy, we could but acknowledge that while our combined kill might not be much more than sufficient to satisfy the appetites of ourselves and servants, still each was fully aware that his appetite was abnormal.
At the appointed hour next morning five cormorant boats appeared, and we prepared to go forth in strange company. In the excitement of preparation for our departure, the little daughter of our cook fell overboard, and through this a strange Chinese custom was called to our attention. As Bret Harte so aptly says:
Which I wish to remark—
And my language is plain—
That for ways that are dark
And for tricks that are vain,
The Heathen Chinee is peculiar.
Now by a dark, peculiar Chinese system of reasoning, if one Chinaman saves the life of another, that life is supposed to become his own and he may be called upon to sustain it. As Chinamen are usually blessed with quite as many children of their own as they can possibly support, and particularly as the child overboard was only a girl, no one, in the absence of her father, seemed to care to rescue her from a watery grave. However, hearing the commotion, a dashing young bachelor of our party rushed to the young lady’s assistance and amidst the grins of the onlookers hauled her from the water, none the worse for her cold bath, though the Chinese bathing season had long since closed. Of course we impressed it upon our bachelor friend that according to good Chinese law the little girl belonged to him, but he waived his claim in favor of anyone who cared to assume it, while she shivered near her father’s improvised cook stove.
The rescue being over, we shoved off in the cormorant boats. Each boat carried two Chinamen and about twenty birds, and thus we went fishing without bait or tackle, save a hundred big, black birds. I took my seat in one of the boats surrounded by cormorants that seemed to stare in open-eyed amazement at this strange type of man that had broken into the monotony of their uneventful lives. However, beyond a subdued muttering, as though discussing me in a polite undertone, they paid no further attention. Some spread their wings to the morning sun (hung themselves out to dry as it were), and others improved the opportunity by taking a little nap. As I looked them over at close range I could but sympathize with the fish that found itself within one of those cruel beaks with its formidable looking, almost right-angled hook at the end. As we headed out into the lake for the fishing ground, I took stock of the other appliances in the boat. Forward was a compartment half filled with water ready to receive the catch, for a Chinaman buys his fresh fish alive, even in the fish markets of the city. A light bamboo pole about twenty feet long and a small dip net completed the outfit.
As we neared the fishing ground, the boats formed in line abreast about fifty feet apart. One man continued to scull the boat from astern while the other took up the bamboo pole and began to stir up the cormorants. Perhaps it was on account of the chill of the morning, or possibly just from laziness, that the birds were so loath to take to the water. Some were shoved overboard with the pole, others were thrown into the water by hand. One old bird in my boat watched the proceedings with evident interest and he was the last to go overboard. Just before he went I am almost certain that he gave me a deliberate wink, as much as to say, “Keep your eye on this old bird if you wish to see things doing.”
In the water within a space about 200 feet long by thirty or forty wide there were now a hundred cormorants, each the very embodiment of alertness and energy. They fairly darted here and there, on the surface, under the surface, and deep down out of sight. The speed with which they traveled under water was astonishing, and as one would pass the boat in pursuit of a fish a few feet beneath the surface he would appear almost as a black streak.
The man with the pole was now in the bow of the boat shouting and whistling to his birds and urging them on to greater effort, while the sculler slowly forced the sampan ahead, at the same time drumming with one foot upon a loose board in the bottom of the boat to start the fish from their lurking places. Did a cormorant remain on the surface but more than a moment, down would come the bamboo pole on the water near him with a resounding whack, and like a flash he would disappear beneath the surface. The boats forged slowly ahead while the cormorants worked back and forth in all directions, but advancing generally at about the same speed as the boats. Thus a veritable cormorant net was sweeping slowly forward through the water.
Soon it became evident that small fish were being caught, for as a cormorant came to the surface the flick of a fish’s tail would be seen as the fish disappeared head first into the birds’ dilatable throat. The younger cormorants had bands tied around their necks of such size as to prevent them from swallowing fish large enough to be of use to their owners, but the older birds seemed more worthy of confidence. Now a bird would appear with a fish weighing probably three quarters of a pound with his head in the bird’s mouth and his tail pointing skyward and vigorously flapping. Quickly the poleman placed one end of his bamboo pole in the water just under the bird, who clasped it with his feet and was lifted on board and robbed of his fish. I say robbed of his fish, but this is hardly true, for when thrown into the water again a small fish would be tossed him in payment—a regular supply of these small fish being on hand. One old bird was not paid promptly and the boatman could neither drive him away from the side of the boat nor make him dive until a small fish had been tossed him, which he caught in the air, and then dived almost instantly. When a bird brought a fish to the surface larger than he could easily manage, the dip net was brought into play.
Suddenly, about twenty yards astern, there was a great commotion in the water. A cormorant (I feel sure it was my old friend of the wink) had brought a fish to the surface weighing several pounds, and from the struggling and splashing going on, he had clearly undertaken more than he could accomplish. Quickly our boat was headed toward him and several other cormorants darted to his assistance, but alas, as is ever the case, the biggest fish was the one that got away.
After about twenty minutes of this strenuous fishing the cormorants were assisted back to their outriggers on the boats by means of the bamboo poles, birds from the different boats being identified by pieces of colored cloth tied to their wings. Each bird promptly shook himself and hung himself out to dry, for their feathers were “wringing wet.” Nature, for some reason, has failed to provide them with the water-shedding oil so well known to us as being part of the equipment of a duck’s back.
What was considered an average day’s work for a bird, I have no way of knowing, but in the twenty minutes of fishing I should say that the boat I was in received about a pound of fish a minute. Between each run, as it were, the birds must be allowed to dry, and still they make a living for their owners. That the fish from the cold waters of the lake were delicious I can certify from personal experience. When one takes into consideration the number of cormorant fishers, he can decide for himself whether or not cormorant fishing in Ta-hu is an industry.
Necessity, the mother of invention, has in this instance surely developed an occupation interesting to the stranger. The next time you get an outing, if you will cross the Pacific and go back into China to the Ta-hu Lakes, you can see it perfectly easily for yourself, provided the direful rumors of things to come in Kiang-su have not developed into realities, and provided also that in the change from China, the Flowery Kingdom, to China, the Republic, the fishermen have not exchanged the cormorants of Ta-hu for the fishtraps that are so rapidly denuding our own waters of fish.