Page:How and Why Library 287.jpg

 while talking, puts a stout stick between the bars. With a terrible roar the lion springs on the stick and crushes it into splinters. But the trainer keeps right on putting sticks between the bars, talking kindly to the lion and feeding him. After a few weeks the lion pays no attention to the stick, or he smells it and walks away. Finally he lets the trainer touch him with it, and stroke his back as he eats.

It is several months before the trainer tries going into the cage. He takes the stick with him and a stout chair. He sits down and pretends to read a newspaper. The lion crouches back in a corner and growls. If he should spring the trainer has the chair up, legs out, before his face, and Mr. Lion gets a bumped head and a blow on the nose—his tenderest spot. Very slowly he learns to trust his master and to fear him, too. Sometimes a lion seems to grow fond of his trainer.

When petted he will purr as if he had a whole swarm of bees in his throat. But trainers never forget that the tamest lion is always dangerous. He is sly and treacherous, too. Without an instant's warning he may forget all his lessons and turn on his best friend. So the trainer watches and watches, never quite trusting even a lion that he has brought up from a cub.

Lion cubs are the cunningest babies. They really look and act more like puppies than kittens. They are as fat and clumsy and woolly as Newfoundland puppies. In Lincoln Park Zoo, Chicago, a keeper takes a family of three or four lion kittens out onto a grass plot for a romp. Crowds and crowds of people watch them tumble over each other. They are not born blind as tame kittens are, but they are just as helpless, and for a long time cannot even lap milk from a saucer. Sometimes the mother lion, soured on the world by being shut in a cage, won't have anything to do with her babies. They die unless some other animal with milk can be found to nurse them. The very best foster mother for lion kittens is—not a cat, but a dog. A shepherd or collie dog is the best, for she is trained to care for sheep. She nurses them, fondles them and seems as proud of them as a mother. But in a few months they grow so big and rough that she looks at them in wonder and alarm, as a hen looks at a duckling she has hatched to take to the water. She must think the fairies have changed these babies in their cradles, for they are none of hers! And by the time they are old enough to be weaned they are too much for doggie.