Page:McClure's Magazine volume 10.djvu/473

Rh pigs and dogs—cold-weather beasts. Yes, there is the hippopotamus, too, which can scarcely be called a cold-weather animal, though traces of his kind have been discovered almost anywhere between the equator and the eternal snows.

Our total in wagons, animals, and food is something enormous; for, unlike the circus on land, the circus at sea cannot secure material from day to day. There are 324 horses, nineteen elephants, thirty- two "led animals," such as camels, zebras, and three-horned oxen, and twenty-five ponies. We have, therefore, between decks some 600 animals to be properly cared for during a twelve or fourteen days' sea-voyage, and to be safely debarked at the end of the trip. If it were simply feeding and caring for 600 animals of a single species, the problem would be a very simple one. But when it is remembered that here we have a great variety of species, each requiring different food and special treatment, it will be seen that the problem is complicated enough to be interesting. Even of one species, all can not be dealt with alike. Take the horses: the delicate thoroughbred of the ring cannot be treated as "baggage stock."

The task could never be accomplished, of course, but for the skill acquired in long, intelligent experience. How, otherwise, could it be known that our savage collection will require 2,700 pounds of beef? Or that 100 cabbages go with seventy pounds of bread daily; and with six barrels of apples, 700 pounds of fish, seventy tons of hay, two cases of wine, 2,000 bushels of oats, one case of eggs, three barrels of onions, and so on.

When I was a farmer's boy, my father used to say that not more than one man in a hundred who owned horses knew how to take care of a horse—a common, every-day horse. Think what must it mean to get proper care taken of the 600 horses of a great circus, whether at sea or on land! In the first place, for show purposes, horses are not bought young. The baggage stock—those great, powerful, sleek-looking fellows—are from seven to twenty-five years old. Poor "Pilot," the big white baggage horse that we buried the second day out, had drawn a cage with seven others of his patient kind for the last eighteen years.

In the next place, these horses are of high and low degree, and are not all to be approached, cared for, fed,