Interwar Postcard

Anthropologist Lye Tuck-Po has been dipping into the colonial memoirs, as she puts it, and reading Ronald McKie’s 1965 book The company of animals: A naturalist’s adventures in the jungle of Malaya. Dr. Lye discusses a portion of that book that describes an encounter with a “‘wild and angry’” elephant, noting the book’s position in a long line of tomes concerning “‘heroic white men tramping through savage jungles…’” Fortunately, both man and pachyderm seem to have survived the encounter at issue with their respective skins and dignities intact. Orwell’s elephant should have been so lucky.

delilah…always so worried, by and © hollywalnuts.

This gorgeous portrait of a sad-eyed chocolate labrador brings to mind “faithful dog Hachikō,” the loyal and determined Akita who, for a decade after his human’s death while away, returned every evening to the train station to wait for his old companion. Wikipedia’s page on Hachikō has a photo of him, showing a similar expression.