THE COMMUNITY
THE VILLAGE

Naked children play at the gates by the bell-shaped baskets where the fighting cocks are kept. Each morning the baskets are lined out on the street so that the roosters may enjoy the spectacle of people passing by. Small boys wearing only oversize sun-hats drive the enormous water-buffaloes, which in Bali appear in two colours, a dark muddy grey, and a pale, almost transparent pink, an albino variety.

A water-buffalo will not hesitate to attack a tiger; their ponderous calm and their gigantic horns are aweinspiring to Europeans, who have been told that their odour furiates the buffaloes. They have often charged white people for no apparent reason, although the smallest Balinese boy can 3nhandle the great beasts. They love to lie in the water and be scrubbed by their little guardians, who climb all over them and sug from their horns when they take them for their evening bath.The buffalo tolerates the children perhaps as a rhinoceros tolerates the birds that eat the ticks on its back.

The Balinese raise a fine breed of cattle, a beautiful variety of cow, with delicate legs and a long neck,that resembles overgrown deer more than ordinary cows. Ducks are driven in flocks to the ricefields, where they feed on all sorts of small water animals. Their guardian is a boy or an old man who leads them with a lit1e banner of white cloth on the end of a bamboo pole topped a bunch of white feathers.

This he plants on the ground and he can then go away for the rest of the day, sure that his ducks will not wander away .At sundown the trained ducks gather arround the flag waiting to be taken home. When the duck-guardian arrives, the flock is all together, and at a signal from the flag, they march home, straight as penguins and in perfect military formation.

All Balinese domestic animals are rather extraordinary; chick, are killed constantly by rushing automobiles, but their owners make no provision to keep them from the road except the low bamboo fence that bars the house gate, and that is intended, perhap for the pigs, which in Bali belong to a monstrous variety that surely exists nowhere else.

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