The Great Forest: From the Magistrate's Indian Diary
I
I HAVE crossed the big river and am now in the ‘really truly’ forest, which stretches away, unbroken, to the snows of the Himalaya. Seen from the south, it is rather dark and forbidding. One vast mass of trees, pathless except for the occasional fire lines, impenetrable except along these lines for any but elephants; for the undergrowth is a tangled wilderness of fallen trunks, thorn bushes, seedlings, and lianes that hang in graceful folds from the upper branches and twist and turn, as they near the ground, like writhing snakes. All the trees in this part are of nearly uniform height, for it is a ‘scientific’ forest now, growing practically one timber crop only, and cut down at regular intervals of about forty-five years. It is all sal, an Indian hardwood that is rather like teak, and almost as valuable. Fine stuff it is. I have seen bridges made of it, where the unpainted timbers had been exposed to sun and rain, to occasional immersion for months, and then to the burning sun after the rains; and the piles were as sound as when they were put in. The broad flat leaves of the sal trees are now dark green, stained with stornis and rains, and they will fall shortly.
Every part of the forest is exactly like every other part; it is all one long flat immensity of trees. The only variety is along the edges, where the forest peters out as it meets the river; and here and there in its huge extent one finds enormous flat plains, absolutely bare of trees, but covered by elephant grass fifteen to eighteen feet high. Trees do not grow, as the soil is slightly depressed, and holds water during the rains. That will not do for sal. These vast plains — sometimes twenty miles or more in area — give endless trouble, for unless the grass is removed before the hot weather comes they will constitute foci from which the whole forest, then dry as tinder, will almost certainly be burned. Terrific storms rage then, and even with all possible precautions the forest is often set on fire by lightning. So, as soon as human beings can live in the steaming fever-sodden land, the grass all round the edge is cut, leaving a pathway of some six or ten feet. That enables one to get about, and the forest officer has to judge the moment when the grass is dry enough to burn and the forest is still green and wet enough not to take fire readily.
Then the vast area is fired, at strategic points, careful attention being paid to the direction of the wind. The firing is always done at night, when the dews are heavy and help to control the initial stages of the mighty conflagration. Usually, it is not difficult to choose a night when the air is dead still. The fire cats rapidly into the dry grass; any advance toward the forest is met by beaters with branches; but reliance is mainly placed on the tiny fire line that has been laboriously cut by hand, and on skillful firing. With amazing rapidity the fire spreads, and soon the vast plain is a whirling mass of flame, which turns and twists, leaps and sinks, with a roar that can be heard fifteen miles off in the silence of the night. Panic-stricken sambhar, swamp deer, leopards, even perhaps a stray tiger, and innumerable small animals of every kind dash wildly to safety in the forest; many are, of course, overcome by the flames, and perish miserably. And for days the fire burns slowly, after the first wild rush, till nothing is left but a few blackened stalks. For miles around the air is full of the scent of burnt grass; and for many days one cannot walk abroad, even many miles from the scene of the fire, without finding long spirals of black or gray ash, twisted like the tendrils of a vine, raining slowly from the sky in the still air.
The bungalow which will be our headquarters during the Christmas shoot stands on the very edge of the forest. In front there is a great plain that stretches, brown with coarse grass, here and there green with crops, to the edge of the river that marks the boundary of British India. Beyond are the low hills of Nepal, — dark indigo-blue, — rising up, ridge on ridge, till they meet the snow line. And the giants of the Himalayan range, aloof in their white majesty, look down silently on it all. A sunbathed scene, wonderfully restful and peaceful after the hurrying, mean life of the towns and villages. Behind the bungalow, so close that one can almost touch the trees from the back verandah, stands the great forest. There is a little town of tents for our guests, gleaming white against the dark green background. The bungalow itself has but little accommodation, but we have a drawing-room and a dining room, both gay with mistletoe and holly, and vivid with the Christmas cards from home that have already arrived. Each room has a large open-hearth fireplace in which crackles an enormous log fire — there are thousands of tons of excellent wood to be had for the picking up within a mile of the camping ground. The days are hot, windless, with everlasting blue skies, and a sun that still has something of a ‘bite’ in it; but the nights are cold, even very cold, and the warm crackle and spluttering of the resinous logs are enormously welcome.
No one has been here since the rains shut down the forest. Riding along the narrow forest line to the bungalow this morning, I came twice across the tracks of wild elephants — a herd of ten or so. On one occasion they had moved over a slight depression in the path, where the ground was still soft and wet; and as I passed I noticed that the water was slowly oozing into the great footmarks. I stopped and listened, but heard no sound. I could not have been many minutes behind them, but they had been swallowed up In the silent forest, and — apart from those great oozing footmarks — there was nothing to betray their presence. Twice my horse shied violently, without apparent reason; almost certainly it smelled a leopard crouching beside the narrow line. One felt one was really in the forest at last, and a great peace descended.
II
The Christmas camp is over, and we have all scattered again — some going as far as Mesopotamia. We had a great time, and amazing luck, everything considered. The total bag — omitting the small game and fearful wild fowl of sorts — was one tiger, three leopards, fifteen crocodiles, a hyena, and two wild dogs. Miscellaneous, I admit, and none of us were very proud of the hyena or the crocodiles, but they added weight at least, and served to make the total more imposing.
Fortunately for us, the wild dogs did not arrive till the last two days of the shoot. When they enter a jungle, all other game leaves. The wild dog is courageous past belief, supremely indifferent, apparently, to his own fate provided the pack survives and prospers; the fiercest thing in the jungle, the most tenacious, the most intelligent, and the most cruel. He does not kill his prey — he runs it down and eats it alive, till it dies of loss of blood and exhaustion. During the hot weather, when sleeping out in the jungle, I have on several occasions been awakened by the agonized screams of a huge sambhar deer which a pack of wild dogs had run down, and were eating till it died. I have seen a pack of twenty-five or so combing a river valley, beating through the high grass in a straight line which they kept by jumping up vertically every now and then, and giving a quick glance right and left to watch the moving grass tops which indicated where their companions were. They kept distance and line like a row of trained elephants — and that in grass four to six feet high! Once they get on to a prey, they never let go. They will attack anything — from man and tiger to leopard and deer.
It. sounds incredible, but I have seen four of them round a tree where a most uncomfortable-looking leopard had taken refuge. They sat on their haunches and looked up expectantly. Sooner or later, they knew, the leopard would have to make a bolt for it; and when that time came, perhaps two of them might be killed, but those who had the fortune to survive would get the leopard all right. A leopard will risk a lot to get a chance at an ordinary dog; his powerful hind legs, armed with their ripping claws, could disembowel a wild dog easily; his great canine teeth would snap a dog’s vertebrae as one would snap a twig; and yet these four wild dogs — who must have known perfectly well what they were taking on — were waiting patiently, hopefully, for the moment when ‘these grave matters would be put to the proof,’ as Winston Churchill said about something else. Wild dogs have treed my runners as they came into camp with my daily budget of papers; wild dogs have killed their tiger when the odds were fairly even; wild dogs will face anything, kill anything, and cat anything. They sweep through a jungle like a destroying pestilence; and the game that senses their presence — even the lordly tiger — stands not upon the order of its going, but goes at once. Where, they are, one wastes time hunting anything but wild dogs.
I am deeply versed in crocodile lore, after shooting perhaps fifty of these loathsome animals in all kinds of circumstances and in all sorts of environments. But never have I seen anything like the shooting on the Suhan. That river divides British India from the lands beyond; but, apart from the importance which that fact may confer, it is a very ‘onehorse,’ tuppenny-ha’penny sort, of river. It runs, in a bed seldom over a hundred yards wide and usually much less, between solid banks of forest; it has cut a channel for itself which is normally about fifty feet below the level of the flat forest land on each side of it; and it is, in essence, a succession of very deep pools, connected by slender threads of shallow running water. One can ford it easily, anywhere.
These great pools, however, teem with alligators — both the muggar, or crocodile, variety, with its heavy ugly snub nose, and the gharial, or fisheating, kind, with a long swordlike snout, perhaps two feet in length, set with exceedingly sharp overlapping teeth. This formidable weapon ends in the tumba, a crinkled, horny sort of mass about the size of one’s doubled fists in the male, and hardly perceptible in the female. On the top of the tumba are the air valves which the crocodile shuts when swimming, or lying up under water. I brought my party, by devious forest paths, to the edge of the river overlooking one of these deep pools; in front, fifty yards off, lying like a row of gray sal logs, higgledy-piggledy in the sun, were perhaps fifty crocodiles, gharials and muggars. Many had their mouths open, and little birds were picking industriously at the interstices of their teeth; all were fast asleep. They looked so like logs, with the dried gray mud covering them almost completely, that it took some time to pick up the unmistakable outlines, the armored backs, the ridged tails with the triangular fins standing vertically, the wicked-looking heads, the powerful jaws.
I silently placed my party of four guns; and told them to aim at the middle of the neck and to fire as soon as they heard the first shot, training their rifles, meantime, steadily on the object. In thirty seconds or so the first rifle went off, and the others followed in a volley. We were all using highpower rifles, cordite, mostly of .400 bore. At the sound, the great mass of logs leaped into life, and in the twinkling of an eye the sand bank was clear, except for four great animals that gave one convulsive heave and then lay still. A crocodile that one misses, or that one hits in any but the vital spot, is into the water like lightning; he may look slow, but he most certainly is n’t. We finished off the four with aimed shots, taken at leisure; and then forded the river to examine our kills.
With the help of the shikaris who accompanied us, we dragged them one by one to a safer distance from the water’s edge. All were over eighteen feet; two were over twenty. All were gharials, the fish-eating kind. But experience teaches one not to believe the chamber naturalists; and in one of the four ‘harmless’ fish eaters we found a complete set of women’s silver ornaments. He evidently preferred a varied diet. ‘That is another story’; but I may say in passing that I have shot a gharial that pulled in his buffalo a week, and that terrorized a village for months, taking toll of one woman and three children during that period. All crocodiles arc loathsome; all will drag in human beings or animals if they get the chance; and that particular ‘ fish eater ’ lived exclusively on an animal diet.
As soon as the skinning started, the vultures began to gather. When we arrived, there was not a vulture to be seen; before we had finished the skinning, perhaps a hundred were hopping expectantly round, at a safe distance on the sand. Their bald heads looked repulsive and obscene; they waddled about clumsily, screaming and gibbering at each other; their necks were purple and leprous white in patches; their legs scaly and horrible. If one looks up into the pale blue sky, one will — when the eyes get accustomed to the glare — perhaps see, thousands of feet up, moving in slow even circles, a vulture quartering the ground. He spots the kill, and swoops down in long smooth curves. Another, from some distant post of vantage out of one’s sight, notes his descent; he follows — for he knows that a kill has been sighted. Others, still farther off, note these disappearances; they too glide down to the anticipated feast; and in less time almost than it takes to tell, the sky, for miles and miles around, is emptied of its hovering scavengers. In the air they look beautiful; every action is taken with such effortless ease; they are so completely at home, and so amazingly masters of that element.
When we withdrew from the skinned carcasses, they thronged round them. They stood, stretching out their repulsive necks, screaming, and waddling over each other to get closer — but seemed to be arrested by some haunting fear. Round each dead body was a ring of heaped-up vultures, wings beating wings, feet treading on bodies, all screaming, all betraying the most intense eagerness to get their great beaks into the bleeding flesh, but all, apparently, afraid to make the final plunge. And then, as if at a signal, the invisible barrier broke. The crocodiles were completely hidden under a screaming, writhing, struggling mass of birds. The pile was roughly six feet high, one heaving mass of fighting birds burrowing their way to the core of flesh underneath. I gave them twenty minutes by my watch, and then advanced slowly. They hopped and waddled away, most of them so gorged that they could not fly; and when I reached the crocodiles, nothing was left but clean-picked skeletons. Sharp work!
III
On the way back, we were met by an excited crowd of villagers from one of the forest hamlets near. It took some time to get their story; but it eventually appeared that, as one of them was going to work in his field, which was in the centre of the great plain stretching from the front of the bungalow to the river, he was attacked by a leopard. It was still in a patch of grass, be said, beside the field. I disbelieved the tale, for the field was entirely isolated; it was over a mile from the nearest point of the forest; and leopards are seldom met with in a spot which affords no cover and involves a journey across absolutely open ground before cover can be reached. However, we had a few elephants with us, though no howdahs; and it is always sound policy in such cases to have a ‘look-see.’ We tramped across the plain, and soon found ourselves beside the field. The patch of grass was possibly twenty yards square; and it seemed about as likely that there would be a leopard there as that you would meet, a tiger strolling on Piccadilly. The grass was short brown coarse stuff, perhaps two feet high; and all round, for miles, lay the bare brown soil on which a rice crop had been grown. We formed our four elephants into line, taking the patch from the edge nearest the forest. Almost as soon as we entered it, one of the elephants ‘called’; that is, it hit the ground with its tensed trunk, with a bruuump! — emitting at the same time a peculiar little squeal. Leopard, certainly, after that—‘no possible, probable shadow of doubt, no shadow of doubt whatever.’ We were perched uncomfortably on our pads, a posture in which it is impossible to change one’s position rapidly, and often very difficult for the tyro to maintain his scat at all. One can fire on one side only, usually, and must keep one’s seat mainly by balance. A second or two later I saw the leopard — a very big one — darting through the grass. There was no time to fire; and I preferred in any case that one of my guests should get him. All very exciting; for the elephants — which were a scrap lot, and not our howdah beasts — began to show signs of fear, and moved about unpleasantly. They did n’t like the game at all.
As we got near the edge of the patch, one rifle rang out—missed! The leopard dashed back, like a flash, far too quick to give anyone a chance of shooting. We turned the line, and went over the ground again. Time and again we saw him, but no one had a chance to fire. Then another shot — another miss! They were all much too excited; and the squealing elephants, jiggling unsteadily, added to the difficulty. Most of my guests were hanging on to the pad ropes with one hand, while their rifles, Held in the other, pointed any way. They were confusing the mahouts with conflicting orders. ‘Dhut! Dhut!’—which means ‘Stop! Stop!’ ’Mail, oh mail, mail, mail!' — ‘Go on, go on! Push on!’ And so it went on, while the leopard slunk about in the miserable cover, taking advantage, with the marvelous instinct of a hunted creature, of every false move on the part of the elephants, and doing always the unexpected. But this could not last; he was ‘tied to a peg,’ as the Indian shikaris say. To break in one wild dash across the open for the nearest bit of forest was his only chance; and inherited instinct forbade that. He clung to his meagre cover; and the trampling of the broad-footed elephants made that cover less and less serviceable every instant. At last the end came, tamely enough — as it so often does in such cases. One of us saw the leopard squatting, flattened out against the ground, his color mingling so completely with the brown grass that only the shape of his head gave him away. One shot between the shoulders killed him instantly, and it was all over.
It was rather like murder; but one could not leave a huge leopard near a forest village, especially afier he had been so harried. After tossing a cartridge or two on him to make certain that he was really dead, everyone was preparing to descend, when I sensed — rather than saw — an unexplained movement in the grass some yards to my right. I shouted instantly, ‘Hold on! There is another!’ Almost as I spoke, we saw the second leopard, which seemed equally big, darting to a clump of grass that remained still untrodden. The beating recommenced, and it was the same game over again. It is extraordinarily difficult to hit in such circumstances.
I think six shots were fired before a lucky bullet caught the leopard rather far back. Instantly the character of the thing changed; the leopard, wounded, was fiercely angry, and charged at once. Time and again she — for it was a female — routed the elephants; time and again, after her charge, she sank back into the grass that absorbed her completely. Two of the elephants bolted, and careered wildly across the open plain, the riders hanging on anyhow as the great black legs worked like huge pistons. We found later that both elephants had been rather badly clawed. With two only, the task was easier. It was merely a case of pushing quietly into the trampled mass, and watching carefully for any movement. Shooting was easier, too, for there was less danger. The end came much as before — my guest saw a heaving flank, and fired. The merciful bullet went through the shoulder and heart, and that was the end of it all. They were both big beasts — the male eight feet three, the female seven feet eight. I suppose they had come near the village during the night in quest of dogs or goats, had been surprised by the dawn, and had decided to lie up during the day in the patch of grass which gave the only cover for miles around. The bolters came back slowly, under heavy punishment all the way; we padded the kills, and went home.
And then, perhaps the best of all, tea in the drawing-room before a roaring, crackling, sizzling fire of logs, the place alive with pleasant talk. All the day’s work was gone over faithfully, and then the talk drifted to the thousand and one topics that hold and interest men in the East. Everybody in t he East knows, more or less, everybody else; and the talk always has a strong personal flavor. It changed lightly from the London we all knew so well to the jungles of East Africa, from man-eating lions to the crocodiles of the Suhan, from curious murders to the ruses of war. I remember that someone happened to mention Oregon, and I heard for the first time Melbourne’s remark that he was ‘damned if England wanted any country where the salmon would not take a fly.’ Was n’t he the man who, when appointed Colonial Secretary, went upstairs to find a map to ‘see where all these places were’?
I remember another yarn of the kind that sticks. One of us was serving in Madras. One day he rode over, in the evening, to a village on the coast that had not been visited by the district officer for very many years — it was isolated, and of no particular importance. He got talking with the village elders; and they suggested that he had come, of course, to see the white man’s grave. He had never heard of any white man being buried there, and asked where the grave was. One old fellow set off, keeping the top of a Hindu temple in line with the crest of a distant hill; another walked on a line with two other landmarks; and they met in a wilderness of sand dunes, where the wind had piled up wave on wave of yellow sand in fantastic shapes. ‘It is here,’ they said. So he started them digging; but the work was heavy, the day was declining, and it soon became clear that nothing could be done before it was dark. They promised to have the grave cleared soon after dawn; and he arranged to ride over in the morning to see it.
Next morning he duly arrived, and galloped to the little knot of people that he saw collected near the site. They had cleared away the sand, and they led him to the edge of the cutting at the foot of which the grave was. He leaned over, and there, six feet down in the yellow sand, he saw a white marble slab, fresh as the day it had left the sculptor’s hands, bearing, in deep-cut leaded letters, his own name! ‘Alan Alastair Soames’ — no common aggregation of names, either. His grandfather had been district officer there many years before; while in camp an infant son had died and had been buried there, — there was no choice, — and my friend (who had no knowledge of the facts) stumbled nearly a hundred years after on the grave. An uncanny happening, that, and a bit upsetting after a long ride without breakfast!
IV
One afternoon, while returning from one of the crocodile battues with which we diversified events, I noticed three or four vultures sitting in a tree on the edge of the forest. We went off to investigate at once, for vultures mean meat, and meat in the forest always means a kill. We found a young sambhar which had been killed by a tiger — there is no mistaking these deep holes in the neck, beside the vertebræ, where the forefinger sinks in till well past the middle joint. Nothing but a tiger’s tooth could leave that mark. Hunting round, I found some of the pugs; they indicated a fairly large tigress. (The pug of the male is round, almost circular; that of the tigress is elongated, more like an ellipse.)
Only a little had been eaten; that portion of the jungle was quite undisturbed; there was excellent cover near, — tall, thick, green grass, — and close by there was water in plenty. It was a ‘new’ tiger; we had not seen pugs of exactly that size and shape before. And a new tiger meant an unsophisticated tiger — not one of the local kind that went about with a copy of the Forest Code under one forearm, and of the shooting regulations under the other, took sights through a theodolite, and worked out a course by logarithms before moving. In short, a fool of a tiger. So we drew lots at once — the usual short and long grass stems — to decide who should sit up for her.
Meantime, an elephant was sent off for the machan; and soon one of the party was ensconced in the little tapestrung frame, cunningly hidden in a tree that dominated the kill. Fresh green branches were arranged so as to hide him, while leaving his line of sight open; and other branches were stuck in below, to break the hard line of the frame. I filled him with good advice, — which I may say here and now shared the usual fate of good advice, —and in particular I told him to use his rifle while the daylight permitted, and then to trust to his twelve-bore, with a soft-lead ball, for the more likely half hour or so of twilight. He must sit absolutely still, and he must not think the tiger was looking at him. The white patches on the ears — about the size of a half crown — always give that impression to a tyro, and this particular man had never seen a tiger outside a zoo. Then we went off quietly to tea, after wishing him good luck.
I was dressed early, and he returned just before dinner, though the kill had been rather a long way off. He was white and shaking, and dejected beyond measure. In brief, his story was that the tigress had come trampling out as if the jungle belonged to her, while it was still broad daylight. He kept still, but was trembling with excitement, He took his gun instead of his rifle; and he fired hastily, without aiming, because he felt sure the tiger was looking steadily at him. ‘Did it call to the shot?’ He did not know; all he did know was that it whirled round and disappeared before he could collect his wits enough to try a second barrel. He felt certain he had missed it; it was a tremendous beast, about a thousand feet long; it had been less than fifteen feet off; it was as big as the side of a house; and he had missed it, missed it, missed it! There is no bitterness like that bitterness. There was nothing to be done that night, but his dinner was a sad and sorrowful meal. He could not take his mind off the tremendous chance which he had thrown away. We knew what he was feeling — we had all passe par la; we left him to his brooding.
Early next morning, before the sun was up, he and I went off on an elephant to see what could be done. I put him in the machan; told him to sit exactly as he was sitting when he fired; and then, having made quite sure myself that the gun was in fact empty, I handed it up to him, and told him to hold it on the aim he must have taken the evening before. I then searched the ground. There was no sign of the bullet in the narrow area where it must have struck, assuming that he was holding his gun more or less correctly; ergo, the bullet must be in the tigress. I searched for blood, but found none — that, of course, was not conclusive one way or the other. I hunted for the claw marks — for a tiger almost always ‘strikes’ its claws when hit; but the ground was grassy and covered with debris of sorts, and I could discover nothing. I picked up a few faint traces of pugs in the direction in which the tigress had fled; they led straight to a large area of very tall elephant grass, which extended for some miles, but which was quite beatable. My guest’s drooping hopes having been revived by a positive statement that the tigress was wounded, lying up in the grass, and that we should get her all right, we went back to the bungalow, and prepared for the beat. We had twelve elephants, four of which carried howdahs. It was arranged that two ‘stops’ should keep well ahead of the line, the farthest nearly a hundred and fifty yards ahead, the second about fifty; that a third should remain about twenty yards in advance; and that I should take my howdah into the middle of the grass, keeping and directing the line.
We started; the swish-swish recommenced, and the long swaying heave — but this time we were all agog with excitement. We began the beat at the point where I had tracked the tigress into the grass; and we had not advanced twenty yards when my elephant— a particularly trustworthy one in such matters — ‘called’ unmistakably to tiger. No other elephant gave any sign, so I thought that she was merely acknowledging the scent where the tigress had lain the night before, and that we should find the tigress farther on. But. as we went on she gave no further sign. There was no movement, either, in the grass. I felt so certain that Luchma — that was my elephant’s name — was right that I stopped the line and went back alone, with the intention of going carefully, zigzag, through the narrow bit of grass we had just beaten. When fifty yards or so behind the line, there was a terrific roar, and the tigress came charging down on my elephant, crashing her way through the tall stems. Luchma never moved; she stood like a rock, ready for anything. I did not have my rifle in my hand, even — for in thick grass one cannot see to shoot. Before I could snatch it up, the tigress had disappeared. She did not like the looks of Luchma, evidently; and the charge was not pushed home. The line, of course, heard the roar, and turned instantly, coming along in excellent order. I waited for it, with the tigress giving tongue somewhere close in front of me, but entirely hidden in the grass, which was twelve feet or more high. Fortunately, it was a narrow spit of grass, right at the end of the great grassy plain, but uncomfortably close to the forest. We could concentrate the elephants better there than in a wider area; but the two stops did not follow what was happening, and they misunderstood all my frantic signs and shouts to them to rejoin us. I was afraid that the tigress might make a dash for it and escape— though probably she would be wounded again — into the forest, where she would be safe for a time at least, and where it might be difficult or even impossible to find her.
However, we pushed slowly on, and then the fun began. With a heartshaking roar, she sprang for the head of a pad elephant. I saw her curled up like a caterpillar on the top part of the trunk, holding on by her claws, and biting the poor beast above the eye. It was impossible to fire; one would have killed the mahout or wounded the elephant. The latter soon shook her off, but an attempt to get its knees on the tigress failed. The tigress dropped into the long grass, and disappeared instantly.
With only two of us available, we had to kill as quickly as possible in order to save the elephants — some of which, naturally enough, were uneasy and even frightened. We therefore fired at every movement in the grass, trying to allow for the fact that the tigress must be somewhere near the bottom of the twelve-foot stems that shook and rustled as she changed position. But it was very unsatisfactory. We never saw her, except when she charged, bounded on to the head of an elephant, and clawed and bit there till she was shaken off. I noticed one stout-hearted mahout laying into her, as hard as he could hit, with the heavy iron ankus — which they usually call a gujbank here. The tigress’s head was within a foot of him as he sat on the elephant’s neck, but his legs were protected by the big long cars. Time and again she charged; time and again she managed to get home a savage bite; but she was always shaken off quickly, and then dropped from sight immediately into the long grass.
On one occasion I caught a flicker of her tawny hide as she dropped, and a very quick shot luckily went home. After that it was easier. She could no longer leap on to the elephants, but she charged continually; and it took us over an hour of vivid excitement before we hit her again. That was nearly the end. I finally spotted her again, in a little clear tunnel in the grass where she lay panting, and finished her off’ with a soft-lead bullet in the neck. She was a very fine tigress, nine feet long and beautifully marked — the white parts were clear and brilliant, the dark head markings almost black. We found that the bullet fired from the machan had entered just behind the shoulder, had been deflected by a rib, and had ploughed its way, just under the skin, right to her tail. It did no real damage; but she must have been very sore, poor beast, all night, and her temper when we met her was of the worst.
Padding home, all agog with the adventure, all mightily pleased at having added a tiger to the bag, we put up a huge hyena quite by accident; the ugly lumbering beast went off at a great pace, but was bowled over by a fine shot which took him clean between the shoulders. The first thing to be done on arrival was to attend to the elephants. I went over them myself, most carefully, swabbing out the wounds with dilute carbolic acid; and it was touching to see how the big beasts lay down, turned over at a word, and curled their trunks up out of the way. They squealed and whimpered as the acid bit into the wounds, but they knew that it was all right — they were being doctored, and were as good as gold all through. Their mahouts talked to them all the time, and so did I. ‘It’s all right, my daughter; this will do you good.’ ‘Turn over, my daughter; let me get to your other side.’ ‘I won’t hurt you.’ They knelt, or lay, as ordered; and there was never a shake in the big bodies. Every morning and evening I went over all their wounds; they healed up in no time.
V
The next to last day, as I took my morning stroll along the fire lines, rifle in hand, I saw about twenty wild dogs popping across one of the paths. They were hunting, regularly spaced out, not following any game, but just beating the jungle for anything that might be there. Their line, in almost impenetrable undergrowth, was perfect — and absolutely true as regards direction. They did not see me — or, if they did, they took no notice. They were making for the open plain near the bungalow, and I went back there — to find the wild dogs sitting on their haunches just at the edge of the forest, and regarding with the most obvious interest the array of tents and the men who were walking about near them. The tents were perhaps three hundred yards off. It was hopeless trying to stalk the dogs either front the plain or from the forest; the former had absolutely no cover, and the latter was so thick with undergrowth that it would have been difficult to force a way through, and in any case I should hat e made as much noise as a German band in doing it. Only one of my guests was about. I called to him; he got his rifle, and we arranged to stroll leisurely toward the dogs, inclining spirally toward them, and dropping for as steady a shot as possible as soon as they began to get uneasy. It was the only plan, and fortunately it worked. He got one, and I got another; both dropped dead to the shots. Handsome brutes they were; heads like Scotch collies, heavy orange-tawny coats, bushy tails, ‘ breedy ’ in form, and in perfect condition. The Government, by the way, pays three pounds a head for the dogs; but this high reward — for India — has but little effect. They are very difficult to get, for a hundred different reasons.
And now it is all over. To-morrow we move off to another forest centre where there has been disturbing news of dacoits. Our guests have already scattered, and we are all alone in the bungalow. The little town of tents has vanished; and to-morrow the gay drawing-room, bright with Christmas cards, hanging draperies, calendars, photographs, and all the ‘homey’ touches, will be but four bare whitewashed walls. There is an ‘after the ball’ air about the place which depresses; we rattle about in the deserted bungalow that was, so lately, full of life and gayety. Partir, c’est mourir un peu.