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beast from its horns downward. There are many superstitions that rest on no more solid foundation.

What number of animals I killed during my four and a half years at Deoghur I cannot say. I kept no diary or any record of my sport. At first I saved the skins as trophies, and had a fairly large bungalow carpeted with them from end to end; but they smelt objectionably in the rains, and tripped me up in the hot weather, and I got rid of them. Then I kept skulls ranged upon shelves until I made my house a Golgotha, and was driven to cast those osseous relics forth; and when I left Deoghur for Oudh I took with me no memento whatever of those four and a half years' shikar, and but a hazy idea of the number of heads of big game that had fallen to my gun.

Whatever the number was, it was of fair proportion, and obtained with only trifling casualties, caused by panthers. One beater was killed by a panther while I was beating through some light cover, but he died very much as the consequence of his own neglect. He stumbled upon the panther in the scrub, and the beast hit him one blow in the back and fled. I saw nothing of this or of the panther at any time; but when I heard of this accident, the wounded man, thinking little of his hurt, had gone off to his home. He died two days later of lockjaw; whereas, had his wound been cauterised and dressed at my camp without loss of time, he would in all probability have

survived, as did several other beaters no seriously wounded. Tigers were in my experience far less dangerous than panthers: even when wounded they fled from the line of beaters, and from first to last no beater of mine ever suffered hurt by these forest kings.

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209

CHAPTER VIII.

THE ELEPHANT IN TIGER-HUNTING.

YULE IN THE TERAI-DANGERS FROM TIGER-SHOOTING ON ELEPHANTS -UNCERTAINTY OF ELEPHANTS-ELEPHANTS FUSSING-ELEPHANTS

REFUSING THEIR COWARDICE
-BOLTING UNDER FIRE MAD
ELEPHANTS-PREPARATIONS FOR
THE TERAI-THE CAMP LOST-
SIR HENRY TOMBS, V.C.

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HAT old Calcutta ambition of mine to get farther afield-to penetrate into the mysterious Mofussil - was adequately realised in 1862, when I was translated to Oudh. At the

present time the distance of Lucknow from Calcutta is,

comparatively speaking, a mere

stone's-throw, and may be travelled by rail without a break in about a day and a half. In 1862 it was a journey of many days, made laboriously in the barbaric contrivance known as the palki

ghari, except as to some 250 miles (Calcutta to Ranigunj, and Allahabad to Cawnpore) which could be done by rail. Day after day one plodded along from Ranigunj to Allahabad by way of the Grand Trunk Road, until one got heartily sick of that splendid engineering work, and could see no good in it whatever. To-day Quetta, or even Kandahar, is, by time, nearer to Deoghur than then Lucknow was. But time and the palki ghari run through the longest course at last, and in the early morn of an April day I reached Oudh's capital.

Yule was then tiger - shooting in the Nepal Terai - his last performance in the character of tiger-slayer-and I was not without hope that he would summon me to his camp, to talk "shop" with him in the moments that could be spared from shikar. There was some little excuse for this hope, in that I was called upon to organise a revenue department newly created by him, as to which his personal counsel would have been invaluable. But, unfortunately, he did not see eye to eye with me in this matter. No request came to me to join his forest camp, and while I constructed a departmental system out of Abkari (excise) and stamps at headquarters, my chief hunted through the swamps and jungles that lie at the foot of the Himalaya.

Very fortunate were the privileged few who were with Yule on that occasion. Herky Ross, the champion rifle-shot of India, and brother of

the first English champion, Bob Aitken, the hero of the Bailey-guard of the Lucknow Residency, Colonel Towers, and another globe-trotter, were of the party. The tigers shot numbered forty- a record that has never been touched, I fancy, before or since, not even when tigers have been netted and imprisoned and put down for the shooters.

Yule's fortunate guests had a fair amount of excitement with their sport. One fighting tigress got upon the pad of a beating elephant occupied by a chuprassie, and was cut about by his tulwar until it dropped to the ground, and was there killed by gun and rifle shots of the party. On another occasion a tigress, more vicious, or of more effective vice than the other, got upon a pad ridden by a chowkidar, and seizing that unfortunate between its teeth, flung him to and fro as a terrier worries a rat, until life was gone a murder promptly avenged by half-adozen bullets.

Then it happened that Ross, somehow or other, got thrown from the elephant he rode into a heavy swamp, and also in the immediate vicinity of a tiger, and had to be extricated from that doubly inconvenient situation; and (fourthly) it came about that in a scrimmage with a tiger in the forest, the elephant ridden by Yule bolted among the low-branched trees, with the natural consequences that the howdah was wrecked, and its contents, including the rider, thrown to the ground and scattered, Yule being so much bruised and

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