Doth each exalt with all his wit
The noble art of murdering.”
3. KILLING TIGERS AND APES [205]
I have just been invited to invest in an electric apparatus, to be installed upon the tree one sits in, when waiting over a “kill” for the return of the tiger. The difficulty at present is to see to shoot in the dark; and this invention enables you to press a button and flood the place with electric light. If then you are moderately quick, you can shoot the beast while he is blinking at the light, as easily as if it were day. You are as safe in the tree as in a bedroom and very nearly as comfortable on your platform. You can sleep there all night—four nights out of five at the least—when nothing happens. When the great night comes, that is to say, when the tiger comes, even then you need not lose more sleep than most passengers do in a sleeping carriage on a railway. The swing of the tree in the breeze and the rustling of the leaves make your platform a superlatively soothing bed; and as you lie back and look up at the drifting clouds, and the moon or the stars, you can feel you have the excitements of savage life, combined with all the comforts of Charing Cross; for at your side is a good fellow, willing, for a consideration, to keep watch for the tiger, better than you [206] ]possibly could, and to watch you, too, and take care that, in waiting, you do not roll over on your back and snore, and finally wake you when it comes. What a dramatic whisper it is in your ear—“Tiger come! Tiger come!” Nothing in any theatre can equal it! Do not be in too big a hurry to fire. There is no need to hurry, if you take care to make no noise at all, and it is well to take time to waken thoroughly, so as to aim your best. If then you fire and kill, you are contented for an hour or two. There might then even be a little danger for you, if you had made a bargain with the Devil like Faust’s (see Goethe’s text, Scene iv)—
“If e’er you find me quite content,
And bidding time stand still,
To Hell you then can have me sent,
And bind me as you will!”
But even in that case, the danger would be momentary. “Another” and “another” you would want; and the Devil himself could not provide them—at any rate in Burma, where the many ineffectual days and nights become intolerable, unless you have something else to do as well.
Accordingly it is the Forest officers, whose work is in the woods, who can hunt to most advantage. There was one I knew who killed many scores of tigers, mostly by “sitting up over a kill,” in the [207] ]manner described. I doubt if he knew the exact figure himself. It must have been over a hundred. Besides the tigers, the same man killed perhaps every kind of wild beast in the Burman forests, except only the big ape.