But this cut did not seem to cool the boar’s courage very much. The savage animal still charged, the horse plunged and the Major slashed, and so the fight went on—charge, plunge, slash, until the Colonel came riding up with his spear, and soon put an end to the career of the ferocious boar.
The next time the Major and Colonel Myles went out to hunt they went after tigers.
Tiger hunting is very popular among the white residents of India, and it is well that it is, for the natives do not often succeed so well in their hunts after tigers, as the tigers succeed in their hunts after the natives.
It is astonishing to read, in the government reports, how many people are annually killed by tigers in some parts of India.
The Colonel’s first tiger hunt was not a very ambitious one. He did not go out into the jungle on an elephant in company with forty or fifty natives, but he and the Major, with two or three followers, started off on foot. They walked a long distance without seeing a sign of tigers, although they were in a place where two bullocks had been killed by these animals the previous night.
Towards noon, however, one of the natives discovered the plain tracks of a tiger, and the party followed the trail until they lost it in a mass of rocks. In these rocks, however, was a large cave, and the natives assured them that they would find the animal in this cave.
No one was particularly anxious to go into it to see if the tiger was there, but, peering carefully in at the entrance of the cave, the Colonel was sure that he saw something gleaming far back in the darkness, and he thought that the bright spot must be one of the tiger’s eyes.
To be sure, unless it was a one-eyed tiger, he ought to see two bright spots, but he did not stop to consider this point, but took deliberate aim at the spot and fired.
Nothing happened. No tiger jumped out.
Then the Major fired, although he was not quite certain that he did see a shining spot. Still there was no sign of a tiger having been shot. Even if the beast had been fairly hit by either of the shots, it is likely that he would have made some disturbance inside the cave, for tigers are very hard to kill.