The elephants were again in motion, and, leaving the well-beaten dâk road behind us, we were now following an elephant’s track, going at every step more and more into scenery such as I had pictured to myself when thinking about India as my future home.
“Look!” I cried excitedly, as, from the edge of a patch of jungle, a couple of peacocks ran along for a few yards, and then took flight, one blaze of bright colour for a few moments, as I caught flashes of vivid blue and green, and metallic gold.
My hand went mechanically to the rifle behind me in the howdah, and the doctor laughed.
“Well done, Englishman!” he cried. “Something beautiful, and wild. Let’s kill it!”
“We’ve come out shooting,” I said, half sulkily.
“Yes—tigers!” said the doctor. “What a curious fate mine is—to live always with you soldiers, who think of nothing but killing, while my trade is to save life! There goes another peacock,” he cried, as one of the lovely birds, with an enormous train, ran out into the open, rose, and went skimming away before us.
“I wonder such beautiful birds don’t attract the common people; they’re grand eating. Why don’t they get shot?”
“Sacred to everybody but to us Englishmen,” he replied. “We are the only savages out here who kill peafowl.”
“Then the Hindoos don’t like it?”
“Of course not; but they have to put up with it, all the same. And we do rid them of the great cats which kill their cows—and themselves, sometimes. Why, they will not even kill their poisonous snakes, and thousands die of the bites every year.”