“On my return to camp, just as I was sitting down to breakfast, some Banjárás [carriers, and probably gypsies] from a place called Déckná—about a mile and a half from our camp—came running in to say that one of their companions had been taken out of the middle of their drove of bullocks by the tiger, just as they were starting from their night’s encampment. The elephant had not been unharnessed, and securing some food and a bottle of claret, I was not two minutes in getting under way again. The edge of a low savanna, covered with long grass and intersected by a nálá, was the scene of this last assassination, and a broad trail of crushed-down grass showed where the body had been dragged down to the nálá. No tracking was required. It was all horribly plain, and the trail did not lead quite into the ravine, which had steep sides, but turned and went alongside of it into some very long grass reaching nearly up to the howdah. Here Sarjú Parshád, a large government mukna [tuskless male elephant] I was then riding, kicked violently at the ground and trumpeted, and immediately the long grass began to wave ahead. We pushed on at full speed, stepping as we went over the ghastly half-eaten body of the Banjárá. But the cover was dreadfully thick, and though I caught a glimpse of a yellow object as it jumped down into the nálá, it was not in time to fire. It was some little time before we could get the elephant down the bank and follow the broad plain footsteps of the monster, now evidently going at a swinging trot. He kept on in the nálá for about a mile, and then took to the grass again; but it was not so long here, and we could make out the trail from the howdah. Presently, however, it led into rough, stony ground, and the tracking became more difficult. He was evidently full of go, and would carry us far; so I sent back for more trackers, and orders to send a small tent across to a hamlet on the banks of the Ganjál, towards which he seemed to be making. All that day we followed the trail through an exceedingly difficult country, patiently working out print by print, but without having been gratified by a sight of his brindled hide. Several of the local shikáris were admirable trackers, and we carried the line down to within about a mile of the river, where a dense, thorny cover began, through which no one could follow a tiger.
“We slept that night at the little village, and early next morning made a long cast ahead, proceeding at once to the river, where we soon hit upon the track leading straight down its sandy bed. There were some strong covers reported in the river-bed some miles ahead, near the large village of Bhádúgaon, so I sent back to order the tent over there. The track was crossed in this river by several others, but was easily distinguished from all by its superior size. It had also a peculiar drag of the toe of one hind foot, which the people knew and attributed to a wound he had received some months before from a shikári’s matchlock. There was thus no doubt that we were behind the man-eater; and I determined to follow him while I could hold out, and we could keep the trail. It led right into a very dense cover of jáman and tamarisk in the bed and on the banks of the river, a few miles above Bhádúgaon. Having been hard pushed the previous day, we hoped that he might lie up here; and, indeed, there was no other place he could well go to for water and shade. So we circled round the outside of the cover, and finding no track leading outside, considered him fairly ringed. We then went over to the village for breakfast, intending to return in the heat of the day.
“About eleven o’clock we again faced the scorching hot wind, and made silently for the cover where the man-eater lay. I surrounded it with scouts on trees, and posted a pad-elephant at the only point where he could easily get up the high bank and make off, and then pushed old Sarjú slowly and carefully through the cover. Peafowl rose in numbers from every bush as we advanced, and a few hares and other small animals bolted out at the edges—such thick green covers being the midday resort of all the life in the neighborhood in the hot weather. About its centre the jungle was extremely thick, and the bottom was cut up into a number of parallel water-channels among the strong roots and overhanging branches of the tamarisk.
“Here the elephant paused and began to kick the earth, and to utter the low tremulous sound by which some of these animals denote the close presence of a tiger. We peered all about with beatings of the heart; and at last the mahout, who was lower down on the elephant’s neck, said he saw him lying beneath a thick Jáman bush. We had some stones in the howdah, and I made the Lállá, who was behind me in the back seat, pitch one into the bush. Instantly the tiger started up with a short roar and galloped off through the jungle. I gave him right and left at once, which told loudly; but he went on till he saw the pad-elephant blocking the road he meant to escape by, and then he turned and charged back at me with horrible roars. It was very difficult to see him among the crashing bushes, and he was within twenty yards before I fired again. This dropped him into one of the channels, but he picked himself up, and came on as savagely, though more slowly, than before. I was now in the act of covering him with the large shell rifle, when suddenly Sarjú spun round, and I found myself looking the opposite way, while a worrying sound behind me, and the frantic movements of the elephant, told me I had a fellow-passenger on board I might well have dispensed with. All I could do in the way of holding on barely sufficed to prevent myself and guns from being pitched out; and it was some time before Sarjú, finding he could not kick him off, paused to think what he would do next. I seized that placid interval to lean over behind and put the muzzle of my rifle to the tiger’s head, blowing it into fifty pieces with the large shell.”
In Assam and other parts of Indo-China, and in the interior of Malacca, the natives are treated by tigers much after the same manner as those of India were in the days before modern inventions had modified the views of these brutes upon mankind.
A pit is an effectual device for taking tigers, but most descriptions of the way in which it is arranged are evidently incorrect. Malays, however, procure most of the animals they export by means of pits, which are constructed after the manner of those oubliettes or “dungeons of the forgotten,” where in the good old times captives were placed who had no hope of release.
What is the tiger’s temper? Conventionally, and according to common misapprehension, he is the furious and insatiable savage that Buffon paints—“sa ferocité n’est comparable à rien.” He is full of base wickedness and inappeasable cruelty, loves blood and carnage for their own sake, and longs continually to fly at unfortunate creatures with that tremendæ velocitatis of which Pliny speaks.
“What immortal hand or eye,
Framed thy matchless symmetry?
In what distant deeps or skies,