"He the Discerner of men, Equitable King! He the Discerner of evil, Invincible King! All generations after us shall hear of him; but we have looked upon his face!"
"Neela Deo, Neela Deo, King of all elephants!"
CHAPTER XV
The Lair
Carlin appeared to get right again in a few days of quiet after her terrific experience on Mitha Baba. There were a few more wonderful weeks for Skag and herself in the Malcolm M'Cord bungalow in Hurda—weeks always remembered. Then Skag undertook a little adventure of his own that had to do with Tiger. He was away seven days in all and made no report of the thing he had done to his department. He came back with a deeper quiet in his eyes and told no one but Carlin what the days had shown him. Skag never was at his best in trying to make words work. He was slow to explain. He had been hurt two or three times in earlier days, trying to tell something of peculiar interest to his work and finding incredulity and uncertain comment afterward. This made the animal trainer more wary than ever about talk.
But Carlin required few words. Carlin always understood. She didn't praise or fall into excesses of admiration, but she understood, and the older one gets the dearer that becomes. Carlin didn't advise with Skag whether she should speak of the matter. She merely decided that her old friend, Malcolm M'Cord, Hand-of-a-God, deserved to be told. The silent Scot knew much about animals and this was an affair that would stand high in his collection of musings and memories. M'Cord observed, in a Scotch that had suffered no thinning in thirty years of India, that if he hadn't known Hantee Sahib he would be forced to pass by Carlin's report as an invention, though a "fertile" one. It was M'Cord who decided that Government should get at least a private account of the affair.
A remarkable tiger pair had operated for several years in the broken cliff country stretching away toward the valley of the Nerbudda beyond the open jungle round Hurda. As mates they had pulled together so efficiently that the natives had started the interminable process of making a tradition concerning them. These were superb young individuals and not man-eaters, for which reason Hand-of-a-God had not been called out to deliver the natives; also on this account Skag had been interested from the beginning.
Their lair had never been found, but they had been seen together and singly over a ranging ground that covered seventy miles and contained several dejected villages. Once, hard pressed for game, the male tiger had entered a village grazing ground and made a quick kill—on the run—of one of the little sacred cows—a tan heifer much loved by the people. The point of comment was that the tiger had spared the boy; in fact, the young herder had been unable to run so rapidly as his little drove, which was lost in a dust cloud ahead of him. The tiger had actually passed him by, entered the drove, knocked the heifer down and stood over it as the boy circled past.
There were no firearms in the village, so that the natives did not venture close in the falling darkness. It was evident next day, however, that the tiger had not fed on the spot of the kill. It was supposed that the female had come to help him carry away the game.
Also, this was the same tiger pair that had leaped an eight-foot wall surrounding another village, made their choice of a sizable bullock in a herd of ordinary cattle, and actually helped each other drag the carcass over the wall and away—a daylight raid, this, witnessed from the shadows of several village huts.