PANTHERS. 273 



he sa\y the monkey caught ; the panther held on to the branches with one 

 forepaw and drew his prey up with the other. A Brinjara told me of a 

 much simpler way the panther has of catching monkeys. On moonlight 

 nights he walks under the trees where the monkeys are roosting on the 

 branches above. He selects his monkey among the shadows cast on the 

 ground beneath, and pounces upon it, whereupon the unhappy sleeper falls 

 into the jaws of the prowler below, who thus snatches at the shadow and 

 grasps the substance ! It has been said that monkeys will swear only at 

 tigers and panthers, I have known them use very bad language at a bear. 



8. Panthers and Wild Dogs. 



Panthers have been known to take men out of trees, and they take to 

 trees when hunted by wild dogs. In Volume V, page 191, Mr. Wright, 

 late of the Berar Police, relates how he found two panthers in a salai tree, 

 one above the other, with a large pack of ten or twelve jungle dogs moving 

 about below. The upper panther was resting upon a branch, and the lower 

 one holding on perpendicularly. "The difficulty was to approach. It was 

 arranged that C should go above and have a shot while I went below. After 

 a bit the lower panther made a jump, pursued by the pack in my direction 

 on the bank, but he broke up a ravine. Just then Cshot the other panther 

 dead, but he stuck in a lower fork when he fell. Some of the pack imme- 

 diately came back and could be seen standing on their hind legs and lick- 

 ing the blood as it steamed from the beast out of reach. The panther shot 

 was a fine male about seven feet in length." Some twenty years ago one 

 of my buffaloes, tied up for tigers, was killed by a panther. When visiting 

 the kill I found an old wild dog and a pup on it. My men afterwards said 

 they saw the panther going off over the hills with a pack of wild dogs in 

 full cry after it. 



9. Panthers and Porcupines. 



The great carnivora have few enemies besides man. Panthers have 

 been known to be killed by crocodiles ; a light between a panther and a 

 hyena is described on page 519, Volume XIX of the Journal ; in this, the 

 panther was the aggressor but not the victor, though neither of the com- 

 batants appears to have been damaged. In another fight between two of 

 the same animals the panther was killed by a hyena whose cave it had 

 entered when slightly wounded. In both these instances the combatants 

 were females. Panthers and tigers both frequently prey on porcupines, 

 and very often have quills sticking in their paws or other parts of the body. 

 I once shot a tiger which must have rolled over a porcupine for there were 

 quills in the back of his neck, which my shikaris would have it were dis- 

 charged by the porcupine like arrows from a bow ! The late Major llodon 

 found a freshly dead panther in a Mysore forest in 1895 with a number 

 of porcupine quills sticking in various parts. One paw was in its mouth, 

 and a number of quills sticking in the throat had apparently caused the 

 animal's death. At a short distance behind the panther he found a 

 large number of quills and a good deal of blood. An instance cf a por- 

 cupine attacking a dead panther is given in Volume XXIV, page 187 of 

 the Journal, Over five dozen quills were picked out of the panther. The 

 writer of the note remarks on the deliberate way in which the porcupine 

 had walked round the panther and filled him with quills both before and 

 behind. Porcupines are no doubt aggressive animals. A goat I tied out 

 for a panther in a deep nullah was killed by a porcupine, several quills 

 having pierced the heart. 



I have read of panthers and tigers being attacked and even killed by 

 wild boars. But on page 237, Volume XXI of the Journal, Mr. Fitz- 

 Gibbon records that while a panther was eating a goat a big wild boar came 



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