The Tiger 207 



a footprint in the path that was not there when he last 

 passed would turn him aside. This tiger of ours is not 

 aged, but has learned something since he became solitary 

 like all his kind, except in the brief season of pairing. 

 Experience may be thrown away on men, but not upon 

 tigers. This one will never again make mistakes such 

 as those into which overboldness and want of proper 

 attention have already betrayed him. Once, shortly 

 after he began to shift for himself, a buffalo, of whom 

 he thought that it could be killed as easily as a slim 

 long-necked native cow, tossed him. Another time when 

 too hungry to wait for a favorable opportunity, he seized 

 upon a calf prematurely. No sooner did his roar of tri- 

 umph as he struck it dead echo through the jungle, than 

 a dark crescentic line fringed with clashing horns con- 

 fronted him. It came on in quick irregular rushes, and 

 no tiger could withstand such an array, so he had to fly. 

 His glossy hide was ripped likewise by a "grim gray 

 tusker," which the unsophisticated youth designed to de- 

 spatch without difficulty. Before these instructive inci- 

 dents occurred something more had been learned also. 



One morning the silence was broken by blasts of 

 cholera horns, the beating of tom-toms, and wild cries 

 from a multitude of men — such men, however, as he 

 knew and had frequently observed in the jungle and else- 

 where. But there was now a man, mounted on an ele- 

 phant, the like of which he had never seen, but whose 

 appearance is not forgotten. He had guns far worse than 

 matchlocks, instruments of sudden death that killed his 

 mother. This formidable robber, for all his ferocious 



