150 KO OKIES. 



establishment of Rungamuttea and Demagiii as frontier police posts, consti- 

 tuting a guard between the troublesome Kookies and the tribes to the west, 

 has given confidence to the latter, and the hill - tracts will probably be 

 better populated soon. A European political officer and a police officer live 

 at Rungamuttea, and another police officer at Demagiri, and these maintain 

 amicable relations with the Kookies. It is the Kookies' annual custom, I 

 was informed, to have extensive raids of two, three, or four thousand men 

 forming a single party. This raiding is done in the cold weather, from 

 December till the early rains ; and their "outing " may be regarded as some- 

 thing equivalent to them to the run to the lakes or seaside in summer 

 amongst us. As they are an independent tribe they are merely requested 

 to confine their pastimes within their own limits, and not to trespass on 

 British territory as formerly. Infraction of this rule caused the Looshai 

 campaign of 1870-71. It is said that the Kookies occasionally eat enemies 

 slain in battle ; but the Joomas are so terrified at the very mention of a 

 Kookie that they perhaps exaggerate. 



The Kookies do not appear to be troubled with more feelings of humanity 

 than savages generally, as Gool Budden told me that when elephant- catching 

 some years back, further north, a party of his scouts met several Kookies 

 at a ford, carrying off girls from a Tipperah village which they had attacked. 

 To prevent their running away, five or six girls were strung together by a 

 strip of cane passed through a hole pierced in their left hands. By this 

 simple method one man could take care of a good many of them. The scouts 

 had no guns, and the Kookies made off with their unhappy captives. Gas- 

 ban, the village I had passed on the Chengree, had been cut up by Kookies 

 about 1852, but, being well within protected limits, was now flourishing 

 again. The houses were all of bamboo, and raised high from the ground. 



January 6. — Marched from 7 a.m. till 10 a.m., seven miles to Jadoog- 

 apara, where, it is said, once on a time stood a large Jooma settlement, 

 till one fine morning a sudden yell on all sides at daybreak announced title 

 Kookies, and no one escaped to tell the tale ! I could not see a trace 

 of the village ; but the structures of the hill - people are not of a very 

 permanent order. I left my tent to be pitched on the river-bank and 

 started on foot to the place, two miles distant, where the elephants were 

 surrounded. I was very much pleased and surprised at the amount of work 

 Suddar Ali's men had done, and its business-like look. The kheddah, or 

 stockade, into which the elephants were to be driven, was constructed of a 

 circle of stout uprights 12 feet high, placed so close together that the hand 

 could scarcely be introduced between them, and well backed with forked 

 uprights and cross-beams, the whole being lashed together with strips of cane. 



