172 MAMMALIA OF INDIA. 
iound by my camp followers with another in a nullah, and brought to 
me. ‘The other cub died, but Zalim lived to grow up into a very fine 
tiger, and was sent to England. I never allowed him to taste raw flesh. 
He had a little cooked meat every day, and as much milk as he liked to 
drink, and he throve well on this diet. When he was too large to be 
allowed to roam about unconfined I had a stout buffalo-leather collar 
made for his neck, and he was chained to a stump near the cook-room 
door.” With grown-up people he was perfectly tame, but I noticed he 
got restless when children approached him, and so made up my mind - 
to part with him before he did any mischief. 
I know nothing of the habits of the tiger of the grass plains, but 
those of the hill tiger are very interesting, the cattle lifter especially, 
as he is better known to men. Each individual has his special idiosyn- 
crasy. I wrote of this once before as follows: “Strange though it 
may seem to the English reader that a tiger should have any special 
character beyond the general one for cruelty and cunning, it is never- 
theless a fact that each animal has certain peculiarities of temperament 
which are well known to the villagers in the neighbourhood. ‘They 
will tell you that such a one is daring and rash ; another is cunning and 
not to be taken by any artifice; that one is savage and morose; an- 
other is mild and harmless. ‘There are few villages in the wilder parts 
of the Seonee and Mandla districts without an attendant tiger, which 
undoubtedly does great damage in the way of destroying cattle, but 
which avoids the human inhabitants of the place. So accustomed do 
the people get to their unwelcome visitor that we have known the boys 
of a village turn a tiger out of quarters which were reckoned too close, 
and pelt him with stones. On one occasion two of the juvenile 
assailants were killed by the animal they had approached too near. 
Herdsmen in the same way get callous to the danger of meddling with 
so dreadful a creature, and frequently rush to the rescue of their cattle 
when seized. On a certain occasion one out of a herd of cattle was 
attacked close to our camp, and rescued single-handed by its owner, 
who laid his heavy iron-bound staff across the tiger’s back ; and, on our 
rushing out to see what was the matter, we found the man coolly 
dressing the wounds of his cow, muttering to himself: ‘The robber, 
the robber! My last cow, and I had five of them!’ He did not seem 
to think he had done anything wonderful, and seemed rather surprised 
that we should suppose that he was going to let his last heifer go the 
avay of all the others. 
“Tt is fortunate for these dwellers in the backwoods that but a small 
percentage of tigers are man-eaters, perhaps not five per cent., other- 
wise village after village would be depopulated ; as it is the yearly tale 
of lives lost is a heavy one.”’* 
* ¢Seonee.’ 
