MUGGERS AND SNAKES 145 



A leopard will walk into a village at night, enter 

 a hut and kill a sleeping native. I never heard of 

 a tiger doing it. A wounded leopard will deliber- 

 ately hide in a side-track or behind a rock and 

 pounce on you when you are following him, and 

 buffalo and bison will ring round you and charge 

 you from behind in similar circumstances. A 

 wounded tiger will retreat to the thickest jungle, 

 and unless you go really close up to him, will 

 hardly ever attack you gratuitously, so to speak. 



I am fond of all animals and often think I shall 

 give up shooting because of the genuine remorse 

 I feel when I look at a dead animal whose life I 

 have cut short. In Scotland I have often had to 

 turn away from a dead red stag, and have thereby 

 earned the contempt of the stalker, who has 

 suspected me of not appreciating the strong 

 " grand smull " of a dead stag. And it is with a 

 big, big lump in my throat that I have turned away. 

 I have not infrequently let off an animal in India 

 because it was looking at me enquiringly, and I 

 am not ashamed to own to it. I have often done 

 the same with rabbits at Home. On the other 

 hand, I never spare a snake or a mugger. I hate 

 and fear both. They are, if you like, really detest- 

 able. The number of natives killed by snakes 

 is proverbially large, but the number killed by 

 muggers, is not, I suspect, much smaller. I 

 suppose muggers are useful as water-scavengers, 

 but why snakes were created I never could under- 

 stand. Possibly, like Topsy, they grew, and 

 Providence may have tolerated them much in the 

 same way that Society puts up with scurrilous 

 newspapers. 



