THE BIOGRAPHY OF A TIGER 47 



Evening fell, and the slayer came up from the valley. 

 Confidently he came, without concealment, and as one 

 accustomed to no interference, fearing naught, The dewy 

 bushes parted ; he paced heavily forward, to pass all un- 

 consciously right under an unnatural-looking clump of 

 leaves in the limbs of a low tree. From this hiding-place 

 the long, lean muzzle of a native gun then slowly pro- 

 truded, and followed him as he moved onwards to the 

 " kill," and stooped to smell it. Long dwelt the careful 

 aim steadied no doubt by the muttered prayer to patron 

 saint or jungle godling. Then a thunderous discharge 

 shook the air, and the rude charge of hammered slugs 

 sped on its fortuitous way. A nerve-shattering roar ; a 

 spring beyond the sulphurous pall of country gunpowder ; 

 and, with two of the slugs embedded in his mighty 

 shoulder, the tiger galloped away to limp and starve 

 through many a long subsequent day. 



An indirect result of this wound was our tiger's one 

 temporary lapse from the paths of rectitude ; for 'twas in 

 the resultant convalescence and its hungry straits that he 

 fell one early morning, along a forest road, on a crawling 

 bullock-cart. But the cattle suddenly swerved, and he 

 found himself clutching an object wrapped in a dark 

 blanket, which gasped and screamed, and died quite 

 suddenly, and weakly, in a surprising manner. He carried 

 the thing off uphill, but had scarcely begun, guiltily and 

 hesitatingly, to lick the strange-tasting blood, before a 

 band of similarly shrieking bipeds made him relinquish 

 his strange prey and slink away with some unknowing 

 fear that thenceforward held him guiltless of further 

 human blood. 



Nor, while his crippled condition lasted, was his attempt 

 on a big boar any more successful. It was in a dew- 

 soaked glade that they met, where the trailing under- 

 growth screened a marshy hollow. The smell of an old 

 hop- is unmistakably peculiar, and it might have been 



