64 RIFLE AND ROMANCE 



side to side of the woody dale. Through long yellow 

 grass and thick jungle the narrow track runs, deep in soft 

 sand or powdery dust, and on this ready medium could be 

 clearly traced the nocturnal rounds of the three-toed 

 tiger as he passed up or down the valley on his senile 

 beat. 



Once more it was the open season, in a year marked by 

 a scanty rainfall ; the jungles lay stripped of their malari- 

 ous verdure, and a hot March sun had been licking up the 

 last of the shallower pools. On the hillsides around the 

 naked teak forest was once more littered with its dry 

 resounding leaves, and the old level river-bottom, arched 

 by great drooping trees, and bosky with rolling woods 

 now golden-brown and bronze in the autumnal tints of 

 their searing foliage, lay bathed in the ruddy evening light. 



No htla lowed at his picket in the surrounding wood- 

 land, no " beat " disturbed its solitude. Yet a sportsman 

 had come to the valley again ; and, with his native tracker, 

 had spent three or four days in quietly examining the 

 neighbourhood, and piecing together the story told by the 

 nocturnal tracks on the old road. 



And now in the warm languor of the sunset hour there 

 are low voices in the quiet jungle. 



Here and there along the deserted cart-track huge old 

 trees raise their branching arms and rounded foliage 

 amid the more leafless woods, casting deep shade by day 

 or under moon, and beneath one of these a great knotty 

 oak-shaped mango that rears its gnarled trunk from the 

 roadside grass stand the tracker and a couple of jungle 

 men. Their eyes are raised to the thick leafage which, 

 some fifteen feet above their heads, clothes a sturdy limb 

 that, forking horizontally into a maze of twisting branches, 

 projects and droops across the forest road. Then the 

 rustling leafage is parted for a moment by a hidden hand, 

 the voices cease, the figures on the roadway salaaming 

 turn and go away. Some fifty yards farther on they halt, 



