92 RIFLE AND ROMANCE 



sweeping antlers springing from a head poised grandly on 

 a massive, shaggy- maned neck. The bristles on his broad 

 back were raised, and his tail stuck stiffly out as he faced 

 us, and then, curling his lip and drawing his breath with 

 a slight hissing noise through his teeth, he slowly bent his 

 neck, and with a powerful stroke of his horns, to which, 

 scarcely clean of their late covering of " velvet," there still 

 adhered some strips of rough skin, scored a deep gash 

 on the stem of a salai sapling. 



" The Red Ones ! " he growled. " Ah ! they were here 

 yesterday : how these ill weeds increase. It is not like old 

 times when they were scarce ! " And in spite of bravado 

 his tone betrayed a tinge of suppressed fear. Passing down- 

 hill, I stopped a moment to gape at him, as he bent his 

 great strength against the frayed sapling that groaned 

 under his antlers, and rained red strings of peeled bark 

 on the grass below ; when he paused, and again lifting the 

 corner of his mouth and distending his eye-pits, from which 

 there exuded a strange sickly sweet odour, edged majesti- 

 cally towards me and slowly lowered his sharp tines. His 

 temper was evidently uncertain ; so, with a skip, I rejoined 

 my mother, and we wound down a slippery grass slope to 

 take up our new quarters. 



We found ourselves in a much finer glen than that we 

 had left ; it ran up right under the precipices buttressing 

 the mighty Bairat, which raises its flat-topped bulk four 

 thousand feet above the sea. A stone detached from the 

 cliffs fell crashing into the dry leaves at our feet, and the 

 faint whoops of the great grey apes sounded far above our 

 heads as they sprang in play among the bare white branches 

 of a torchwood tree which jutted from a ledge in the sheer 

 face of black basalt. In the cool depths of bamboo thicket 

 high up the ravine side was our day retreat, where the wild 

 plantain grew in the rocks overhanging us, and the sun 

 scarcely ever penetrated ; while at the cttwar, where one 

 ravine met another, the valley expanded into a charming 



