RIFLE AND ROMANCE 



conveniently from a bough close to my head, and 

 haversack with light refreshment, not of a noisy kind, 

 somewhere handy. The 'men went away. 



It was right at the fag end of the hot weather ; and at 

 this elevation close on four thousand feet the breeze 

 was tempered by moisture that presaged a near approach 

 of the monsoon current. The moon was almost full, as 

 she shone through the interstices of the jungle on her 

 way to the zenith. Through a gap in the beautifully 

 rounded foliage of great mango trees, growing hard by 

 the edge of the plateau, one obtained a glimpse of the 

 far-off Tapti valley, still bathed in a reddish mist, or 

 dust-haze, illumined by the after-glow of sunset. Distant 

 tinklings denoted the return home of cattle to the Korku 

 huts some five hundred yards away. The eternal night- 

 jars began to set up their " Chuckoo-chuckoo-chuckoo ! " or 

 to sail ghost-like abroad, uttering a peculiar cry that 

 sounds like " Chyeece? Then, somewhere down beyond 

 the edge of the khud, one heard the bark of a wandering 

 khdkar. 



Night- watching in trees is not a form of amusement 

 that appeals to me much now, after a long course of the 

 same necessitated by the very thick jungles in which most 

 of my shikar has been carried out but the first hour or so 

 of such a vigil, until one gets bored, and especially if 

 animals appear and interest the watcher, never fails to 

 exercise a certain mystic charm. Thick-skulled and un- 

 happy must he be whose perceptions fail to respond to the 

 wooing of our mother Nature in one of her most attractive 

 moods ! One is carried away, as it were, to some tremen- 

 dously distant era, when we all were children of the forest, 

 dependent on the good earth in much more direct fashion 

 than we seem to be now ; when the risings of the sun and 

 moon, the passing of clouds, a crackle in the shadow of 

 the trees, a stealthy step in the dark all seem to have 

 been more intimately bound up with man's very existence, 



