214 RIFLE AND ROMANCE 



The men now came up ; the water-bottle arrived, and 

 was very welcome. The bear's legs were tied together 

 with fibrous strips of the bark of the dJidmin tree, a sapling 

 was felled and run through his legs, and, hey presto! 

 Bhdlu, borne by half a dozen staggering Korkus, emerges 

 from the Machhar khdra for the positively last time feet 

 first! 



Elated by such a capital morning's sport, I turned west- 

 ward and beat along the banks of the little river, missing 

 a four-horned antelope that, with its mate, went darting 

 and dodging away through the maze of salai stems. Far- 

 ther on we beat a thickly wooded terrace running along 

 the side of the now deep- sunk watercourse, and, being 

 luckily posted, a lot of peafowl thrashed heavily up in 

 all directions within easy range and gave a pretty right 

 and left to the gun, the cock closing his wings with a snap 

 and collapsing limply in mid-air like a gigantic pheasant. 



This wound up the morning's doings, and I was shortly 

 rid of my shooting boots and coasting homeward on the 

 bike down the long, gentle slope that trends away from the 

 base of the hills. Another hour or so found me engaged 

 at the billiard-table in our little mess, having killed the 

 bear over again at tiffin. 



Another day, it was after a long blank morning of hard 

 tramping, when we were returning home, that a man came 

 running after us to say a bear had been marked down. 

 Foot-soreness suddenly vanished, and we quickly reeled off 

 another kos to the place where a small dot in the upper 

 branches of a teak tree showed us the watcher patiently 

 marking old Bhdlu down. 



" Somewhere in that little scar half-way up the opposite 

 hillside" was all the information he could give us. The 

 bear had been seen by these fellows, who had been cutting 

 grass on the hillside, as he went meandering and snuffing 

 his way home from a night's visit to the ber trees at the 

 foot of the hill country. 



