SMALL GAME IN INDIA 165 



even moved, but continued to gaze. We wonderingly 

 followed the impatient robbers, trying to look as if 

 such meetings fell to our lot every day. 



We had not gone a quarter of a mile when the 

 chorus suddenly flopped down, patted the ground 

 invitingly, and pointed round a bend in the opposite 

 bank. Through the twisted stems in the bushes we 

 peered, and there lay the mugger. A big gharial, 

 one of those strange creatures popularly supposed to 

 live on fish alone (though I wouldn't trust one a 

 yard ! ) sunned himself on the left ; between the two 

 was a smaller gharial, and beyond him again an evil- 

 looking little beast, without doubt the mugger's son, 

 sunk in slumber. The bigger gharial kept his ugly 

 button of a snout pointing in the air, his neck almost 

 under the water. The mugger faced us, sound asleep, 

 grinning as only a mugger can grin. I was to have 

 first shot ; so through the glass I carefully made out 

 his position, for I knew that if the first shot failed 

 to paralyse I should never get a second. Then we 

 crawled up as far as we dared, and lay amid the 

 bushes. The tall grasses above him bent and whis- 

 pered in the river breeze, but he still slept on, wear- 

 ing his cruel, never-changing smile, dreaming of the 

 brown corpses, for there were no white ones now, 

 who came floating down past the shelving mud bank. 

 Then there came a great splashing and commotion 

 in the water, and his companions vanished with a 

 swift ease surprising in such clumsy-looking animals. 

 But he lay there mutely writhing, with blood squirting 



