THE TEAK REGION. 251 



of these trap hills when every particle of grass on them 

 has been burnt into fine charcoal is dreadful. 1 never 

 found the deer that had been seen, and soon got 

 involved in a troublesome series of cross ravines, so 

 that by about nine o'clock I was pretty hot and wearied 

 in the April sun. I had almost given up hunting, and 

 had turned for home, when something caught my eye 

 in the bottom of a slight hollow in the hill. It looked 

 exactly like one of the bunches of twigs that grow out 

 of old teak stumps on these hills, wdth one or two 

 dried leaves attached to them ; and yet I fancied I 

 had seen it move. I looked at it intently for at least 

 a minute, trying to make out if it was a bunch of teak 

 twiofs or a sambar's head and horns. It never moved 

 the whole of this time ; and, as the Bheels who were 

 with me said it was only a stump, I turned to pass on. 

 The glint of my rifle barrel must then have caught 

 in the sun, for a noble stag started up from his lair, 

 and without pausing for a second wheeled round and 

 clattered away. My hasty shot missed him clean, and 

 he then plunged into a ravine that lay at the back 

 of the hollow he had been in. I followed across, think- 

 ing I might find blood, but there was no sign, and I 

 turned for home, swearing to expend a bullet in future 

 on every teak stump that bore the most distant 

 resemblance to a deer's head. The resemblance is so 

 very close between the two objects that I cannot but 

 think that the instinct of the animal leads him to 

 dispose of his head so as to resemble the bunch of teak. 

 Even the motion of the large ears of the sambar, which 

 they restrain only when actually in the presence of 

 danger, answers exactly to the stirring of a dried teak 

 leaf in a lisfht breeze. Indeed no one can hunt in these 



