THE TIGEIJ. 313 



of pilgrimage had been carried by the hapless man, was 

 lying on the ground in a dricd-up pool of blood ; and 

 shreds of his clothes adhered to the bushes where he had 

 been dragged down into the bed of the nala. We tracked 

 the man-eater and his prey into a very thick grass cover, 

 alive with spotted deer, where he had broken up and 

 devoured the greater part of the body. Some bones and 

 shreds of flesh, and the skull, hands, and feet, were all 

 that remained. This tiger never returned to his victim 

 a second time, so it was useless to found any scheme for 

 killing him on that expectation. We took up his tracks 

 from the body, and carried them patiently down through 

 very dense jungle to the banks of the Moran ; the 

 trackers working in fear and trembling under the trunk 

 of my elephant, and covered by my rifle at full cock. 

 At the river the tracks went out to a long spit of sand 

 that projected into the water, where the tiger had drunk, 

 and then returned to a great mass of piled-up rocks 

 at the bottom of a precipitous bank, full of caverns and 

 recesses. This we searched with stones and some fire- 

 works I had in the howdah ; but put out nothing but a 

 scraggy hyaena, which was of course allowed to escape. 

 We searched about all day here in vain, and it was not 

 till nearly sunset that I turned and made for camp. 



It was almost dusk, when we were a few miles from 

 home, passing along the road we had marched by the 

 former day, and the same by which we had come out in 

 the morning, when one of the men who was walking 

 behind the elephant started and called a halt. He had 

 seen the footprint of a tiger. The elephant's tread had 

 partly obliterated it ; but further on, where we had not 

 gone, it was plain enough — the great square pug of the 

 man-eater we had been looking for all day ! He was on 

 before us, and must have passed since we came out m 



