322 THE HIGHLANDS OF CENTEAL INDIA. 



decreased ; and the experience of a few years will show 

 whether the tigers again get the upper hand. It is 

 practically only the cattle-killing and man-eating tigers 

 that are productive of injury, those which principally 

 subsist on game being probably more useful than 

 noxious. Poison has sometimes been successful in 

 destroying a man-eater — a famous tigress, that long 

 ravaged the western part of Chindwara district, having 

 been killed with strychnine just a day before I arrived 

 after a forced march of a hundred miles to hunt her. 

 More commonly, however, poison is of no avail with 

 these cunning brutes ; and, as a rule, man-eaters can 

 only be killed by the European sportsman with the help 

 of an elephant, the native shikaris rarely attempting to 

 molest them. Elephants have been made more available 

 than formerly, some of the jungle districts having a 

 Government one attached to them, besides many 

 possessed by various public departments ; and man- 

 eaters of a bad type now rarely survive long. It is 

 a great point to extinguish those brutes at the outset of 

 their career, for, if not killed when he commences to 

 prey on human beings, a tiger becomes so cunning that 

 it is afterwards a most difficult thing to circumvent him. 

 On the 27th of May I shot my last tiger for that 

 season in the famous cover of Dapara, being seized the 

 next day with the preliminary symptoms of what turned 

 out to be a severe attack of jungle fever, brought on by 

 constant exposure to the hot sun by day and the mala- 

 rious air of these close valleys by night ; cholera, too, 

 was raging all around us, and so I determined to return 

 to the cool heights of Puchmurree, which I did by the 

 Borl route, in four longish marches. I was sick of the 

 constant severe heat of the burnt-up plains below, and 

 parched with the coming fever as well, and I think I 



