448 THE HIGHLANDS OF CENTRAL INDIA. 



a matter of some difficulty. I have found that generally 

 a deer struck by the Express bullet, even in the lungs, 

 will run from fifty to a hundred yards before falling. 

 It is then generally stone dead, having bled internally. 

 But very often there will not be the slightest mark 

 of blood on the track. The very first two shots 

 I ever fired with an Express were remarkable illustra- 

 tions of this. The first was at a lovely spotted buck, 

 who suddenly stood before me like an apparition, 

 drinking at the margin of the mirror-like lake of 

 Lachora, as I rounded the point of one of its bays 

 on my way back, tired and muddy, from an evening's 

 snipe-shooting. It was over two hundred yards across 

 the arm of the lake from where I was. I had taken 

 out a single Express, by Henry, to raise the flocks of 

 wild fowl that sat in safety in the centre of the lake, 

 and this my gun-boy now thrust unloaded into my 

 hand. The buck had turned, and was picking his 

 way leisurely up the bank, before I had the cartridge 

 in ; and his graceful form and long tapering antlers 

 stood out clear against the sky-line as I fired point- 

 blank at his shoulder. With a startled toss of the 

 head, and a desperate bound over the top of the bank, 

 he was ofi" into the thick cover that here surrounds 

 the lake. We tracked his footprints in the gravelly 

 soil for near a hundred yards, when, light failing us 

 altogether, we had to give it up. Next morning I 

 returned, and a solitary crow cawing on a branch, 

 pointed out the buck lying dead and stiff within a 

 few paces of where we had left the trail. The next 

 chance I had with this rifle was equally unexpected. 

 Walking along near midday in the Punasa forest, by a 

 little-travelled pathway, the ridge of a great black back 

 appeared through the trees, slowly passing behind a 



