240 By Mountain, Lake, and Plain 



whence I thought that vibrant-toned protest had 

 come, but saw nothing. We had not gone very 

 far on, perhaps a quarter of a mile, when an 

 appalling odour struck us in the face, the cause 

 of which was discovered to be a big boar that 

 lay dead in the middle of a thicket. He had 

 been killed and half eaten, perhaps thirty -six 

 hours ago, and the slayer was a tiger. 



Now, though I knew that tigers existed in the 

 forests of Mazanderan, the old Hyrcania the 

 tigers that long ago were brought to the Koman 

 bestiarii, and even in Shakespear's * time seem to 

 have been better known than their relatives of 

 Bengal (since become so famous) I knew also 

 they were very scarce, so that their serious quest 

 had never found a place in our programme. As 

 Mahommed would have said, " If God willed we 

 should get a tiger, otherwise we should not." 

 There was, moreover, no plan, even granted the 

 proved presence of a tiger in our neighbourhood, 

 by which he could be brought to bag. We might 

 " tie up," but there was the initial difficulty of 

 finding a beast to fill the roll of bait. Our Kurd 

 escort's horses would have been valued at their 

 weight in silver for such a purpose. There were, of 

 course, the Government horses of our own Indian 



1 " Approach thou like the rugged Russian bear, 

 The armed rhinoceros, or the Hyrcan tiger." 



