250 By Mountain, Lake, and Plain 



find him dead on the morrow within twenty 

 yards of where he had vanished. Ibrahim said 

 the same thing. For my part, I liked not the 

 last glimpse I got of his cocked tail. My rifle, 

 I may explain, was the same one with which 

 I had shot the first tiger, a *280 Eoss, not, of 

 course, a weapon one would select for tiger- 

 shooting, but still no toy. 



Next morning we followed him, I with a double 

 magnum smooth - bore loaded with ball, while 

 Ibrahim had my Koss rifle and the shikari his 

 own gun. There was plenty of blood at first. 

 He had gone straight downhill, through the 

 most awful thick stuff it has ever been my lot 

 to track an animal in. At some places we had 

 literally to worm ourselves along the ground, and 

 I admit, without any sense of shame, that my 

 attitude of mind at times was not at all dissimilar 

 to that of the sportsman in Punch's picture, under 

 which ran the legend " When you go out hunt- 

 ing lions, make quite sure that you really want 

 to find one ! " 



To cut a long story short, the blood got less 

 and less, though sometimes I was cheered by 

 the sight of a lump of fat on a twig ; then it 

 became difficult to track him at all. Blood-drops 

 got fewer and fewer, each one took longer to find, 

 and finally they stopped altogether. With no 



