166 WATCH FOR A LEOPARD. 



a lucky bullet from one of the other guns caught him in the 

 head and stopped his further progress instanter. The first 

 shot was found to have gone clean through him, close behind 

 the shoulders. This serves to show what a tiger is capable 

 of doing after being mortally wounded. On another occasion, 

 in broad daylight, I shot a leopard in a jungly ravine, within 

 a few hundred yards of my house, where it had killed one 

 of my servant's goats. In this case I left the dead goat, 

 from which the domestics had but just scared the leopard 

 away, as a bait, and tried the shouting artifice I have al- 

 ready described in chap. v. The shouters had hardly left me 

 watching there a quarter of an hour ere the leopard returned 

 to its prey. My first barrel, by some mischance, missed fire. 

 The brute, on hearing the click of the hammer, turned his 

 head towards my little screen formed of green boughs, as he 

 stood with his fore-paws on the goat, within a dozen yards 

 of the muzzle of my rifle. His wicked green eyes seemed to 

 meet mine through the loophole in my ambush, whilst, with- 

 out raising my cheek from the stock, I noiselessly cocked the 

 other hammer and again pressed the trigger. A few gurgling 

 grunts were his reply to the shot. On the smoke clearing 

 off he was nowhere visible ; but after reloading, I followed on 

 his blood-tracks, and soon found him lying stone-dead at the 

 bottom of the ravine. 



Both the black bears the Himalayan and the sloth bear 

 were occasionally met with in the valley, feeding on the 

 fruit of the prickly "byer" (a kind of buckthorn) bushes 

 when in season. 



The prettiest sport of the Doon was the stalking in the 

 Sewaliks. But the spear-grass that grows most abundantly 

 there, as also on the lower ranges, is, when long and dry, dread- 

 fully troublesome. The sharp barbed points of the thin hard 

 seeds, from which it derives its name, catch in your clothes, 

 and work themselves by myriads through them, and even 

 down into your boots, until they reach your skin, which they 



