THE CONVENTIONAL "THUD." 279 



see the fore-sight of the rifle, for, unfortunately, it was not 

 silvered, as the near end of the sporting fore-sight should 

 always be; so I took the best aim I could at the shadowy 

 form of the stag without it. The bullet told on him some- 

 where with a smart " thwack," a term, I think, better suited 

 to the sound than the conventional " thud," which as often 

 denotes mud as meat. The deer gave a sudden spring, 

 turned short round, and plunging down the hill, disappeared 

 in a deep wooded gorge. To follow him in the dark would 

 have been worse than useless ; we therefore made the best of 

 a long trudge back to camp. Fortunately the clouds had 

 broken, so we had some glimpses of moonlight to help us 

 through the gloomy pine woods. 



At peep of dawn we were off again, and spent several 

 hours in trying to follow up the stag of the previous even- 

 ing, as we felt certain he was hard hit. There was no 

 blood on his track; but this might have been accounted 

 for by the closing up of the small orifice made by a 450 

 bullet, or by the shell hitting high in the animal's body, 

 and bursting up without penetrating right through it. 

 Bamzan, who was rather conservative in his ideas, had 

 already suggested that the new-fangled " nasala ke golee " 

 (medicine-bullet), as he termed my vaunted shell, might 

 not be very certain in its effect, and I was beginning to 

 think he was right. 



The deer's track had been missed, and I was sitting down 

 consoling myself with a smoke when a stag began bellowing 

 on the brow of an opposite hill. I could see with the tele- 

 scope that he carried at least a royal number of tines, as I 

 watched him moving quickly down over a steep open slope, 

 until he disappeared in the thick wood below it. Whilst 

 still spying about with the glass, its field lighted on two 

 more stags which were browsing among some bushes far 

 away below. One of them carried good horns, but not to be 

 compared with the royal set that had just disappeared. My 



