HUNTING & SHOOTING IN CEYLON 



is no place in it where a sporting party can camp for a 

 week and get all-round shooting. The only way in which 

 shooting may be obtained is by travelling, putting in a 

 day at one place where you may get a shot or two at 

 deer and such-like, moving on to another similar place 

 next day, and so on. The travelling, however, is very hard 

 work if you have a cart, as the minor roads, or rather 

 tracks, are usually loose sand or ordinary earth, impassable 

 in the wet season and fearfully rough in the dry season. 

 The natives also, being all Tamils, consider themselves 

 of too high and mighty a caste to condescend to carry- 

 ing a traveller's goods and chattels, so you will get no help 

 from them. The wet season is from October to January 

 inclusive, the rest of the season being dry, except perhaps 

 a little rain in April and May. Want of water is the great 

 difficulty except in the wet season, as there are no perennial 

 streams or springs, and after the end of the wet season water 

 soon dries up. 



We now come to the North Central Province. This 

 is certainly the sporting province of the northern half of 

 Ceylon, and, like many other parts of the island, teemed 

 with game fifty years ago. The greater part of the 

 province is forest-covered, broken up by more or less 

 scattered villages, tanks, and paddy fields, and is not, 

 strictly speaking, flat, as the country undulates a good 

 deal and is full of small, rocky hills rising everywhere 

 out of the plain. To the ordinary passer-by, however, 

 the country is flat, and these hills only become evident 

 when the country is viewed from the summit of any one 

 of them. The extreme north-west corner of the province, 

 known as the Wilachiya Korale, is very gamey, being a vast 

 uninhabited plain, composed of forest, scrub, open " park " 

 land, and huge swamps or wilas. A large part of it is, 



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