140 IN MALAY FORESTS. 



stout canvas, but found that they had all the dis- 

 advantages of a boot with none of its advantages. I 

 even tried going on my bare socks when we discovered 

 that the animal was close, but found that I had to 

 devote an undue amount of attention to my feet. 

 After many experiments, I decided that for silent 

 tracking nothing that I could find beat a pair of stout 

 English leather boots with plenty of big nails. 



Our knowledge, derived from the tapir's tracks, of 

 its habits was that it left the sulphur spring a little 

 before daybreak, moved away through the forest for 

 an hour or two, then fed, and afterwards lay down to 

 sleep from ten to three o'clock. The length of the 

 midday slumber depended very considerably upon the 

 weather and the season, and it was sometimes broken 

 up into two siestas, with a short interval between 

 them. At three o'clock it moved away in the direc- 

 tion of the place it had chosen as the site of its 

 evening meal and drink. This was almost invariably 

 the sulphur spring, where it generally arrived an hour 

 after sunset. Here it would drink, feed, wallow, and 

 sleep at intervals until the first grey light of early 

 dawn. 



Malias was anxious to build in a tree over the 

 spring a platform from which I could shoot the tapir 

 at night. But this I would not hear of. One of the 

 unwritten laws of big-game shooting, and one which 

 is not always sufficiently followed, is that every 

 animal should be attacked in the most sporting way 

 possible. No one would attempt to take with a worm 

 a salmon that could be tempted with a fly. The 

 same principle applies to big game. No one should 



