Jungle By-Ways in India 



a man chosen for this purpose, and one hears too 

 late that on the appearance of the tiger he has 

 entirely lost his head and has clung to his tree 

 as one stricken with the palsy, with rattling teeth 

 and staring eyeballs, whilst ' stripes ' has strolled 

 by beneath and out of the beat. Stops often, how- 

 ever, behave very well, and rise to the occasion 

 when a more than ordinarily determined tiger en- 

 deavours to break out of a beat. I saw a man, a 

 Kol in Chota Nagpur, fling first his axe, without 

 which implement the Central Indian aborigines 

 never stir, and then his pagri at a tiger who had 

 no stomach for a long w r alk through the grass in 

 front of a line of noisy villagers who, armed with 

 village drums, old matchlocks, heavy sticks, and 

 the inevitable kerosene tin, were creating a babel 

 fit to raise the dead. That pagri turned this par- 

 ticular gentleman, who reached the rifles and his 

 end from a '400 cordite Express of a friend. Mine 

 was the spectator's part on that occasion. 



In Northern India the grass is too long to enable 

 men to be used as beaters with safety, or with any 

 chance of success ; and therefore if one has not 

 a lordly array of elephants to do the work, 

 such as we have already described, or even one or 

 two to beat up ' stripes ' with, one has a machan 

 or platform built in a tree close to the kill and sits 

 up over the latter. 



To the tyro, if he is a natural history lover, this 

 procedure is all pleasure, for everything is new to 



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