In the Sal Forests. 



side! Another, all red and glistening from the mire- 

 puddled soil and see ! the earth soft and noiseless for us 

 the creeping enemy, leafy covert all abroad, a steady 

 settled wind ; we shall have no difficulty in approaching 

 almost near enough to pluck a hair from those huge sides, 

 and, unless tempted by an extraordinary length of horn, 

 nr^y spare at the last moment. 



Such is the pursuit of speiroceros under the most favour- 

 able circumstances ; but here again, although he has now 

 abated his nocturnal habits and long expeditions, we must 

 choose his track with care, and, above all, shoot hard and 

 straight. Once crossed and intermingled with the scurry- 

 ings of a frightened herd, the tracks of the great bull 

 may be lost for ever ; and that is beyond the art of JVlariah 

 or Gond. 



But most of us will doubtless pursue our bull in the open 

 season, during the summer heats, when that malarious jun- 

 gle, filled with feverish exhalations and microbes of unknown 

 venom, has been dried by a rigorous sun into the semblance 

 of salubrity for the European traveller. 



The position of these wilds the writer would not object 

 to give here were Indian game less on the decrease. 

 They lay there forty years ago. Of which time I possess 

 a diary then describing them truly a hunter's paradise, to 

 be read of with beating heart and watering mouth. They 

 lie there now Ichabod ! to be mourned over; their day 

 gone by, desolate, crossed at intervals by some rare, shy, 

 phenomenally astute descendants of the once great herds, 

 now practically extinct by reason of murrain, drought, 

 and, deadlier still, incursions of gun-bearing natives and 

 gun-running merchants from that horrible country lying to 

 the west, across the big river, where, at an even earlier 

 date, most of the ungulata had become but a memory. 



