48 IN MALAY FORESTS. 



The Malays use sidins, rather than more sporting 

 methods, in a deer-drive for many reasons. The forest 

 is often a featureless wilderness of trees and under- 

 growth, in which an unbroken line of nooses some 

 hundreds of yards long has a better chance of stopping 

 a deer than a few men armed with guns ; and two or 

 three guns is generally all that a village can produce. 

 Then the undergrowth beneath the trees is almost 

 always so dense that a deer may pass unseen between 

 two men not more than fifty yards apart, and under 

 the most favourable circumstances it is rare to get 

 more than a snap-shot. The Malay is an execrable 

 shot, and seldom succeeds in shooting a running deer. 

 It takes him half a minute or more to squint along the 

 barrels of a gun before he will fire at an animal the 

 size of a bullock standing at rest twenty yards away, 

 and if he stops the headlong rush of a driven deer he 

 is generally as much surprised as the rest of the 

 company at his success. 



A deer-drive with sidins is perhaps the favourite 

 form of sport among the Malays ; and if deer are 

 known to be in any patch of forest that can be beaten 

 out, a suggestion to have a hunt is generally welcomed. 

 Rusa (the sambar deer of India) are fairly common 

 everywhere throughout the peninsula, and often do 

 considerable damage by their depredations in the 

 rice-fields when the crops are ripening. 



Let me describe an imaginary deer-drive. For the 

 past two or three nights a couple of deer have been 

 feeding in the rice-fields, and lying up by day in an 

 adjoining patch of secondary forest. The injured 

 cultivators go to the village headman, who at their 



