220 IN MALAY FORESTS. 



first raised the alarm ? In reply to this, several men 

 spoke to having heard the tiger, but no one had 

 actually seen it. Every man of them indignantly 

 repudiated the suggestion that he could have mistaken 

 a pig's grunt for a tiger's growl. Malays know the 

 two sounds so well that such a mistake would be 

 most unlikely. Some pigs had been seen, but no one 

 had taken any notice of them. When we asked the 

 men who declared that they had heard the tiger how 

 they accounted for its having escaped unseen, they 

 pointed out that when the squirrels had given their 

 alarm we had all taken it for granted that they 

 had seen the tiger, whereas it was probably only 

 the sow, and that when the beaters closed in upon 

 the ravine they had left the forest on either side 

 unguarded. This, of course, was perfectly true, and 

 their explanation of our failure was probably the 

 correct one. 



Some of the more enthusiastic of the Malays pro- 

 posed that the ground should at once be beaten over 

 again ; but midday was past, and it did not need a 

 second glance at the majority of the men to see that 

 the excitement, rather than their exertions, had so 

 exhausted them that they were not fit to undertake 

 another drive. Moreover, even if the tiger had really 

 been in the ground covered by the first drive, it by 

 no means followed that it would be there by the time 

 that the beaters were ready to line up again. We 

 decided, therefore, that we must give it up. We 

 covered our disappointment as best we could; but 

 our long high - strung excitement had had such a 

 miserable ending that one might have noticed an 



