THE STORY OF THE TIGER. 



417 



tricts. According to the Government returns, it appears that within a period 

 oi six years no less than 4,218 natives fell victims to tigers, while in the 

 Central Provinces alone 2-§5 were killed during the years 1898 and 1899. In 

 regard to the ravages committed by individual man-eaters, one tiger in 1897, 

 1898, 1899, killed respectively twenty-seven, thirty- four and forty-seven people. 

 I have known it to attack a party, and kill four or five at a time. Once it killed 

 a father, mother and three children ; and the week before it was shot it killed 

 seven people. It wandered over a tract of twenty miles, never remaining in 

 the same spot two consecutive days, and was at last killed by a bullet from a 



PHOTOGRAPH OF YOUNG TIGERS SHOT BY MR. SEYMOUR. 



spring-gun when returning to feed on the body of one of its victims. The 

 account of the depredations of another man-eater, which infested the neigh- 

 borhood of a station in the Eastern Himalaya, states that the animal "prowled 

 about within a circle, say of twenty miles, and that it killed on an average about 

 eighty men per annum." 



It has been considered that man-eating tigers, which generally belong to the 

 female sex, were invariably animals unable to procure other food, from the 

 effects of age. Although this is true in a very large number of instances, it 



