TIGER-SHOOTING. 191 



impossible for a mouse to have passed unheard. I 

 remembered afterwards that a hare, a jungle-hen r 

 and some small lizard had each, as they ran by> 

 attracted my attention, and that of the man beside 

 me, by the crackling rustle of the dead leaves. 



1 Almost at the first distant shout of the beaters 

 the large, man-eating tiger came out close to me, 

 so noiselessly that, had not my eye caught him, 

 he might have passed unobserved by me, as he 

 was by the trained and trusty gun-carrier stand- 

 ing at my elbow, and who, looking in another 

 direction and not seeing me raise my gun, had 

 not, although his ears were from constant practice 

 as keen to any noise on hillside or in forest as 

 those of the wildest animal, an idea that game was 

 on foot until he heard the angry growl with which 

 the animal received his death- wound.' 



Again he says, as an illustration of the cat-like 

 tactics of the tiger : 



4 A few months ago, while going to look for ibex, 

 I was passing over the large hill in front of the 

 Avalanche bungalow on the Kondahs. Suddenly 

 my gun-carrier asked me for my glass, and whis- 

 pered that he could see a tiger crossing a bare 

 ridge about half-a-mile off; his assistant corrobo- 

 rated this, but, even with the glass, I could not 

 succeed in making out what these two men had 

 discovered with the naked eye and I own I 



