io8 DAYS AND NIGHTS OF SHIKAR 



cowmen and villagers with him and go out before 

 dawn to watch the hills; they would then see any 

 bears there might be coming back from their night's 

 feeding grounds, and could mark them down in the 

 place they chose to lie up in to sleep for the day; 

 and when marked down he would let me know where 

 I was to join him. I went out at sunrise next 

 morning and found Esuf coming back. He said 

 they had found the pugs of a bear, though they had 

 not seen the bear himself; he, Esuf, was just going 

 down into some scrub tp pug him up, and I was to 

 wait at the top. The ground was very wet, so the 

 men could see the tracks plainly on the grass; but 

 it was an hour or two before they sent for me. They 

 wanted to give him time to settle down fairly to 

 sleep before he was disturbed. 



When I got near the place Esuf said the bear was 

 lying under some thick bushes, sound asleep, and he 

 asked me if I should like the men to beat him out 

 or if I would walk him up. They talked in such 

 very loud whispers that if the bear had been as near 

 as the men said he must have heard us. The scrub 

 he was lying in was extremely thick and heavy and 

 would have been very difficult to beat him out of, 

 so I settled to walk him up, and told Esuf to take 

 me above him if he could. That did not seem pos- 

 sible, as we had to follow closely in the pugs they had 

 already tracked. Esuf, Nana a big man in a 

 bright red waistcoat and I went a few hundred yards 

 through dripping bushes which grew so thick and 

 low we could no longer walk the bear up, so we 

 crawled him up. Nana knew just where he lay, so 



