122 DAYS AND NIGHTS OF SHIKAR 



designs on the wall of a house frescoes they might 

 be called of most remarkable-looking animals. I 

 stopped to have a look at them and ask what they 

 were supposed to represent. I could not very well 

 understand the mixed language the people spoke, 

 so one ingenious man started to imitate the various 

 noises that each animal made, and then a lot of them 

 joined in. It afforded the greatest merriment to 

 us all, except to Fanny, who could not make out 

 what all the noise was about. She was tired of 

 waiting and turned her head round to bite at my foot, 

 as she playfully did sometimes, to ask what we were 

 stopping for. She somehow got her teeth and the 

 ring of the bit firmly entangled in the stirrup, which 

 frightened her a good deal, and she waltzed round 

 and round trying to free her head, her neck twisted 

 against her side, which fixed the stirrup all the tighter 

 in her mouth. I slipped off, while Lai Singh, the 

 forest guard, got hold of her and she nearly threw 

 herself down and got in such a panic that it was 

 almost impossible to help her. Fortunately the 

 stirrup strap, which must have been rather rotten, 

 broke, and even then it was with some difficulty that 

 we managed to disentangle the stirrup from her teeth 

 and bit. 



The first place I went to shoot was near Yeotmal, 

 but the jungles were so infested with wild dogs, all 

 the game was driven away and I could get no news 

 of any tiger being about. Wild dogs killed one or 

 two of my baits and it seemed no use tying up 

 anywhere, the jungle seemed full of them. The 

 forest guard found a litter of eleven puppies and 



