The Tiger 249 



the spot about eight o'clock. The man had been struck 

 down where a small ravine leading to the Moran crosses a 

 lonely pathway a few miles east of La. The shoulder- 

 stick with its pendant baskets, in which the holy water 

 from his place of pilgrimage had been carried by the hap- 

 less man, was lying on the ground in a dried-up pool of 

 blood, and shreds of his clothes adhered to the bushes 

 where he had been dragged down into the bed of the nala. 



" We tracked the man-eater and his prey into a very thick 

 grass cover, alive with spotted deer, where he had broken 

 up and devoured the greater part of the body. Some 

 bones and shreds of flesh, and the skull, hands, and feet 

 were all that remained. This tiger never returned to his 

 victim a second time, so it was useless to found any scheme 

 for killing him on that expectation. We took up his tracks, 

 however, from the body, and carried them patiently down 

 through very dense jungle to the banks of the Moran, 

 the trackers working in fear and trembling under the 

 trunk of my elephant, and covered by my rifle at full cock. 

 At the river the pugs [footprints] went out to a long spit 

 of sand that projected into the water, where the man-eater 

 had drunk, and then returned to a great mass of piled-up 

 rocks at the bottom of a precipitous bank, full of caverns 

 and recesses. This we searched with stones and some fire- 

 works I had in the howdah, but put out nothing but a 

 scraggy hyena, which was, of course, allowed to escape. 

 We searched about here all day in vain, and it was not till 

 nearly sunset that I turned and made for camp. 



" It was almost dusk, when we were a few miles from 

 home, passing along the road we had marched by the for- 



