THE TEAK REGION. 219 



stern ; and yet here were none of the immediate paralysing 

 effects ascribed to these shells at close quarters. On walking 

 up to the second " tiger," what was my disgust to find that it 

 was not a tiger after all, but only a huge striped hyaena I had 

 shot, having mistaken his disproportionately large head in the 

 imperfect light for that of the jungle king ! The shell had 

 passed completely through his neck, but, if it exploded at 

 all, must have done so after passing out. The other was a 

 veritable tiger, however. We followed him a little way by 

 his footprints and blood, but it was getting very dark, and 

 prudence compelled us to leave him till the morning. We 

 failed, however, to find him then, though we hunted about 

 the whole day ; and it was not till some days after that a 

 cow-herd found his rotting remains beside a pool of water, 

 many miles away. 



On another occasion I secured the largest sambar horns I 

 have ever seen, in a drive. It was in the Bori teak forest, 

 a lovely little valley nestling under the northern scarp of the 

 Mahadeo hills, and surrounded on three sides by its mural 

 precipices. Being very inaccessible from the plains, more teak 

 trees have here escaped the destroying timber contractor than 

 almost anywhere else ; and E., D., and myself were engaged 

 in demarcating its boundaries as a reserved forest. Having 

 toiled for some days putting up cairns of stones along the 

 open southern border, where it is not enclosed by precipices, 

 and completed the business, we decided to wind up with 

 a drive in the forest itself for sambar, and the chance of a few 

 bison whose tracks we had seen during our work. The grass 

 was so long and the forest so thick that driving was then 

 almost the only possible way of getting game. We had had 

 a number of Gonds and Korkus out with us at the boundary 

 work, and the prospect of abundance of meat readily induced 



