272 THE HIGHLANDS OF CENTRAL INDIA. 



himself right above her, and swore away until he fairly- 

 turned her out of her comfortable berth. The excitement of 

 the monkeys soon told me she was on the move ; and 

 presently I saw her round face looking at me from behind a 

 tree with a forked trunk, through the cleft of which I caught 

 sight of about a square foot of her striped hide. It seemed 

 about the right place, so covering it carefully I put in a 

 shell at about forty yards, and she collapsed there and then, 

 forming a beautiful spread-eagle in the bottom of the nala. 

 The youngster now started out, roaring as if he were the 

 biggest tiger in the country ; and, though I fired a couple of 

 snap shots at him as he galloped through some thick bushes, 

 I could not stop him. It is important to extinguish 

 a brute, however young, who has once tasted human flesh ; 

 and I followed him up till it grew nearly dark, when I 

 returned to the ravine to take home the tigress, and there I 

 found my monkey friends tucking into the berries in all 

 directions, and hopping about close to the body of the dead 

 tigress. The cub was met, much exhausted with its run, by 

 a gang of wood-cutters, and killed with their axes. 



The barking of deer, and the alarm cry of peafowl, also 

 frequently indicate the movements of a tiger. The s^mbar, 

 the spotted deer, the barking deer, and the little four-horned 

 antelope, all " bark " violently at a tiger suddenly appearing in 

 the daytime. In April, 1865, having marched nearly a thou- 

 sand miles exploring in the forests almost without firing a 

 shot, I halted to hunt a very large cattle-eating tiger near 

 Chandvel in the Nimar district. This animal was believed 

 by the cowherds to have killed more than a thousand head of 

 cattle ; and one of the best grazing grounds in all that country 

 had been quite abandoned by them in consequence. His 

 haunts lay in a network of ravines that ]ead down to the, 



