280 THE HIGHLANDS OF CENTRAL INDIA. 



think of eating me." His early days had been passed in 

 catching and training falcons for the nobles of Upper India, 

 and in shooting birds for sale in the market. He had come 

 down to Central India to make a bag of blue rollers and 

 kingfishers, whose feathers are so much valued in the 

 countries to the east for fancy work, when he was caught, 

 nobody knows how, by a gentleman with a taste for bird- 

 stuffing, from whom he passed into the possession of a sports- 

 man who put him on tigers, and eventually he came to me 

 with a little experience of the business. His early training 

 had made him exceedingly keen of eyesight and in reading 

 the signs of the forest ; while in his many wanderings he had 

 accumulated a store of legends of demons and devilry, and a 

 wild jumble of Hindu mythology, that never failed, when re- 

 tailed over a fire at night to a circle of gaping cowherds and 

 village shik&ris, to unlock every secret of the neighbourhood in 

 the matter of tigers. Such an oily cozener of reticent Gonds 

 never existed. Then, miserable as he looked, he could walk 

 about all day and every day for a week in a broiling sun, 

 hunting up tracks, with nothing but the thinnest of muslin 

 skull-caps on his hard nut of a head, and would fearlessly 

 penetrate into the very lair of a tiger perfectly unarmed. He 

 had a particular beaming look which he always wore on his 

 ugly face when he had actually seen or, as he said, " salaamed 

 to " a tiger comfortably disposed of for the day ; and in late 

 years, w T hen I had to leave all the arrangements to him, I 

 hardly recollect ever going out when he reported the find a 

 likely one without at least seeing the game. He could shoot 

 a little, say a pot shot at a bird on a branch at twenty paces, 

 and kept guns, etc., in beautiful order. But he soon came to 

 utterly despise and contemn everything except tiger-hunting, 

 for which he had, I believe, really an absorbing passion. Even 



