THE TIGER. 281 



bison-hunting he looked down on as sport not fit for a gentle- 

 man to pursue. For ten months in the year he moped about 

 looking utterly wretched, and taking no interest in anything but 

 the elephant and rifles ; and woke up again only on the first of 

 April, opposite which date "Tiger-shooting commences" 

 will be entered in the Indian almanack of the future, 

 when the royal animal shall be preserved in the Keserved 

 Forests of Central India to furnish sport for the nobility of 

 the land ! 



Poor old LalM ! He fell a victim in the end to contempt of 

 tigers, bred of undue familiarity. I was very ill with fever 

 in the June of 1866, and meditating a trip home, and had 

 sent out the Lalla* with a double gun to shoot some birds 

 for their feathers with a view to salmon flies. He came 

 upon the tracks of a tiger, and, contrary to all orders, 

 tied out a calf at night as a bait, and sat over it in a 

 tree with the gun. The tigress came and received his 

 bullet in the thigh, going off wounded into a very thick 

 cover in the bed of a river. The plucky but foolish Lalla* 

 followed her in there the next morning by the blood ; but 

 soon found that tracking up a wounded tiger with a gun is 

 a very different thing from following about uninjured tigers 

 without intent to disturb them. Before he had gone a dozen 

 paces the tigress was upon him, his unfired gun dashed from 

 his hands and buried for half its length in the sand, his turban 

 cuffed from his head to the top of a high tree by a stroke of 

 her paw that narrowly missed his head, and himself down 

 below the furious beast, and being slowly chewed from shoulder 

 to ankle. He was brought in a dozen miles to Khandwri., 

 where I was, by some men who had gone in for him when 

 the tigress left him. The fire of delirium was then in his 

 eye, and he raved of the tiger's form passing before him, red 



