AN EXPLORATION IN THE FAR EAST. 443 



of this. The first was at a lovely spotted buck, who suddenly 

 stood before me like an apparition, drinking at the margin of 

 the mirror-like lake of Lachora, as I rounded the point of one 

 of its bays on my way back, tired and muddy, from an even- 

 ing's snipe shooting. It was over two hundred yards across 

 the arm of the lake from where I was. I had taken out a 

 single Express by Henry, to raise the flocks of wild fowl 

 that sat in safety in the centre of the lake, and this my gun- 

 boy now thrust unloaded into my hand. The buck had 

 turned, and was picking his way leisurely up the bank, before 

 I had the cartridge in ; and his graceful form and long taper- 

 ing antlers stood out clear against the sky line as I fired point 

 blank at his shoulder. With a startled toss of the head, and 

 a desperate bound over the top of the bank, he was off into 

 the thick cover that here surrounds the lake. We tracked his 

 footprints in the gravelly soil for near a hundred yards, when, 

 light failing us altogether, we had to give it up. Next morn- 

 ing I returned, and a solitary crow cawing on a branch pointed 

 out the buck lying dead and stiff within a few paces of where 

 we had left the trail. The next chance I had with this rifle 

 was equally unexpected. Walking along near midday in the 

 Pun&sa" forest, by a little travelled pathway, the ridge of a 

 great black back appeared through the trees, slowly passing 

 behind a little eminence. It was a splendid stag sain bar, 

 who had, very unusually, ventured down to that silent valley 

 in the midday heat to drink at a little stream. He seemed to 

 be dazed by the sunlight as he came out on the pathway, and 

 failed to notice a cortege of three or four horses with their 

 riders, an elephant, and ten or a dozen men on foot. I fired 

 at about a hundred and seventy yards, and heard the little 

 bullet strike against his brawny shoulder. But he galloped 

 away up a little glade, leaving no blood ; and I felt inclined 



