BULLET AND SHOT 



loss of revenue to Government, the be-all and end-all 

 of administration in Burma. This was never a difficulty 

 for me, as the Corporation supplied me with two elephants 

 to carry my camp when on tour. Of the many ways 

 in which Englishmen pass their lives in all quarters of 

 the globe, this is perhaps one of the wildest and most 

 peculiar the wildest because one's life is spent in nature's 

 primeval forests, the most peculiar because it is practically 

 a nomadic life. Englishmen are wonderfully successful 

 in this kind of life, even getting to know the jungles as 

 well as the natives themselves ; thus do the old instincts 

 of our ancestors reassert themselves. Engaged in this 

 employment, a man will have his headquarters, or place 

 where he lives and keeps his stores, about the centre 

 of the district over which he has charge. From this 

 place he starts on a tour of his district of many square 

 miles of forest, and hither he returns when down with 

 fever or when he has completed the tour of his district. 

 It is during the monsoon that he will be most busy, 

 as then he has to see that his foresters are keeping the 

 logs in the streams after every flood so that they may 

 float out to the main river, as well as putting in freshly- 

 cut logs. The best time of year for the pursuit of tsine 

 is during the monsoon, when it is quite easy to track a 

 herd on striking a fresh trail ; at this season the tsine 

 is finding abundance of fodder, and now the young 

 bamboo shoots, the piece de resistance of bovine fare, 

 are springing up. On these the tsine takes heavy toll, 

 with the result that he keeps himself fat and sleek during 

 the cold weather, and even in the hot weather does not 

 show any failing in condition. A somewhat strange trait 

 in the character of the tsine is that he keeps to the same 

 part of the prairie land and will not leave it unless dis- 

 turbed ; this allows the native hunters to know exactly 

 whereabout to look for a herd, and they seldom fail to 

 find fresh tracks in the course of a day's pursuit. 



I would recount the procedure of a few days spent in 

 hunting tsine. In one somewhat restricted area in this 



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