i68 



THEIR NOISELESS MOVEMENTS. 



discovered a party would be formed to slay him. The 

 plan latterly adopted was to collect a pack of all kinds of 

 dogs, and put them on the track of the tiger ; they invariably 

 either drove him out of the wood, or up a tree ; and some- 

 how or other they generally managed to kill him. It is 

 worthy of notice that a tiger will hardly ever get up a 

 tree unless thus scared by dogs. 



I know nothing more convincing of the extraordinary 

 strength of a tiger both in the power of jaw and muscle 

 than to see what he does with a large dead buffalo or an 

 old bull bison. Now an old bull bison stands six feet at the 

 shoulder, and is about nine feet long from his chest to his 

 hind quarters, and is of great bulk, certainly half as large 

 again as an ordinary bull. I have known the body of this 

 huge beast turned completely round by a tiger, and I have 

 seen large buffaloes which have been picketed, killed by a 

 tiger and dragged into the jungle to a considerable distance. 



I have at times been astonished at the perfectly noise- 

 less movements of this animal ; on one occasion I was 

 watching the carcass of a buffalo that had been killed by a 

 tiger, he had dragged it into a thicket and I was sitting on 

 the branch of a tree waiting for him. It was a perfectly still 

 calm day and no rain having fallen for some time, the jungle 

 was quite dried up, and the dead leaves strewn about made 

 such a noise when trodden on that I fancied a mouse could 

 not pass over them without my hearing it. I had been 

 watching for some time, when I heard what I fancied was a 

 stick fall on the dry leaves, this put me on the alert and I 

 listened with strained ears but there was not another sound ; 

 I had just leaned back again, thinking it was nothing, when 

 the tiger suddenly appeared like a ghost not twenty paces 



