30 THE FORESTS OF UPPER INDIA 



the still quivering flesh from the quarters, while its com- 

 panions flee in terror, scattered in all directions. The 

 poor village guala swarms up the nearest tree, and shouts 

 for aid in vain, trying to scare the enemy from his 

 frightened herds. 



He is a wasteful beast, a tiger, often killing two or three 

 out of a drove of cattle within a space of fifty yards. 

 But if he has once got the taste of human flesh he gets 

 too lazy to strike the big cattle, and prefers a smaller 

 victim more easily slain and tasty, and light enough to 

 carry off as a cat does a mouse. Such a one was the son 

 of the old Juli tigress. He preferred a man, or, better 

 still, a woman, but he would take a calf if one came handy 

 to him, and if he was hungry, which he generally was 

 after a three days' roaming. There lived near Juli, high 

 up on the first hills, a villager of Motee's kin, called Jussoo. 

 He was a son of the pudhan of that village, and a noted 

 shikari, a man skilled in all woodcraft, who knew how to 

 trap or snare all animals of the jungle ; could take the 

 kalij pheasant and the soft whistling peura partridge* in 

 his snares, with lines of horsehair nooses set cunningly 

 near the drinking pools. He could trap the kakur or 

 barking deer, and even a bear might be taken in his snare, 

 fastened to a sapling which had sprung back and tightened 

 on its paw.f He could set great beams weighted with 

 rocks to fall on an unwary tiger ; but a gun was not much 

 in his line, and, indeed, he had no license to carry one ; and 

 he did not believe much in a matchlock, a long clumsy 

 thing which takes a lot of coaxing to let it off and then 

 shoots very badly. He had, however, great faith in the 

 sahib's double-barrelled Westley - Richards rifle, which 



* Arboricola rufogularis. 



t Strange to say, a bear will eat his own paw off before he will cut / 

 the thong. ' 



