246 THE FORESTS OF UPPER INDIA 



shoot in his Terai for ten or fifteen days. Our party had 

 an extremely pleasant time, every day beating ravines 

 with long grass, where the native shikaris said there were 

 tigers. We shot bears, leopards, sambur deer, chital, 

 para, and pigs, but our bag of tigers was nil. Jung 

 Bahadur's tigers were too wary for us, or perhaps the 

 shikaris were so instructed. Our party was, in my belief, 

 too large and noisy. We had too many counsellors, and 

 tigers are not to be got except with much jungle craft 

 and knowledge of their passes. 



A Terai bear — Ursus lahiatus — is a very quaint animal, 

 with a humped back, long shiny black hair, a long snout 

 bare at the end, and long white curved claws. He lives 

 on insects and the eggs of white ants, and roots out the 

 nests with his claws, sucking up the white juicy eggs with 

 his long prehensile lips and tongue. Ants' nests are 

 most abundant over all the Terai. Some places are simply 

 covered with tall pillars of mud, 4, 6, or 8 feet high, and 

 almost anywhere on the grassy plain one can see numbers 

 of these strange pointed erections. They are the same 

 colour as the ground, and often clasp the stump of a dead 

 tree, which has been eaten away and converted into mud, 

 which, after passing through the bodies of the ants, sets 

 hard on drying. There are also red ants of great size — 

 over half an inch long. These are fighting ants, and if by 

 chance you disturb their nest, which swings, made of leaves 

 stuck together, in the branches of a tree, they will drive you 

 out of the howdah. They have big nippers, and will lay 

 hold of your flesh, giving a painful pinch, but it is not any 

 way poisonous or dangerous. 



There are man}'- beautiful birds in the Terai, the jungle 

 teeming with life. There are great flocks of noisy mynahs, 

 like starlings, of three or four species, one, peculiar to 

 Nepal, being a larger bird, black and white, which is often 



