106 H El MAN'S DATCH. 



too dark to see even the barrels of my rifle, but 

 aiming as best I could, I fired. The figure bounded 

 forward and trotted briskly along the coast from 

 me ; so pitching my rifle low, and well in front, I 

 fired again. Then the beast vanished. For a 

 minute or two I waited, expecting to see it again, 

 or at least hear it making off, and then, loading my 

 rifle, I went up to the spot at which I had last seen 

 it. But whatever the beast was, it had vanished, 

 and feeling that I had wasted a couple of hours 

 and a couple of cartridges in missing a jackal, I 

 went back to my roost in the ruin. 



However, on the morning after my night-watch, 

 when we went down to bathe and collect drift- 

 wood for our fires, my man Ivan suddenly called 

 to me to look at something he had found on the 

 stones. On inspection it proved to be large blood 

 drops, on the very spot, as near as I could tell, on 

 which my shadowy visitor of the night before had 

 stood. Following the blood track along the shore, 

 we momentarily expected to find a dead jackal, as, 

 from the quantity of blood, the beast must have 

 been very hard hit. Some two hundred yards 

 alontf the shore the trail crossed the mouth of a 



D 



little mountain stream, with a bed of soft clay on 

 one side of it, and through this the trail went. 

 Our astonishment may be imagined when along 

 with the blood marks we found the fresh tracks of 

 a large panther (or more properly leopard), which 



