TIGERS. 71 



ing itself with flesh to such an extent, that it lay up in the 

 jungle close to the village. These tigers had plenty of 

 game to subsist on, and there was no excuse for their 

 becoming man-eaters, nor were the natives in any fear of 

 them. In March, 1871, having joined my friends Manley 

 and Poulton at Secunderabad, we marched northward for 

 Kowlass, and on arrival at Sunkerrumpett, determined to 

 devote some days to the pursuit of the Poppinapett tigress, 

 which had, as already stated, developed into an accomplished 

 and sanguinary man-eater. Her iniquities had roused the 

 whole district, it being reported that she had killed and 

 eaten over one hundred human beings. But, this being 

 the ordinary reputation of every man-eater in those parts, 

 it cannot be implicitly relied on. Its hunting grounds 

 stretched over a large tract of country, from a few miles 

 south of Sunkerrumpett, to Nowsanpully (nearly twelve 

 miles to the east as the crow flies), and extending north- 

 wards, some twenty-five miles along the Kowlass-Sunker- 

 rumpett road. On the 3rd March it had killed a woman, 

 towards Jogiepett to the south of Sunkerrumpett its 

 previous victim near the same place being a man who had 

 been killed a week before. Like all man-eaters it 

 had left that district after killing, and had, in the 

 interim favoured Nagadurra, a village seventeen 

 miles off, with a visit. The country near Jogiepett 

 was covered with cholum (millet) fields, but having recon- 

 noitred it, we came to the conclusion that it would be 

 useless and impossible to arrange a beat there. Two days 

 after this she killed a man and a woman near Sunker- 

 rumpett, in the direction of Nagadurra. She was accom- 

 panied by two cubs, which were receiving a nice lesson 

 from their mother. Our haylas (young buffaloes), to the 

 number of twenty-three, were tied up at all the likely 



