90 THE WILDERNESS AND JUNGLE 



comes down to the brink, killing few, but 

 wounding many. Some people always raise an 

 outcry whenever anything is said against allow- 

 ing natives to carry arms, but, as will presently 

 be shown, it is these armed natives who, more 

 particularly in Africa, are chiefly responsible 

 for the disappearance of the very animals that 

 we aim chiefly at protecting, so as to save them 

 from the irrevocable edict of extermination, 

 which has already gone forth against more than 

 one beautiful and interesting wild animal in 

 that continent. 



Colonel Williamson, several of whose varied 

 memories of Indian sport I am privileged to 

 relate in these pages, has often seen cases 

 in which the well-known lack of scent in 

 the majority of young animals has been 

 the means of saving their lives. In sup- 

 port of this view, he recalled an experience 

 with a young sambur. Accompanied by half a 

 dozen natives from Ootacamund and their 

 pariahs, which ran in company with his own 

 spaniels, he had been shooting in some of the 

 sholas (evergreen coverts which clothe the 

 lovely ravines of the Nilgiris), and, having 

 beaten one of them, had crossed, with the 

 whole party of men and dogs, an open grassy 

 space in order to try another, when he learnt 

 that a woodcock had just left this second shola 

 and flown across the open land to the one that 



