248 THE WILDERNESS AND JUNGLE 



old guns of their generation does not mean 

 that sportsmen are necessarily less courageous 

 to-day. They merely play the game as it 

 should be played. No one goes deliberately 

 into the jungle to be killed, and it would be 

 amazing stupidity to behave quixotically 

 towards tigers, and to give them a better 

 chance of victory by a voluntary handicap of 

 inferior firearms. Yet even savages recognise 

 the change in the odds when their cheap fire- 

 arms are substituted for the bow or spear. The 

 Abyssinians have long had a regular tariff by 

 which the bravery of their warriors is assessed 

 by the wild animals each has killed. Killing a 

 rhinoceros was formerly regarded by them as 

 equivalent to killing twenty men in battle, but 

 to-day it counts as equal only to five, and a 

 leopard, which then did duty for five, now 

 represents only one. 



As has been shown in an earlier chapter, 

 some methods of shooting big game are more 

 dangerous than others, and the most familiar 

 gradation of safety is illustrated in tiger shoot- 

 ing on foot, from a machan^ or from the 

 howdah. At the same time, wild beasts vary 

 so much in strength and cunning that not 

 always the safest methods can be relied on to 

 avert danger. Lions occasionally charge right 

 through the seemingly secure thorn zareebas 

 behind which sportsmen shelter themselves, 



