ROUGHING IT IN SOUTHERN INDIA 169 



of feeling towards animals is not to be bought, nor is it 

 common with hired servants. 



Pintu was a Eurasian, with the native predominating 

 in Mm, and he preferred to live as one. Kim — that strange 

 and beautiful book by Rudyard Kipling — was yet to come, 

 but on reading it I knew that it was true to life, for our dog- 

 boy Pintu might have stood for the original. He came 

 without a ' written character,' and had never worked steadily 

 before ; had done odd jobs in a military cantonment at quite 

 a distance from us, so how he existed on his weary tramp 

 it was hard to say. With him was a ' pie ' 1 dog — a very 

 mongrel — of his own. He walked up to us, and without 

 introducing himself further, said that he could not get 

 enough to keep them both ; that he had heard the Doray 

 did not mind how many dogs he had ; might this one of 

 his have his food with ours if he worked about the place % 

 The 'pie' was fairly flourishing, and stood looking at *us 

 and wagging his tail, as if pleading for both of them", but 

 the boy looked as if he and hunger were not \ unacquaint.' 

 Of course, the couple were installed, and Pintu's talents 

 very soon came out. From the first every dog of ours 

 adopted him, even some rather exclusive ones among them 

 — his ' pie,' too, after a short probation. It was nothing 

 short of magnetism that did it, for he had the same caressing 

 hand with the horses, whom he made follow and whinny 

 after him. 



The shikar expeditions were somewhat of a trial to Pintu, 

 as he never could bear any of his charges to be exposed to 

 the risks involved, preferring to keep them all under his own 

 eye, and even inventing ailments for them to that end ; 

 whereas the dogs themselves were never happier than when 

 in the thick of it all. A year or two later, when Punch, 

 a much-beloved member of the pack, was carried off by a 

 panther almost under our very eyes — though no one actually 



1 'Pie,' contraction of 'pariah,' i.e. homeless, ownerless. 



