252 ROUGHING IT IN SOUTHERN INDIA 



would be on his track. As it is, villages are allowed to be 

 decimated and a whole countryside panic-stricken, some- 

 times for a year or more, before the career of the man-eater 

 is stopped ; not at all, as has been suggested, through faint- 

 heartedness on the part of the shikaris. Whatever their 

 faults, they do not lack courage ; they only act in accord- 

 ance with human nature. The ill-judged system of rewards, 

 and nothing else, is the real cause of the long continuance 

 of such a scourge ; yet the Indian Government does not 

 seem to have grasped the fact. As recently as 18th December 

 1909 a paragraph appeared in the Daily Mail stating that 

 the Government reward had been raised from £16 to £70 

 in the space of three years for the slaying of a tiger still 

 ravaging the villages of Gam jam, and that during that time 

 he had killed upwards of a hundred and fifty people. How 

 English sportsmen came to leave him alone at his hideous 

 work it is hard to understand, for it is not to be supposed 

 that the increased reward would be any incentive in their 

 case ; neither can it be possible that they would be afraid 

 to hunt up the man-eater — at any rate, it used not to be so. 



Then, again, it has happened before now that after the 

 Government reward had been paid away, children and others 

 were still carried off, the native champion having been so 

 fortunate — ' God is good,' he would say — as to light upon 

 some other, and comparatively harmless, tiger that would 

 serve his turn. He would shoot that, and produce the skin 

 as his proof at the Kutcheri. One skin being much like 

 another, to claim the reward and get it, none disputing his 

 right, was simple enough. At the worst, he could always 

 ask : ' How was he to know it was not the one wanted ? 

 Besides, there might be two man-eaters about,' which, if 

 unlikely, was not impossible ; ' he would go out again.' 



Even a man-eating tiger may be slandered, and not seldom 

 may the disappearance of unwanted people be conveniently 

 accounted for by laying their death at his door, if the real 



