258 ROUGHING IT IN SOUTHERN INDIA 



help for it but to dislodge him, or he might have gone his 

 way in safety, so regal did he look, with the moonlight 

 showing up every bar and stripe on his coat. 



Much more uncomfortable was the experience of a friend 

 of mine, who told me how she had once passed a very 

 mauvais quart d'heure, when, something having gone wrong 

 with the howdah or the elephant, she was wrapped in a green 

 cloth and set down amongst some bushes in the jungle, 

 while the rest of the party went away after a wounded tiger. 

 She heard a single shot, that sound which, as already said, 

 gives rise to such unnerving feelings of suspense in a mere 

 listener. However, in due time they came for her. The 

 shot had taken effect. 



When a dead tiger was brought into camp close watch 

 had to be kept lest the whiskers should be filched, a tiger's 

 whiskers being considered invincible charms against every 

 misfortune under the sun. Several of F.'s best trophies 

 had to be furnished with whiskers of stiffened horsehair 

 by reason of such spoliation. 



Not a trophy F. had — a head, or horns, or skin — but had 

 its story, remembered to the veriest details ; the stories, too, 

 of many he had not secured, clean misses from some cause 

 or another, no man being infallible, and the wild things very 

 wary and fleet ; and so they need be, with their own powers 

 all they have to pit against the tiny pellet of lead on the 

 man's side. Occasional bad shooting is one thing, mere 

 bungling quite another, though even bunglers generally 

 have sense enough to know that the skin of an animal 

 which they have shot at rather than shot is a piece of 

 evidence to be suppressed, and are content to buy their 

 trophies, weaving quite clever yarns about them too. We 

 have listened to a few such tales ourselves. 



A Governor of our Presidency, no sportsman himself, at 

 the end of his five years of office repeatedly asked my 

 husband to let him buy his entire collection for his English 



