COUSIN JACK 185 



awakes. Every Anglo-Indian sportsman knows the 

 weird cry by which the jackal warns his kin that the 

 tiger is abroad in the jungle : a cry of warning no 

 doubt, but also a call to the pack to look out for 

 plunder. Everyone who has sat up by a kill knows 

 that if the tiger is scared away the jackals arc 

 quickly heard pulling and snarling over the carcase. 



Infinitely weaker than the tiger, the jackal has 

 this advantage over the royal beast in the struggle 

 for existence, that he is not much afraid of man. 

 The natives, however, believe that the jackal that 

 utters the peculiar note to which I have referred is 

 a solitary driven from the pack. Such outcasts, they 

 say, attach themselves to the tiger, leading him to his 

 prey by their superior sense of smell, and perhaps 

 acting as scouts. They think that the jackal some- 

 times sees that all is clear in the neighbourhood ot 

 a kill, and that it utters its strange cry as a signal 

 to the tiger. 



A story is told of a sportsman who was waiting 

 for deer at night. He heard the peculiar cry of 

 the jackal, soon after a tiger made its appearance, 

 and the watcher forthwith became a convert to the 

 native belief. I am very unwilling to put aside the 

 beliefs of natives as being altogether baseless, but 

 this evidence hardly seems as convincing as it was to 



