TRAPS FOR TIGERS. 291 



giving the dislocating twist that they considered we had been placing 

 ourselves in peril of) " in poking about after tigers for months, when one 

 dose of this capital * medicine ' would have done. This is the thing for the 

 future." And when the tigers were padded they preceded the elephants, 

 singing anything but a dirge. My own feelings as we followed the corUge 

 may be imagined, nor did my companions spare me. 



I should say that the male tiger had commenced to eat first, and the 

 poison must have been almost instantly fatal, as he lay within four yards of 

 the carcass. He had not struggled at all ; he must have felt the poison, 

 turned away, and dropped dead. One tigress was on her back thirty yards 

 distant, the other near her ; the latter had struggled slightly. As a proof 

 of the almost instantaneous effect of the poison in this instance not more 

 than half-a-dozen pounds of flesh had been eaten. Upon being moved, a 

 quantity of blood ran from the nostrils of all three tigers. 



Traps are not now often used for tigers : a few used to be caught alive 

 in ordinary mouse-trap-shaped cages in the time of the late Maharajah of 

 Mysore ; and there was, when I was last there, one of these cages, mounted 

 upon wheels, decaying in the Hoonsoor jungles. The bait used was a goat, 

 partitioned oflf by iron bars at the far end of the cage, as a native is loath to 

 give even a sprat to a whale if he can catch him without. How tigers 

 <;an ever have been such simpletons as to enter these structures is incom- 

 prehensible. I once saw a novel kind of trap in a hill where a tiger had 

 been recently caught by propping up a flat slab, as in an ordinary brick- 

 trap for birds, over a recess between two rocks, and baiting with a goat. 

 Tigers are occasionally caught in pitfalls. One fell into a sambur-pit that 

 some Sholagas on the Billiga-rungun hills had dug near their cultivation 

 whilst I was there shooting on one occasion, but though severely staked it 

 got out : the pit was oidy four feet deep, but narrow at the bottom, and the 

 tiger had had a long task to free himself. Old Bommay Gouda used to kill 

 a good many tigers in his younger days by dead-fall traps, made of bamboos 

 and loaded with stones ; the natives construct these very ingeniously. I once 

 had a huge iron spring-trap like the ordinary scissors rat-trap. It was 

 originally made by a sporting district officer for catching panthers, which did 

 a good deal of damage amongst the game in his domain, but was found to 

 be too slow for them, as they sprang away in time to avoid the jaws. It 

 was twelve feet long, with two springs that required a man of ten stone 

 weight standing on each to put down. The bait-plate was eighteen inches 

 square, the jaws about three feet long, and closing at a foot and a haK 

 above the plate. I am convinced no tiger would ever have got out of it 

 if he could only have been got in, unless he had left his leg behind ; but 



