i68 IN THE INDIAN JUNGLE. 



elephants, had been churned into a quagmire by 

 their ponderous feet in their wild rushes to escape 

 from their mad companion. Great bodies strewed 

 the enclosure, some mangled and trodden out of 

 all semblance to the living creature. In one corner 

 the bodies were so piled up and mixed together that 

 it was difficult to conceive how they could have got 

 into that position. This mass showed some move- 

 ment, and with immense difficulty two living ele- 

 phants were exhumed from this veritable mountain 

 of flesh. All the others were dead. Of the thirty- 

 three leviathans captured the previous evening, 

 thirty dead bodies, two maimed brutes more than 

 half-dead, and the runaway made up the tale ! 



Great heavens ! Could this scene of slaughter be 

 the work of one brute ! Was it possible for one 

 animal to destroy thirty of his fellows in the space 

 of a couple of hours ? Many of the victims were as 

 large as, if not larger than, their mad assailant, 

 and two were immense tuskers. The labour of six 

 months and a large expenditure of money gone in an 

 hour ! The herd when secured would have been 

 worth more than half a lakh of rupees (Rs. 50,000), 

 now all gone through the instrumentality of one 

 luckless brute ; and, more than this, one ill-fated 

 human being had been torn limb from limb. 



Nothing more was heard of the runaway for some 

 time. Then came in reports from numerous vil- 

 lages bordering the forest lands of Kollegal of the 

 depredations of a mad elephant. His insanity took 

 a peculiar form, as I have said, inasmuch as it 

 was directed against his own kind and against 



