2 ;6 IN THE INDIAN JUNGLE. 



At Jeraikela, on the Bengal-Nagpur Railway, 

 a villager had a pet spotted deer, which would 

 follow him about like a dog. I frequently wished 

 to purchase it, and offered him a price many 

 times its value and sufficient to tempt most 

 natives. But he would not sell. He was as fond 

 of the deer as the deer was of him. His hut was 

 in the heart of the village. One warm moonlight 

 night he drew his charpoy (bedstead) as usual 

 across the entrance of his hut and slept on 

 it. While he was asleep, a hunting leopard 

 crept under his charpoy, seized and killed the 

 deer, and crept back the way it came, drawing 

 the deer after it, and made off to the woods. 

 The man only knew of his loss on awakening 

 in the morning, when the unmistakable dog- 

 like foot-prints of the animal showed who the 

 midnight marauder was. Not long ago one of 

 these brutes entered the village of Sendee during 

 the dark hours just before dawn. It dug a 

 passage for itself through the wattle-and-dab 

 walls of the bazaar-man's hut, seized and killed 

 a two-year-old calf, and endeavoured to drag 

 the body through the passage it had made for 

 itself, but the calf's body was too large to pass 

 that way. The noise made by the cheetah's 

 efforts to drag the calf through the hole in 

 the wall awakened an old woman who was 

 sleeping in the hut, and she immediately opened 

 the door, rushed out and raised an outcry. The 

 cheetah, seeing the door open, re-entered the 

 dwelling and pulled the calf away through the 





