TKIAL OF A NEW SHOT. 187 



warned us of the presence of some heavy animal which had 

 detected us : then came a rush too heavy for a stag or boar, 

 and a fine bull showed himself for a moment or two on my 

 side before making off at full speed. The bull had been 

 lying asleep in the hollow when our advance startled him 

 out of his dreams, and his curiosity to view his disturbers 

 had induced him to come out into the open for an instant, 

 before he took to flight, presenting to me his broad stern. 

 Having my Westley-Richards in hand, loaded with steel- 

 tipped conicals, weighing two and a-half ounces each, I fired 

 the right barrel in a kneeling position, when the bull was 

 sixty or seventy yards off, in the expectation of breaking his 

 thigh-bone ; the bullet, however, flew high, and struck near 

 the root of the tail with a soft thud, proving that it had 

 entered a tender spot, unlike the loud smack which proclaims 

 a shot in the shoulder or ribs. The bull continued his 

 headlong course with unabated speed for fully a hundred 

 yards, and then dropped on the edge of the covert, and 

 was stone dead when we came up. Curious to trace the 

 course of the bullet which had done such fatal injury, 

 the animal was opened under P.'s professional directions, 

 and the track of the conical was followed from the point 

 of entrance into the body, along its entire length, till 

 found lodged in the neck among the bones ; the steel tip 

 remaining perfect, but the lead much dented and jagged. 

 A precisely similar shot from the same rifle had exactly 

 equal effect upon a huge male rhinoceros some time after- 

 wards in Assam, 



I once spent a very pleasant and successful week in the 

 month of January with E. I. S., the District Superintendent 

 of Police, and his assistant, S., in the country between Sarob 

 and the mouth of the Dhamra river, in Balasore. Abundance 

 of game, delightful weather, good fellowship, and a view of 

 the sea, combined to render this a most enjoyable trip, while 

 the sport, as noted in my diary, made it one to look back upon 

 with pleasure. "We shot each day as we walked from camp to 

 camp, our light tents and baggage being conveyed in small 



