218 SPORT IX BENGAL. 



carried off from the front of his residence while smoking his 

 after-dinner cheeroot on a sultry moonless night ; but such 

 occurrences are uncommon, while the most impudent intru- 

 sions and depredations of panthers are not so, the smaller, or 

 tree variety, bearing away the palm in this respect from its 

 bigger cousin, as well as from all other beasts of prey in India. 



Of the other two pards found in Bengal, the clouded 

 panther (F. pardus macrocclis) is even more rare than the 

 black species (F. pardus melas), and neither can be pro- 

 perly catalogued among the game likely to fall to the rifle in 

 that country. I have seen only one individual of the former 

 species, a handsome male, six and a half feet in length, shot 

 in the Kamroop District of Assam, at the northern base of 

 the Khassia mountains, and I have never heard of another 

 killed in this country ; but, as an animal very common in the 

 Malayan Peninsula and Archipelago, it may exist in small 

 numbers in the hill tracts of Chittagong, Assam, and southern 

 parts of Cachar and Sylhet, like its compatriot Pardus 

 melas. The solitary individual met with by me was a crea- 

 ture of lower stature, in proportion to its length, than the 

 grass or tree panther, less powerfully built, and it carried a 

 proportionately longer tail, with the fur longer at the ex- 

 tremity than elsewhere. The head was rounder and smaller 

 than that of the other species, and the expression of the 

 countenance milder and less truculent ; more that of a petty 

 thief or pickpocket than of an armed burglar ; and lastly, its 

 general appearance stamped it as by no means dangerous to 

 the human race. Mr. C. T. M., of the Bengal Civil Service, a 

 sportsman of wide and varied experience, has informed me 

 that he once saw in the Nepal Terai an animal of the pard 

 species with a bushy tail, and which the natives spoke of as 

 a " hill leopard," rarely descending into the plains in the cold 

 season. If a pard, and not a lynx, the animal may have been 

 a clouded panther. 



I obtained at Cherra Poonjee, in the Khassia Hills, the 

 skin of a large lynx, the ground colour of which was a dirty 



