40 TWO YEARS 12^ THE JUNGLE. 



seize tliem by the taiL When a crocodile leaves the water to take 

 his daily sun-bath upon the bank, he does not go rambling about 

 over the country, to be suddenly set upon and killed by almost auy 

 one before he has time to reach the water. Far from it. He cau- 

 tiously lays himself down to sleep within a yard of the water's edge, 

 head towai'd the stream, ready to plunge forward out of sight at 

 the slightest alarm. He usually sleeps with one eye open, too, and 

 however fast asleep he may appear to be, you have only to show 

 yourseK within easy liHe shot, and adios ! he is off to the bottom 

 of the river. 



I have found by a long series of experiments, that the only sure 

 way to stop a large crocodile or alligator is to shoot him in the neck 

 or at the shoulders, so as to strike the vertebral column. It is easy 

 enough to kill small specimens by shooting them in the head, but 

 a crocodile with the top of its head blown off is useless either for 

 its skin or skeleton, while one shot through the heart or lungs will 

 get into the water much faster than one not shot at all. The brain 

 of a twelve-foot gavial is so small that it would hardly fill an egg- 

 cup, and it is surrounded by such a huge mass of solid bone that 

 it offers no mark at all to fire at. The sides of the neck and the 

 shoidders, however, are wholly unprotected by bony plates, and 

 when a buUet strikes the vertebral column, the whole nervous sys- 

 tem receives such a tenible shock that the animal is instantly paral- 

 yzed, at least for a time, and rendered powerless to move a single 

 yard. AYhen the spinal column is struck by a bullet, the crocodile's 

 jaws fly wide open, as if the bullet had touched a spring, the legs 

 draw up and quiver convulsively, and the reptile Hes still for further 

 treatment. 



I soon found that if we captured any gavials, I should have to 

 shoot them at long range and do much better shooting than I had 

 ever done before. At first I feared that my httle rifle and I had 

 undertaken more than we could accompUsh under so many disad- 

 vantages. The river was very swift owing to the recent freshets in 

 the lower Himalayas, and our boat was so much hke an old clumsy 

 raft that shooting from it was simply out of the question. The 

 cover along the banks was so pitifully thin, and the sand-banks 

 were so wide I saw I should often have to shoot across the river, or 

 else just as far across the sand-banks, in order to kill a gavial at alL 



Just below Etawah we stopped at a wide sand-bar and I spent 

 some time in firing at targets from one hundred to three hundred 

 yards, until I got the peep-sight of my Maynard rifle graduated 



