170 TWO YEARS IN THE JUNGLE. 



short distance and stopped behind some bamboos. Vera took me 

 up quite close to it and tried to make me see it. I looked and 

 looked, and he pointed and pointed, saying, "There, sahib ! there !" 

 but I couldn't make it out. The men all grinned from ear to ear, 

 and I blasted my eyes more heartily than ever. Finally I sighted 

 a brown object in a thicket fifty yards away, and fired at it through 

 the clump of bamboos near which we were standing. Imagine my 

 I'eeHngs when the sambur sprang up from the ground on the other 

 side of the bamboo clump, almost under the muzzle of my rifle, or at 

 least only twenty-five yards away ! He had been lying down, and 

 I fired directly over him. As he ran off slowly, I hit him again and 

 brought him down, but this did not atone for my former stupidity. 



It was a bad case of protective coloring, which I had noticed 

 many times before. The summer coat of the sambur is precisely 

 of the same dull gray color as the branching, scraggy base of a 

 bamboo clump. 



Sambur hunting in the Animallais is a mere question of patient 

 tracking and straight shooting. The game is easy to stalk and easy 

 to shoot. All around Tellikul, sambur were very plentiful, and 

 many a time diu-ing the night some daring old buck would come 

 up withui fifty or a hundred paces of our camp, and blow one blast 

 after another on his dinner-horn. I know of no sound which the 

 so-called " bark " of this animal so nearly resembles, as a short, 

 strong blast on a deep-toned tin horn. What sounds can be more 

 pleasant to a hunter's ears than such a midnight serenade in the 

 heart of a grand old forest ! 



There was one serenader, however, who often annoyed me by 

 his outlandish song. It was the hawk-cuckoo (Hierococcyx varius, 

 Vahl.), also called the "brain-fever bird," partly because its cry 

 sounds like " hxoxn-feverj" and also because of its fancied tendency 

 to produce that painful malady. This bird would perch quite close 

 to my hut, and begin with a low whistling cry of "hew-ee," but 

 with each repetition it was given louder until it reached the high- 

 est pitch of the bird's lungs, about like this : 



"liew-«e.' hew-^^ ! hew-EE / HEW-EE ! HEW-EE ! " 



About every five minutes, or less, it would begin at the bottom of 

 the gamut and keep getting louder and louder, until at the last it 

 would end in a shrill shriek, like a steam-whistle, and the exhausted 

 bird would stop to rest. This serenade was a great annoyance to 



