542 JOURNAL, BOMBAY NATURAL HIST. SOCIETY, Vol. XXVIII, 
Major Evans deals fully with this point in his ‘‘ Big Game Shooting in Upper 
Burma ”’, both as regards bison and Tsine, pointing out that bulls in their prime 
periodically rejoin a herd, giving two instances from his personal experience. 
On one occasion in July 1914 I was after a big solitary bull whose habits I knew 
fairly well. In the early morning I had come across a small herd of four cows 
and a couple of calves and left them undisturbed. Passing on, about an hour 
later I found a herd of two small bulls and twelve cows. They fed past within 
afew yards of me, and then, to make certain that the big bull was not with them, 
I crawled into the middle of them, but unfortunately selected for cover a bush 
behind which an old cow was feeding ; the result being a terrific snort in my face 
and the stampede of the herd. I examined all the tracks, found that the big bull 
was not with them, and then tried his usual haunts without success. On the way 
back, at about eleven o’clock, we passed the place again and, I saw some tracks 
crossing those of the stampeded herd, which on examination proved to be those 
of the big bull and asingle cow. (The bull’s tracks were easily distinguishable 
owing to a slight malformation of one front toe.) I took up the tracks myself 
and, as the rifle was much in the way in the thick undergrowth, I handed it to 
the Burman with me, thinking that I knew where the bull would make for. I 
was wrong, for at the top of the next rise, half a mile on, up rose the bull (a grand 
khaki fellow) out of the undergrowth while his mate stood some thirty yards from 
him. The Burman bolted with the rifle and I was left staring at the bull not 
forty yards distant, feeling an egregious ass and decidedly nervous as to his in- 
tentions. After fully fifteen seconds he swung round with a snort and they went 
off at a fast trot together disappearing to a diminuenda of crashes. On the way 
home we again passed the first little herd of the morning, and it was now a cow 
short. 
Judging from this experience and the former one with the big “ buffalo-co- 
loured ”’ bull, I would say that the big bulls normally live solitary, but periodi- 
cally join a herd and go off with any cow in it which happens to be in season, 1 
twice came across a solitary pair on other occasions ; in each case the bull was 
‘*copper-beech ”’ colour. In every case the cow was lying about 35 yards 
from the bull, and in both the last-mentioned cases I came on top of her and 
lost my shot. 
It seems probable that June and July are the usual pairing months, and that 
10 months is the period of gestation ; all the calves I saw in June seemed to be 
six weeks to two months old. It also seems possible that twins are occasionally 
born, as I watched a herd of five cows and four calves lying down on a slope in 
bamboo jungle one day in June, and the cow lowest on the slope had two calves 
lying between her legs, tail on to each other, with their heads resting on her 
shoulder and thigh, respectively. 
The measurements of the bull illustrated were :— : 
Height at shoulder 65 inches. (Measured shoulder to heel.) 
( Length gt ee ee 
Horns 2 Girth TSE). 5 
Spread 414 
This was an exceptionally big bull. Another bull measured 62 inches at the 
shoulder. 
In the Malay States, Java and Sumatra the old bulls seem to become black, 
and it seems likely that in Burma the tendency is the same, and that the buffalo- 
coloured and chocolate bulls were a further stage in this direction of the grey 
and copper-beech coloured animals. I have already suggested that the red 
bulls turn darker and become copper-beech ; this is supported by the fact that I 
never saw a red bull which carried any but a very moderate head. 
This theory agrees with the fact that the further south we go towards countries 
of constant warmth, heavy rainfall and dense forest, the stronger become the 
melanistic tendencies of the mammals inhabiting them ; but it does not cover 
