502 JOVnNAL, BOMBAY NATURAL HISTORY SOCIETY, 1892. 



of late by my having come across them several times last May in the 

 jungles of the lower Tapti Valley, when I procured a couple of 

 dead full-grown specimens, and a couple of live pups, one of which 

 still survives. I met with three packs of five, nine, and fifteen 

 individuals, and these numbers represent the average size of one, 

 twOj or three families, if packs are aggregates of families^ as seems 

 likely. Mr. Blanford gives twenty as the size of large packs, 

 but a friend well acquainted with packs o£ hounds informs me that 

 he saw a pack of nearly forty of these wild dogs, many years ago, in 

 the Chandni jungles near Asseerghur. Probably small packs or 

 family parties combine at times, and then separate again according 

 as business is brisk or the opposite. 



On the 5th of May my shikaris captured two pups of the wild 

 dog, Cyon deccanensis. The men said that there were three in the 

 litter, but that one escaped. They found them in the Baroda jungles 

 to the south of the Tapti, opposite Vajpur. The pair brought were 

 male and female ; but the male, the smaller and weaker of the two, 

 was very sick and died on the 7th, having refused all food. They 

 seemed to be about three weeks old, which would fix their birth about 

 the middle of April. Mr. Blanford says the young are produced 

 from January to March ; so this period must now be extended a 

 little. He also says that they are of a sooty-brown colour, but I 

 should rather describe their colour as a sooty -yellowish dun. They 

 were as snappish and wild at first as this one is on a larger scale still. 

 After their capture the pups were taken to a village five miles or so 

 distant, but the mother tracked them and was heard calling to them 

 at night. Next day at noon they were carried in a bag to my camp, 

 five miles away on the other side of the Tapti, which thereabouts is 

 100 yards broad but onl^ two or three feet deep. They were tied 

 up inside a hut of branches with my other dogs, amid a concourse 

 of grooms and other servants, horses, goats, bullocks, camel, &c. 

 But the mother soon found them again. The pups whimpered 

 occasionally, and the men said that she had called to them during 

 the night. She had crossed the river and tracked them five miles, 

 and at 9-30 on the morniug of the 7th, she was about 100 yards 

 from the camp amid the bamboos on a hill side, calling to them in a 

 loud piercing wail, quite unlike a dog's cry. As I would not restore 



