297 JOURNAL, BOMBAY NATURAL HISTORY SOCIETY, Vol. VILI. 
ineffectively. At this critical moment, when she was within a few yards of 
us—near enough for us to see her ears back, teeth showing, a savage gleam 
in her eyes, and blood streaming down one fore shoulder,—when it 
looked as if one of usin her next bound must be knocked over, our gun- 
bearers from behind jumped up the mound on which we stood to hand 
us our second rifles. In their excitement they shoved Resaidar Beg 
Mahomed and the writer over the crest of the mound, and we, losing our 
footing, slid down the mound in a sitting posture with our rifles in our hands. 
For a moment it seemed as if one of us two must be seized, for the tigress 
was now quite close to us; but in that moment Watson, who was a very 
steady and cool shot, fired, hit her between the eyes, and in fact brained her. 
Instead of continuing to come on, she spun round and round twice or thrice 
and fell dead close in front of us, Had she come on, instead of spinning round, 
some of us might, possibly would, have been clawed. While this little scene 
was being enacted, the other three tigers had, it seems, come into view and again 
turned back. But they could not face the row the beaters were making, and 
again they turned towards us to force a passage through. One was passing to 
our left, two to the right ; we fired at and wounded the former, and he dou- 
bled back on the beaters. As he did so, the other two tigers faced the stop and 
broke past us to the hills behind. We at once stopped and withdrew the 
beaters and sent for the elephant to look the wounded tiger up. It would 
have risked an accident to let the beaters come on with a wounded tiger in 
their front, The elephant was a very unsteady one; if he saw a tiger, he 
invariably charged it, and it was difficult to shoot off him. In such jungle, how- 
ever, we had no choice but to mount him, and we went first to look up tiger 
number one. As we approached the nallah, where the look-out indicated she 
had fallen, we heard a growl, followed by a faint attempt ata charge; she 
was put out of pain immediately. Number three gave us a lot of trouble. 
He was a cowardly sneak, Nothing would draw him ; he kept retreating from 
one thick and almost impenetrable patch of “ Sendi” to another, and dodged 
about, till eventually he dodged us altogether ; and we had to return to camp 
with two tigers only, which the General photographed. This ended for us a 
very eventful day. As to excitement, the day has doubtless been often 
matched in the annals of shikar of earlier times, but it is not readily to be 
matched in these more prosaic days, which is my excuse for presenting an 
account of it to the pages of the Society’s Journal. As to tiger number three, 
subsequent information led me to believe that he died under a thick bush 
while we were hustling him, As it was impossible to put in men on foot and 
we had no dogs, and the elephant could not penetrate everywhere, we did not 
nieoruunately know it in time. 
- The place I speak of is no longer a home for tigers; the jungle has gives 
place to fields with cover barely sufticient for a hare. 
KENNETH MACKENZIE, CoLonet. 
CHIKALDAH, BERAR, 28th April, 1893. 
