HUME'S BARRED-BACKED PHEASANT i?? 



it I immediately saw that it contained three or four long tail-feathers of a pheasant with 

 which I was not acquainted. I at once inquired about the bird to which these feathers 

 belonged, and was informed that it belonged to the Loe-nin-koi which occurred in the 

 extreme south of the Manipur territory and in the eastern Looshai country. But the 

 Envoy had never seen it, nor, so far as he knew, had any other Manipur ever seen it. It 

 was an inhabitant of pathless hill jungles on the southern border, which had for long 

 been subject to the ravages of the Kamhows, a fierce so-called Kuki tribe (they are not 

 genuine Kukis), who invariably killed every one they came across. The tail-feathers, and 

 these only, filtered into Manipur through the agency of certain semi-savages, originally 

 residents of the Kamhow territory, but now refugees in Manipur, and though afraid to 

 return, yet maintaining secretly some sort of intercourse with some of their former 

 tribe-fellows. 



" Day by day, as I marched, I persisted in my inquiries. One officer only, a 

 Manipuri, who commanded a number of detachments scattered about the hills in the 

 neighbourhood of Noong-zae-ban, or rather with that as a centre, in stockades, as a 

 protection against Looshai raids, assured me that once in former years he had himself 

 seen the Loe-nin-koi in the Jhiri Valley, a good deal south of where I crossed it and 

 near the Looshai border. 



"Arrived at Manipur, 'from the Minister down to the Clerk of the Crown,' I gave 

 no one any peace about the Loe-nin-koi, but all to no purpose. No one had ever seen 

 the bird ; the Maharajah, who alone has the right to keep these tail-feathers, very kindly 

 offered me a bunch of them, and he sent out stringent orders to all his officers in the 

 south of the district to procure specimens of the bird, and really did all he could to get 

 these ; but all to no purpose. 



'' So time passed, and the Loe-nin-koi became daily more and more of a myth, the 

 more so that after all ordinary methods of getting the bird had failed, it began to be 

 suggested that ' there never was no such bird,' that perhaps the feathers grew on trees, 

 or were brought from some far distant country. Still I stuck to it that the Loe-nin-koi 

 I had to get, and I hope my good friends, the two Chief Ministers, have forgiven me for 

 the way in which I worried them about this phoenix. The Maharajah himself, however, 

 got interested, and when, after working the central part of Manipur, I started for the 

 south, I was, through his kindness and that of Colonel Johnstone, the Political Agent, 

 to whose support and friendship I was mainly indebted for whatever little success 

 attended my explorations, armed with full powers to get at the Loe-nin-koi, if within 

 the compass of the resources of the State. 



" At the south of the Manchar Lake we got together the most important officers of 

 the country farther south, and my Envoy made them understand that the bird had to 

 be got. It was not distinctly said that every one would have their heads chopped off if 

 we didn't get it, but a vague, gloomy cloud of awful possible eventualities was discreetly 

 left to veil the vista. 



" My Envoy and the officers had confabs off and on lasting a week ; the exact 

 localities nearest to us where the bird occurred were ascertained from old villagers, 

 summoned from the more southern fortified villages, but the hitch was this — although 

 just within the nominal boundaries of the State, and in a tract where in past time there 

 were scattered Manipuri villages, of late years the Kamhows had so harried the country 



VOL. HI A A 



