94 THE HIGHLANDS OF CENTRAL INDIA 



there is sufficient evidence on record of the occasional 

 fierce retaliation of the bull bison when wounded and 

 closely followed up, in some resulting even in the death 

 of the sportsman, to invest their pursuit with the flavour 

 of danger so attractive to many persons, and to render 

 caution in attacking them highly advisable. The ground 

 on which they are usually met is fortunately favourable 

 for escape if the sportsman be attacked, trees and large 

 rocks being seldom far distant. 



Although a closely allied bovine, the Gayal of trans- 

 Brahmaputra India, has for ages been domesticated and 

 used to till the land, all attempts to do so with the subject 

 of my remarks, or even to raise them to maturity in a state 

 of captivity, have failed. After a certain point the wild 

 and retiring nature of the forest race asserts itself, and 

 the young bison pines and dies. It has always struck me 

 as curious why the most difficult of all animals to reclaim 

 from a wild state are precisely those whose congeners have 

 been already domesticated. The so-called wild horses, 

 and the wild asses, are almost untamable ; so also with the 

 wild sheep and goat, the wild dog and the jungle-fowl. A 

 young tiger or hyena is infinitely easier to bring up and 

 tame than any of these. 



This unconquerable antipathy of the Indian bison to 

 the propinquity of man is slowly but surely contracting 

 its range, and probably diminishing its numbers. Gradu- 

 ally cultivation is extending into the valleys that every- 

 where penetrate these hills; and the grazing of cattle, 

 which extends far ahead of the regularly settled tracts, is 

 pushing the wild bull before it into the remotest depths 

 of the hills. I have, in a comparatively brief acquaintance 

 with these hills, myself known considerable areas where 

 bison used to be plentiful almost entirely cleared of these 

 animals. Other wild beasts retire more slowly before the 

 incursions of man, partly subsisting as they do on the 

 products of his labour. The tiger who finds himself sud- 

 denly in the middle of herds of cattle merely changes his 

 diet to meet the situation, and preys on cattle instead of 

 wild pigs and deer. Even deer seldom live entirely in the 

 deep forest, but hang on the outskirts of cultivation, and, 



