THE MAHiDEO HILLS 107 



of prickly buslies that tad been put up round the sheep ; 

 and his attempts to drag it through the fence created such 

 a disturbance among the people that he left it and leaped 

 out in the confusion. The next night he seized one of my 

 Clumber spaniels at the door of my tent ; but a big grey- 

 hound named " Jack " flew to the rescue, and little " Nell " 

 escaped with a few scratches and a great fright. The same 

 panther became afterwards very troublesome on the hill 

 when the workmen at the bungalow had left, attacking 

 my dogs, sheep, and goats nearly every night, and coming 

 boldly through the very rooms of the house. He was a 

 toothless old brute, however, to which circumstance the 

 dogs owed seV^eral escapes out of his very jaws; and 

 though so daring at night in attacking our animals he 

 would never face the men. Several times my horse- 

 keepers and dog-boys sent him skulking ofE sideways, like 

 a crab, from the vigour of their applications of long bam- 

 boos across his back. I never could kill him, though I 

 tried every conceivable plan. One night I might have shot 

 him as he passed along below the raised plinth of the house 

 in the moonhght ; but of course I had seized the only un- 

 loaded gun in the rack in the hurry, and the locks snapped 

 harmlessly within a foot of his back. He was shot by a 

 shikari after I had left the hill. 



Coursing foxes was another great amusement. A 

 colony of the pretty little fox of the plains ^ inhabited a 

 small open glade a little to the west of my camp. They 

 had a great many burrows almost in the centre of the 

 plain, all of which appeared to run into each other. I 

 never failed to unearth one or more foxes here by the 

 aid of "Pincher," a minute black-and-tan English terrier, 

 with the spirit of a lion, who could get into any of the 

 holes, and would die rather than not get out his fox. 

 Often he showed signs of severe subterranean combats; 

 and once I thought he was done for, when the grey- 

 hounds ran a fox into the very hole he had gone in at. 

 We had to get picks and spades and dig down to him, and 

 we found him lying with one fox before him pinned up in 

 the end of a blind hole, which he had already half killed, 

 1 Vulpes Bengalensis. 



