THE TIGER 237 



was a little, wee man, so insignificant and so dried and 

 shrivelled up that, as lie used to say, " No tiger would 

 ever think of eating me." His early days had been passed 

 in catching and training falcons for the nobles of upper 

 India, and in shooting birds for sale in the market. He 

 had come down to Central India to make a bag of blue 

 rollers and kingfishers, whose feathers are so much valued 

 in the countries to the east for fancy work, when he was 

 caught, nobody knows how, by a gentleman with a taste 

 for bird-stuffing, from whom he passed into the possession 

 of a sportsman who put him on tigers, and eventually he 

 came to me with a little experience of the business. His 

 early training had made him exceedingly keen of eyesight, 

 and in reading the signs of the forest ; while in his many 

 wanderings he had accumulated a store of legends of demons 

 and devilry, and a wild jumble of Hindu mythology, that 

 never failed, when retailed over a fire at night to a circle of 

 gaping cowherds and village shikaris, to unlock every secret 

 of the neighbourhood in the matter of tigers. Such an oily 

 cozener of reticent Gonds never existed. Then, miserable 

 as he looked, he could walk about all day and every day for 

 a week in a broihng sun, hunting up tracks, with nothing 

 but the thinnest of mushn skull-caps on his hard nut of 

 a head, and would fearlessly penetrate into the very lair 

 of a tiger perfectly unarmed. He had a particular beaming 

 look which he always wore on his ugly face when he had 

 actually seen or, as he said, " salaamed to " a tiger com- 

 fortably disposed of for the day ; and in late years, when I 

 had to leave all the arrangements to him, I hardly recollect 

 ever going out when he reported the find a likely one with- 

 out at least seeing the game." He could shoot a little, say 

 a pot-shot at a bird on a branch at twenty paces, and kept 

 guns, etc., in beautiful order. But he soon came to utterly 

 despise and contemn everything except tiger-hunting, of 

 which he had, I believe, reaUy an absorbing passion. Even 

 bison-hunting he looked down on as sport not fit for a 

 gentleman to pursue. For ten months in the year he 

 moped about looking utterly wretched, and taking no 

 interest in anything but the elephants and rifles ; and woke 

 up again only on the first of April — opposite which date 



