THE TIGER 251 



its pendent baskets, in which the holy water from his place 

 of pilgrimage had been carried by the hapless man, was 

 lying on the groimd in a dried-up pool of blood; and 

 shreds of his clothes adhered to the bushes where he had 

 been dragged down into the bed of the nala. We tracked 

 the man-eater and his prey into a very thick grass cover, 

 alive with spotted deer, where he had broken up and 

 devoured the greater part of the body. Some bones and 

 shreds of flesh, and the skull, hands, and feet, were all 

 that remained. This tiger never returned to his victim 

 a second time, so it was useless to found any scheme for 

 killing him on that expectation. We took up his tracks 

 from the body, and carried them patiently down through 

 very dense jimgle to the banks of the Moran ; the trackers 

 working in fear and trembhng under the trunk of my 

 elephant, and covered by my rifle at full cock. At the 

 river the tracks went out to a long spit of sand that pro- 

 jected into the water, where the tiger had drunk, and then 

 returned to a great mass of piled-up rocks at the bottom 

 of a precipitous bank, full of caverns and recesses. This 

 we searched with stones and some fireworks I had in the 

 howdah ; but put out nothing but a scraggy hyaena, which 

 was of course allowed to escape. We searched about all 

 day here in vain, and it was not till nearly sunset that I 

 turned and made for camp. 



It was almost dusk, when we were a few miles from 

 home, passing along the road we had marched by the 

 former day, and the same by which we had come out in 

 the morning, when one of the men who was walking behind 

 the elephant started and called a halt. He had seen the 

 footpriat of a tiger. The elephant's tread had partly 

 obhterated it ; but further on, where we had not gone, it 

 was plain enough — ^the great square pug of the man-eater 

 we had been looking for all day ! He was on before us, 

 and must have passed since we came out in the morning, 

 for his track had covered that of the elephants as they came. 

 It was too late to hope to find him that evening ; and we 

 could only proceed slowly along on the track, which held 

 to the pathway, keeping a bright look-out. The Lalla 

 indeed proposed that he should go a little ahead as a bait 



