THE HIGHER NARBADA 275 



defied every effort to kill him. Long will " Whitehead," 

 of the Gaira Baira, be remembered on the banks of the 

 Narbada. He furnished sport to a whole generation of 

 the sportsmen of Jubbulpur, and, so far as I know, never 

 was killed. He disappeared in the course of time. Several 

 hundred beaters were assembled to beat the leg-of-mutton 

 shaped tract, of which the narrow "Monkeys' Leap" 

 between the two rivers formed the shank. A large old 

 stump of a banyan tree stood right in the centre of the 

 neck, hollowed like a cup at the top by the weather, and 

 filled a few inches deep- with drift sand. A better post 

 for the gunner could not be, and here the Thakiir and I 

 took our places. It was a long drive, and it was not for 

 an hour or more that the game began to appear, and groups 

 of spotted deer gradually collected on all the knolls within 

 sight on the inward side. They grew and grew in numbers, 

 gazing back at the beaters and forward at the tree, where 

 they had often run the gauntlet before. They were very 

 imwilling to come on, but the drive was strong and not 

 to be eluded. I watched for the tiger till many of the 

 deer had gone past; at first a stragghng doe with her 

 fawn, then small groups, and finally a great husthng 

 mass of dappled hides and tossing antlers. There was 

 no tiger evidently in the beat. The Thakiir's long match- 

 lock had already been the death of a buck, and he was 

 painfully reloading its long tube from his primitive charging 

 implements. I had a couple of rifies, single and double, 

 and it was the work of as many seconds only to fire the 

 three barrels, kilhng two and wounding another. There 

 were no breech-loaders in those days; but I had time to 

 reload the double while the stream of deer poured past, 

 and secure two more bucks before the beaters came up. 

 The wounded buck was afterwards recovered. There 

 cannot have been less than a thousand spotted deer in 

 this beat; and I never before or since saw such a sight. 

 With a breech-loader twenty or thirty bucks could easily 

 have been killed. One of the bucks I killed had the 

 largest horns I have ever seen, measuring each thirty-eight 

 inches round the curve. 



I had another beat for " Whitehead " afterwards, near 



