AIT EXPLOEATION IN THE FAR EAST 361 



struck by the Express bullet, even in the lungs, will run 

 from fifty to a hundred yards before falling. It is then 

 generally stone dead, having bled internally. But very 

 often there will not be the slightest mark of blood on the 

 track. The very first two shots I ever fired with an 

 Exj)ress were remarkable illustrations of this. The first 

 was at a lovely spotted buck, who suddenly stood before 

 me hke an apparition, drinking at the margin of the mirror- 

 like lake of Lachora, as I rounded the point of one of its 

 bays on my way back, tired and muddy, from an evening's 

 snipe-shooting. It was over two hundred yards across 

 the arm of the lake from where I was. I had taken out a 

 single Express, by Henry, to raise the flocks of wild fowl 

 that sat in safety in the centre of the lake, and this my 

 gun-boy now thrust unloaded into my hand. The buck 

 had turned, and was picking his way leisurely up the bank, 

 before I had the cartridge in; and his graceful form and 

 long tapering antlers stood out clear against the sky-hne 

 as I fired point-blank at his shoulder. With a startled toss 

 of the head, and a desperate bound over the top of the 

 bank, he was off into the thick cover that here surround 

 the lake. We tracked his footprints in the gravelly soil 

 for near a hundred yards, when, hght faihng us altogether, 

 we had to give it up. Next morning I returned, and a 

 solitary crow cawing on a branch, pointed out the buck 

 lying dead and stiff within a few paces of where we had left 

 the trail. The next chance I had with this rifle was equally 

 unexpected. Walking al6ng near midday in the Punasa 

 forest, by a Httle-travelled pathway, the ridge of a great 

 black back appeared through the trees, slowly passing 

 behind a little eminence. It was a splendid stag sambar, 

 who had, very unusually, ventured down to that silent 

 valley in the midday heat to drink at a little stream. He 

 seemed to be dazed by the sunhght as he came out on the 

 pathway, and failed to notice a cortege of three or four 

 horses with their riders, an elephant, and ten or a dozen 

 men on foot. I fired at about a hundred and seventy 

 yards, and heard the little bullet strike against his brawny 

 shoulder. But he galloped away up a little glade, leaving 

 no blood, and I felt inclined to throw down the little rifl© 



