THE LIFE OF MAMMALS 
their meshes; but no such feats of single-handed conquering 
as abound in the history of the lion can be undertaken here. 
The nearest to it that is known to me is Basil Hall’s ** descrip- 
tion of an arena show at an Indian Rajah’s court, in which a 
Hindoo armed only with a Goorkha’s knife met a tiger, cleverly 
avoided its spring, hamstrung it as it passed, and then de- 
livered a second stroke quickly enough to cut through the 
animal’s spinal cord and kill it. The Goorkhas do sometimes 
kill wild tigers with their celebrated knives, — or used to; but 
they are hardy fellows of the mountains. Most of the Hindoos 
and Malays meekly accept the tiger as an evil to be endured, 
and in this mood have lifted it, with superstitious terror and 
reverence, into a sort of malignant deity, which must and may 
be pacified. ‘You can be shown to-day,” remarks J. L. 
Supersti- Kipling, “forest shrines and saintly tombs where 
ae the tiger comes nightly to keep pious guard, and you 
may hear in any Hindoo village of jogis to whom the cruel 
beasts are as lapdogs.” One of the difficulties which British 
officers have encountered in certain parts of India, in their 
attempts to kill off the cattle-lifting or man-eating tigers of some 
dangerously infested neighborhood, or to have sport with them, 
is the opposition of the people to their destruction. A comical 
illustration of this is given in the century-old, but ever interest- 
ing, book of the “Old Forest Ranger”? (Colonel R. Baigrie), 
the scene of the incident being not far from Bombay : — 
“While sitting at breakfast we were alarmed by hearing cries of dis- 
tress proceeding from the jagheerdar’s hut, and on running out to ascertain 
the cause, we found old Kamah in a furious state of excitement, his left 
hand firmly fixed in the woolly pate of the hopeful scion of the house, and 
belaboring him stoutly with a stout bamboo. We inquired what crime 
young Moideen had been guilty of to bring upon him such a storm of pa- 
rental indignation, and learned to our astonishment that it was all owing 
to his having killed a tiger! One of his father’s tame buffaloes having been 
killed by a tiger on the previous day, the young savage had watched for him 
during the night, and shot him from a tree when he returned to feed upon 
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