46 WILD ANIMALS. 



teeth or claws, until shaken off by the writhing and infuriated 

 elephant, or shot by the hunter. 



The tiger can make terrible leaps, being so lithe and agile. He 

 crouches down, bending his back into a concave curve, contracts 

 the muscles of the limbs, especially the hinder ones, and with a 

 slight quivering of the tensioned sinews, takes his leap and lands 

 with tremendous force. The following account will give some 

 idea of their power in this way : — 



In " The Bengal Sporting Magazine " for 1834, " Sheer Khan " 

 gives an account of an extraordinary leap of a tigress. He was 

 out hunting with a party of four, and they had just put their 

 elephants into the jungle, and had not advanced far when they 

 came upon something which moved on a short distance and then 

 stopped. " We could not see," he writes, " what it was from the 

 height of the jungle, but conjectured from the motion of the 

 nulls that it was a tiger, and we were not mistaken ; for on the 

 elephants coming upon it again, a fine tigress, with one bound, 

 sprang horizontally into the air, clear over the jungle, and lighted 

 with all four paws at once on the pad of the elephant nearest to 

 her. Never, I should think, in the annals of tiger-hunting was 

 such a spring heard of ; she leapt from the same level as the 

 elephant, had no advantage from any rising ground, rose in the 

 air higher than the pad, and lighted on it neatly and easily, with- 

 out the slightest scramble : the best Arab that was ever rattled 

 across country, never tossed a bank in such style. I could not 

 have imagined that it was in any animal to make such a spring ; 

 it almost equalled that out-and-out jump of King Arthur's steed, 

 when 



' Screaming with agony and fright. 

 He bolted twenty feet upright.' 



And as in that case, it is asserted by the minstrel of the north 



that 



' The peasant still can show the dint, 

 "Where his hoofs lighted on the flint,' 



SO can I show in corroboration of the truth of my story the marks 

 of the four paws of the brute where she lighted on the pad. 



