136 
MAMMALIA. 
[Chap. III. 
although two may be in the same vicinity, there is no 
known instance of their associating, or of a rogue being 
seen in company with another elephant. 
They spend their nights in marauding, often about 
the dwellings of men, destroying their plantations, 
trampling down their gardens, and committing serious 
ravages in rice grounds and young coco-nut plantations. 
Hence from their closer contact with man and his dwell- 
ings, these outcasts become disabused of many of the 
terrors which render the ordinary elephant timid and 
needlessly cautious ; they break through fences without 
fear ; and even in the daylight a rogue has been known 
near Ambogammoa to watch a field of labourers at work 
in reaping rice, and boldly to walk in amongst them, seize 
a sheaf from the heap, and retire leisurely to the jungle. 
By day they generally seek concealment, but are fre- 
quently to be met with prowling about the by-roads and 
jungle paths, where travellers are exposed to the utmost 
risk from their savage assaults. It is probable that this 
hostility to man is the result of the enmity engendered 
by those measures which the natives, who have a con- 
stant dread of their visits, adopt for the protection of 
their growing crops. In some districts, especially in the 
low country of Badulla, the villagers occasionally enclose 
their cottages with rude walls of earth and branches to 
protect them from nightly assaults. In places infested 
by them, the visits of European sportsmen to the vicinity 
of their haunts are eagerly encouraged by the natives, 
who think themselves happy in lending their services to 
track the ordinary herds in consideration of the benefit 
conferred on the village communities by the destruction 
of a rogue. In 1847 one of these formidable creatures 
frequented for some months the Eangbodde Pass on the 
