THREE MONTHS IN PAHANG 
ahead, that the seladang was staring at us through a leafy 
thicket under which he had been lying down, A snort and a 
rush proclaimed his whereabouts, and the extreme tension 
of one's nerves, which feel at such moments as if they were 
ready to tear asunder, was instantly lehcved, although with 
a feeling of much mortification and anntyyance, I think it 
must have been a bird in the elephant grass th:it had caused 
the movement which had attractetl mir notice, and g ven 
the seladang the opportunity which he did not require to 
be told to make use f>f. We uxaniined the s|>nt where our 
friend had been standing, and when I said that we might 
have seen him had we looked, I meant that we might have 
seen an ear or a horn or something equally indefinite to 
shoot at, because his body must have been entirely covered 
by the aforesaid thicket. Well, to cut a long sttny short, 
we tracked him until 2 p.m., and came up to him again 
about one o'clock, but never had a chance. He was quite 
up to my game and fully alert. Towards the latter part 
of the hunt he kept moving about in half circles in thick 
bhiker, and when I saw that he was doing this I somehow 
felt that he did not intend to give me a second opportunity 
of seeing his bead. It is quite possible that he was one 
of 'Mem Prang's mtss^ff seladang. 
We left him near a large padang at Batu Rakit, and 
on our wav home we passed the spot where 'Mem Prang had 
failed to hit a big bull seladang in the open at 40 yards. 
He shewed me the exact spot, where he fired from, and 
where the unsuspecting beast was standing quietly feeding, 
exposing the whole of his vitals to this Malay Nimrod, who 
did not seem at all ashamed of his failure. It- was just 
Nastb iidii baik. Titan ; that explained the whole thirig. 
How lucky to be a Malay and hsive a temperament like 
that, the attitude of ** nothing matters '* reduced to a fine art. 
Next day we movctl our camp and travelling across 
country passed through Bukit Si Gumpal, crossed the Jinka, 
and went towards the ulii of one of the small tributaries of 
that river, putting up for the ni^^ht at the house of an ancient 
Malay who rejoiced in the name of the Datoh Mukim Simun, 
We crossed the fresh tracks of a bull elephant on our 
journey but he could not have been very big from h-is track. 
We heard all sorts of news of game close at hand, and one 
man told us that the big elephant which 'Afem Prang had 
wounded had been close to his kampong about ten days 
previouslv. This little piece of news cheered me up wonder- 
fully for the time being, but unfortunately proved to be quite 
false on investigation. This marvellous piece of huraaft 
