l68 THEIR NOISELESS MOVEMENTS. 
discovered a party would be formed to slay him. The 
plan latterly adopted was to collect a pack of all kinds of 
dogs, and put them on the track of the tiger ; they invariably 
either drove him out of the wood, or up a tree ; and some- 
how or other they generally managed to kill him. It is 
worthy of notice that a tiger will kirdly ever get up a 
tree unless thus scared by dogs. 
1 know nothing more convincing of the extraordinary 
strength of a tigef both in the power of jaw and muscle 
than to see what he does with a large dead buffalo or an 
old bull bison. Now an old bull bison stands six feet at the 
shoulder, and is about nine feet long from his chest to his 
hind quarters, and is of great bulk, certainly half as large 
again as an ordinary bull. I have known the body of this 
huge beast turned completely round by a tiger, and I have 
seen large buffaloes which have been picketed, killed by a 
tiger and dragged into the jungle to a considerable distance. 
1 have at times been astonished at the perfectly noise- 
less movements of this animal ; on one occasion I was 
watching the carcass of a buffalo that had been killed by a 
tiger, he had dragged It into a thicket and I was sitting on 
the branch of a tree waiting for him. It was a perfecdy still 
calm day and no rain having fallen for some time, the jungle 
was quite dried up, and the dead leaves strewn about made 
such a noise when trodden on that 1 fancied a mouse could 
not pass over them without my hearing it. I had been 
watching for some time, when I heard what I fancied was a 
stick fall on the dry leaves, this put me on the alert and I 
listened with strained ears but there was not another sound ; 
I had just leaned back again, thinking it was nothing, when 
the tiger suddenly appeared like a ghost not tw^enty paces 
