THE TIGER 
and seeing nothing to charge, the tiger pulled himself together and galloped 
on. We were both too cautious to follow him up that evening, and one of 
us spent a sleepless night wondering if the wounded beast would ever be 
found. In the morning we went out with some tame buffaloes from the 
village to hunt him down, and found him where he had fallen dead in his 
tracks some two hundred yards further on. This is one of the few instances 
I have witnessed of an animal pausing in his death rush. 
The third method, sitting up over a kill, is generally adopted when the 
country is too difficult to drive, either from the scarcity of beaters or the 
size of the jungle. In this case care must be taken to post oneself fairly 
early in the afternoon. From the writer’s experience of this kind of shooting 
it is only about once in twenty times that a shot is obtained, but there are 
occasions when it is the only chance of getting a tiger at all. 
When there are several sportsmen out it is the man who gets first blood 
and not necessarily the one who kills it to whom the tiger belongs; this, 
however, does not always apply to other big game, for buffalo, bison and 
rhino, in some parts of India, count to the man who gives the knock- 
down shot. Tigers are nearly always killed at short range, and the 
shoulder shot is to be recommended as the most effective. Of course, 
when beating for a tiger, all other game must be spared, at all events 
till the first shot is fired. The lucky bones, which are really elementary 
collar bones, embedded in the shoulder muscles, should be preserved; 
mounted as safety pins they are appreciated by ladies; care must be taken 
that the claws and whiskers are not stolen as charms by the natives. 
The skull of a tiger may be easily distinguished from that of a lion, by 
the prolongation of the V-shaped suture over the middle of the nose beyond 
the parallel ones on each side of it; while in a lion’s skull the termination 
of the three sutures is almost in a line. It is difficult to say which of the two 
animals is the more dangerous to hunt. The tiger, as a rule, is shot in 
thick jungle, where the following up of a wounded beast may lead to dis- 
aster; while the lion, though generally hunted on foot, is nearly always 
met with in fairly open country, where, if not disabled by the first shot, 
he can easily be marked down and finished off. 
One occasionally hears of an albino tiger being killed, but the writer has 
never had the good fortune to see the skin of one. 
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