Two friends of mine once shot an enormous old tiger on a small island in the middle of the river, during the height of the annual rains.  The brute had lost nearly all its hair from mange, and was an emaciated sorry-looking object.  From the remains on the island—­the skin, scales, and bones—­they found that he must have slain and eaten several alligators during his enforced imprisonment on the island.  They will eat alligators when pressed by hunger, and they have been known to subsist on turtles, tortoises, iguanas, and even jackals.  Only the other day in Assam, a son of Dr. B. was severely mauled by a tiger which sprang into the verandah after a dog.  There were three gentlemen in the verandah, and, as you may imagine, they were taken not a little by surprise.  They succeeded in bagging the tiger, but not until poor B. was very severely hurt.

After tearing the throat open, they walk round the prostrate carcase of their prey, growling and spitting like ‘tabby’ cats.  They begin their operations in earnest, invariably on the buttock.  A leopard generally eats the inner portion of the thigh first.  A wolf tears open the belly, and eats the intestines first.  A vulture, hawk, or kite, begins on the eyes; but a tiger invariably begins on the buttocks, whether of buffalo, cow, deer, or pig.  He then eats the fatty covering round the intestines, follows that up with the liver and udder, and works his way round systematically to the fore-quarters, leaving the head to the last.  It is frequently the only part of an animal that they do not eat.

A ‘man-eater’ eats the buttocks, shoulders, and breasts first.  So many carcases are found in the jungle of animals that have died from disease or old age, or succumbed to hurts and accidents, that the whitened skeletons meet the eye in hundreds.  But one can always tell the kill of a tiger, and distinguish between it and the other bleached heaps.  The large bones of a tiger’s kill are always broken.  The broad massive rib bones are crunched in two as easily as a dog would snap the drumstick of a fowl.  Vultures and jackals, the scavengers of the jungle, are incapable of doing this; and when you see the fractured large bones, you can always tell that the whiskered monarch has been on the war-path.  George S. writes me:—­

’I have known a tiger devour a whole bullock to his own cheek in one day.  Early in the morning a man came to inform me he had seen a tiger pull down a bullock.  I went after the fellow late in the afternoon, and found him in a bush not more than twenty feet square, the only jungle he had to hide in for some distance round, and in this he had polished off the bullock, nothing remaining save the head.  The jungle being so very small, and he having lain the whole day in it, nothing in the way of vultures or jackals could have assisted him in finishing off the bullock.’

When hungry they appear to bolt large masses of flesh without masticating it.  The same correspondent writes:—­