It is marvellous in what sparse cover they will manage to lie up.  So admirably do their stripes mingle with the withered and charred grass-stems and dried up stalks, that it is very difficult to detect the dreaded robber when he is lying flat, extended, close to the ground, so still and motionless that you cannot distinguish a tremor or even a vibration of the grass in which he is crouching.

On one occasion George followed an old tiger through some stubble about three feet high.  It had been well trampled down too by tame buffaloes.  The tiger had been tracked into the field, and was known to be in it.  George was within ten yards of the cunning brute, and although mounted on a tall elephant, and eagerly scanning the thin cover with his sharpest glance, he could not discern the concealed monster.  His elephant was within four paces of it, when it sprang up at the charge, giving a mighty roar, which however also served as its death yell, as a bullet from George’s trusty gun crashed through its ribs and heart.

Tigers can lay themselves so flat on the ground, and lie so perfectly motionless, that it is often a very easy thing to overlook them.  On another occasion, when the Purneah Hunt were out, a tigress that had been shot got under some cover that was trampled down by a line of about twenty elephants.  The sportsmen knew that she had been severely wounded, as they could tell by the gouts of blood, but there was no sign of the body.  She had disappeared.  After a long search, beating the same ground over and over again, an elephant trod on the dead body lying under the trampled canes, and the mahout got down and discovered her lying quite dead.  She was a large animal and full grown.

On another occasion George was after a fine male tiger.  He was following up fast, but coming to a broad nullah, full of water, he suddenly lost sight of his game.  He looked up and down the bank, and on the opposite bank, but could see no traces of the tiger.  Looking down, he saw in the water what at first he took to be a large bull-frog.  There was not a ripple on the placid stagnant surface of the pool.  He marvelled much, and just then his mahout pointed to the supposed bull-frog, and in an excited whisper implored George to fire.  A keener look convinced George that it really was the tiger.  It was totally immersed all but the face, and lying so still that not the faintest motion or ripple was perceptible.  He fired and inflicted a terrible wound.  The tiger bounded madly forward, and George gave it its quietus through the spine as it tried to spring up the opposite bank.

A nearly similar case occurred to old Mr. C., one of the veteran sportsmen of Purneah.  A tiger had bolted towards a small tank or pond, and though the line followed up in hot pursuit, the brute disappeared.  Old C., keener than the others, was loth to give up the pursuit, and presently discerned a yellowish reflection in the clear water.  Peering more intently, he could discover the yellowish tawny outline of the cunning animal, totally immersed in the water, save its eyes, ears, and nose.  He shot the tiger dead, and it sank to the bottom like a stone.  So perfectly had it concealed itself, that the other sportsmen could not for the life of them imagine what old C. had fired at, till his mahout got down and began to haul the dead animal out of the water.