My friend George writes me:  ’In several cases I have known and seen the tiger spring, and leave the ground.  In one case the tiger sprang from fully five yards off.  He crouched at the distance of a few paces, as if about to spring, and then sprang clean on to the head of Joe’s tusker.  An eight feet nine inch tigress once got on to the head of my elephant, which was ten feet seven inches in height.  Every one present saw her leave the ground.  Once, when after a tiger in small stubble, about six feet high, I saw one bound over a bush so clean that I could see every bit of him.’  And so on.

For long range shooting the rifle is doubtless the best weapon.  The Express is the most deadly.  The smooth-bore is the gun for downright honest sport.  Shells and hollow pointed bullets are the things, as one sportsman writes me, ’for mutilation and cowardly murder, and for spoiling the skin.’  Poison is the resource of the poacher.  No sportsman could descend so low.  Grant that the tiger is a scourge, a pest, a nuisance, a cruel and implacable foe to man and beast; pile all the vilest epithets of your vocabulary on his head, and say that he deserves them all, still he is what opportunity and circumstance have made him.  He is as nature fashioned him; and there are bold spirits, and keen sights, and steady nerves enough, God wot, among our Indian sportsmen, to cope with him on more equal and sportsmanlike terms than by poisoning him like a mangy dog.  On this point, however, opinions differ.  I do not envy the man who would prefer poisoning a tiger to the keen delight of patiently following him up, ousting him from cover to cover, watching his careful endeavours to elude your search; perhaps at the end of a long and fascinating beat, feeling the electric excitement thrill every nerve and fibre of your body, as the magnificent robber comes bounding down at the charge, the very embodiment of ferocity and strength, the perfection of symmetry, the acme of agility and grace.

Natives are such notorious perverters of the truth, and so often hide what little there may be in their communications under such floods of Oriental hyperbole and exaggeration, that you are often disappointed in going out on what you consider trustworthy and certain information.  They often remind me of the story of the Laird of Logan.  He was riding slowly along a country road one day, when another equestrian joined him.  Logan’s eye fixed itself on a hole in the turf bank bounding the road, and with great gravity, and in trust-inspiring accents, he said, ‘I saw a tod (or fox) gang in there.’

‘Did you, really;’ cried the new comer.

‘I did,’ responded the laird.

‘Will you hold my horse till I get a spade,’ cried the now excited traveller.

The laird assented.  Away hurried the man, and soon returned with a spade.  He set manfully to work to dig out the fox, and worked till the perspiration streamed down his face.  The laird sat stolidly looking on, saying never a word; and as he seemed to be nearing the confines of the hole, the poor digger redoubled his exertions.  When at length it became plain that there was no fox there, he wiped his streaming brow, and rather crossly exclaimed, ‘I’m afraid there’s no tod here.’