I have already described our mode of beating.  The jungle was close, and there was a great growth of young trees.  I was again on the right, and near the edge of the forest.  Beyond was a glade planted with rice.  The incidents of the beat were much as you have just read.  There was, however, unknown or at any rate unnoticed by us, more intense excitement.  We knew that the leopard might at any moment pass before us.  Pat was close to a mighty bhur tree, whose branches, sending down shoots from the parent stem, had planted round it a colony of vigorous supports.  It was a magnificent tree with dense shade.  All was solemn and still.  Pat with his keen eye, his pulse bounding, and every sense on the alert, was keeping a careful look-out from behind an immense projecting buttress of the tree.  All was deadly quiet.  H. and myself were occupied watching the gambols of some monkeys in our front.  The beaters were yet far off.  Suddenly Pat heard a faint crackle on a dried leaf.  He glanced in the direction of the sound, and his quick eye detected the glossy coats, the beautifully spotted hides of not one leopard, but two.  In a moment the stillness was broken by the report of his rifle.  Another report followed sharp and quick.  We were on the alert, but to Pat the chief honour and glory belonged.  He had shot one leopard dead through the heart.  The female was badly hit and came bounding along in my direction.  Of course we were now on the qui vive.  Waiting for an instant, till I could get my aim clear of some intervening trees, I at length got a fair shot, and brought her down with a ball through the throat.  H. and Pat came running up, and we congratulated ourselves on our success.  By and bye Mehrman Singh and the rest of the beaters came up, and the joy of the villagers was gratifying.  These were doubtless the two leopards we had heard so much about, for which I had sat up and watched.  It was amusing to see some villager whose pet goat or valued calf had been carried off, now coming up, striking the dead body of the leopard, and abusing it in the most unmeasured terms.  Such a crowding round as there was! such a noise, and such excitement!

While waiting for the horses to be brought, and while the excited mob of beaters and coolies carried off the dead animals to the camp to be skinned, we amused ourselves by trying our rifles at a huge tree that grew on the further side of the rice swamp.  We found the effects of the ‘Express’ bullet to be tremendous.  It splintered up and burst the bark and body of the tree into fragments.  Its effects on an animal are even more wonderful.  On looking afterwards at the leopard which had been shot, we found that my bullet had touched the base of the shoulder, near the collar-bone.  It had gone downwards through the neck, under the collar-bone, and struck the shoulder.  There it had splintered up and made a frightful wound, scattering its fragments all over the chest, and cutting and lacerating everything in its way.