of no cash value, may freely go into the jungle on foot after wounded tigers, and generally throw themselves in the way of the animals, I do not consider it right for a married man, whose family is dependent wholly or partially on his exertions, to go after tigers on foot, or without the aid of elephants, for though a man may resolve to stick to safe positions, they are often difficult and sometimes impossible to find, and the excitement soon does away with all feelings for one’s personal safety.

Though I have no doubt that it is, generally speaking, true that a tiger will not attack a group of four or five people, I am not at all sure that this is correct as regards a wounded tiger, and a tiger I had wounded once sprang into a party of I should say at least twenty people, and killed one of them—­at least the poor man died in the course of a few hours.  I always regretted that I did not obtain and preserve his belt.  At the back of it was the iron catch with which to hitch his wood-knife, and the tiger’s tooth had grazed one side of the iron, and cut it as if one had worked at the iron with a steel file.  Another instance too occurred of a tiger attacking a party, or at least one of a party which was approaching a tiger.  Several tigers, it appeared, had been marked down, and the jungle in which they were was surrounded by nets.  This was done in Mysore on the arrival of the Russian princes some years ago, but one of the tigers had managed to elude the shooters, and, as the native magistrate of the district was anxious to have it killed, a sporting photographer who was there undertook to look it up.  As they approached the thicket in which the tiger was concealed the tiger rushed out with a sudden bound, aimed a blow with its paw at the leading native, tore his scalp right off and flung it on to a bush, bit the man in the arm, and retreated into the thicket with such suddenness that no one had time to fire.  The poor man afterwards died.

The great danger from following up wounded tigers on foot in the jungle arises from the extraordinary difficulty of seeing the animal when it is lying amongst dry fallen leaves, into which the body partially sinks, and this is more particularly the case if there is a flickering sunlight coming though the branches of the jungle trees.  In one case of this kind, though I could see the tiger when it half raised itself up—­it had been wounded in the back—­I failed to pick it up the moment it sank back into the leaves; and my shikari told mo of another similar case he had seen when there was a similar flickering light.  But even without that source of confusion to the sight a tiger is extremely difficult to see, as difficult as a hare in a ploughed field, or perhaps more so.  On one occasion Rama Gouda said to me, when we were attacking a wounded tiger, or rather tigress in the jungle, “There is the tiger.”  “What!” I said, “that thing looking like a stone?” The light was bad.  We both supposed it to be dead,