Tigers seem to recover easily from wounds, and so completely, that no trace of a bullet having entered the body can be found.  On one occasion I shot a tiger, and when the skin was being removed we perceived a lump on the inner side of it.  This we opened, and found that it contained a bullet which a brother of mine had fired into the tiger about a year before.  We had no difficulty in identifying the bullet, as no other rifle in the country had anything like it.  The tiger was perfectly well and fat, and had not a mark on it of having been previously wounded, and yet the bullet had gone close to mine, which proved fatal to the tiger.  In 1891 I killed a tiger, which had evidently, from his action, been hunted before.  He was in unusually good condition, and yet had a piece of lead in him, which appeared to be a fragment of an express bullet.  But a friend of mine tells me that he has often found old bullets in tigers.  It is a surprising thing that tigers and panthers seem often to be little influenced by wounds, and I have heard of one case of a panther, for which a sportsman was sitting up, which returned to the kill after being wounded and fired at several times.  A friend of mine was once out small game shooting on the Nilgiris when a tiger seized one of his dogs.  He at once put a ball cartridge into his smooth bore, had a beat, and wounded the tiger.  On the following day he returned to the spot with his rifle, and again beat the jungle, when he killed the tiger, which had returned and finished the dog, and then found that the bullet of the day before, which had struck the tiger in the chest, had travelled nearly the whole length of the body.  I recollect once shooting a spotted deer which had a matchlock ball lying up against its liver, and pressing on it, but the deer, though it had good horns, was rather a stunted animal.

I have previously remarked that, in the opinion of Colonel Peyton, even the stanchest sportsman when on foot in the jungle, is liable to be startled by the sudden roar of a wounded tiger close at hand, and so much so as even to draw back for a pace or two, but he says that the effect is only momentary.  In 1891 I again had an opportunity of observing the effects on myself and others of the roar of a wounded tiger in the jungle, but on this occasion, though I confess I was very considerably startled, and generally commoved for a moment, as I had expected to find the tiger dead, I did not step back a pace, nor did the stanchest of the natives who were with me, though a certain number climbed right up to the tops of trees.  As it happened, there was, after all, no danger, for the tiger had been damaged in the back, and I soon dispatched it.  The effect of the roar of a tiger is really very remarkable, and of this the animal itself seems to be well aware, for the tiger I have just alluded to—­evidently an old hand, from the trouble he had given us and the cunning he had displayed—­remained in the open, or came