Although dogs are not regularly used in hunting the wild boar they are sometimes employed for scouting in a particularly thick jungle, and Baden-Powell frequently went to work of this kind with a half-bred fox-terrier.  He regards as one of the joys of true sport the bending of animals’ wills to his own, and while in this respect the horse ranks highest in his estimation, he is always glad to work with a keen dog.  Beetle, the fox-terrier, was just such a dog as Baden-Powell would like; he was quick, full of intelligence, a complete stranger to fear, and moreover he had an individuality of his own.  When B.-P. started off for the haunt of his quarry, Beetle would sit with an air of great dignity in the front of the saddle, keeping a sharp look-out for signs of pig.  At a likely spot the little dog would jump nimbly from the saddle and plunge boldly into the jungle.  Then a sharp yap would reach the ears of B.-P., then a smothered growl, a crashing of twigs and branches, and at last, with a floundering dash, out came the boar, struggling into his stride with Beetle at his heels.  “In the run which followed,” says Baden-Powell, “the little dog used to tail along after the hunt, and, straining every sense of sight and hearing as well as of smell to keep to the line, always managed to be in at the death, in time to hang on to the ear of a charging boar, or to apply himself to the back end of one who preferred sulking in a bush.”  And in the end it was a change of climate, at Natal, that killed the gallant-hearted Beetle.  He died with a tattered ear, a drooping eyelid, an enlarged foot, and twelve scars on his game little body—­all honourable mementos of innumerable fights with the dreaded boar.

As showing Baden-Powell’s prowess as a hunter we may mention some of the stuffed animals in the hall of his mother’s house, all of which have fallen to our hero:  Black Bucks, Ravine Deer, Gnu, Inyala, Eland, Jackal, Black Bear, Hippopotamus (a huge skull), Lion, Tiger, and Hog Deer.

CHAPTER VII

SCOUT

All hardy exercise is good for a soldier, but in pig-sticking Baden-Powell found a sport which, in addition to its effect upon the nerves and sinews, gives a man what is called a “stalker’s eye,” and that, says B.-P., is par excellence the soldier’s eye.  It was this that made B.-P. an enthusiastic hunter of the wild boar.  “Without doubt,” he exclaims, “the constant and varied exercise of the inductive reasoning powers called into play in the pursuit must exert a beneficial effect on the mind, and the actual pleasure of riding and killing a boar is doubly enhanced by the knowledge that he has been found by the fair and sporting exercise of one’s own bump of ‘woodcraft.’  The sharpness of intellect which we are wont to associate with the detective is nothing more than the result of training that inductive reasoning, which is almost innate in the savage.  To the child of the jungle