It was so unexpected
and so quick that even the trained eyes of my companion were uncertain.
"Did you see?" he asked me in a voice of hushed and wondering awe.
"Could that have been a tiger?" I could not say, but I understood his
excitement. For the tiger is the king of Indian carnivorae, the most
desired of all game. Hunters date their lives by them: such and such a
thing happened not on the anniversary of their wedding day; not when
their boy went to Balliol; not when they received the K.C.I.E.; but in
the year that they shot this or that man-eater.
That a tiger had really chanced upon us we soon ascertained. Also that
it had been hit by the rifle on the first elephant and had disappeared
into the jungle, which consisted hereabouts of a grass some twenty feet
high, bleached by the sun.
A Council of War followed, and we were led by Bam Bahadur on a rounding-
up manoeuvre. According to his judgment the tiger would remain just
inside the cover, and our duty was therefore to make a wide detour and
then advance in as solid a semicircle as possible upon him and force him
again into the open, where the hunter who had inflicted the first wound
was to remain stationed. Accordingly all the rest of us entered the
jungle in single file, our elephants treading down the grass with their
great irresistible feet or wrenching it away with their invincible
trunks. It was now that the shikaree was feeling the elephant shortage.
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