The last of recent tiger-books which we shall notice is a great contrast to these two sportsmen's annals of shooting tigers.‡ Captain Forsyth died in May 1871, at the untimely age of thirty-three, before the delightful volume he had written was entirely through the press. Every reader must regret that he was not spared to reIt is sometimes an interesting sight to wit-late more adventures, and charm English ness the demeanour of a tiger towards his terrified prey

flowers, enables him to produce a thoroughly interesting narrative of the natives and animals of the Central Provinces. By means of an ethnological introduction, and an exhaustive account of the physical geography of this district, he succeeds to an eminent degree in enabling a western reader to realize the strange scenes through which he wandered, and the savage life which peoples them. Scattered here and there, too, are suggestions on the government of India; hints for better organization on divers points, and wide views on economical subjects, which prove him to have possessed that constructive and, at the same time, that versatile character which belongs to most men who leave their mark on our Indian empire. Premising then that his book cannot be opened by a lover of natural history without finding an interesting fact or a thrilling narrative of sport, we shall confine our notice of it to the tiger-lore which it contains.

By way of introduction, let the reader fancy himself camping out with Captain Forsyth, near Mátín, in the forests of the far east. The grateful silence of night is all at once broken by a serenade, which must sound anything but pleasant to the wakeful traveller in a frail tent.

they might run, could overcome a tiger in
fair fight; but he thinks it quite possible
that they might stick to him and wear
him out by depriving him of the chance
of obtaining his ordinary food. Many
stories are related, he says, of tigers
climbing trees (which of course is quite
contrary to their usual habits), in order to
escape them; and he once saw the bones
of a tiger whitening on a rocky ledge,
where more than one person assured him
they had seen him lying surrounded by a
large pack of wild dogs. A curious in-
stance of a tiger shot during the cold sea-
son occurred at Jubbulpúr, in 1861, when
the governor-general paid his first visit to
central India.
Our author says:-

a week, girding him in a little hill with a belt I mounted sentry over that beast for nearly of fires, and feeding him with nightly kine, till half a hundred elephants, carrying the cream of a vice-regal camp, swept him out into the plain, where he fell riddled by a storm of bullets from several hundred virgin rifles. He had the honour of being painted by a Landseer, by the blaze of torch-light, under the shadow of the British standard; and my howdah bore witness for many a day, in a bullet-hole through both sides of it, to the accuracy of aim of some gallant member of the staff! (P. 262.)

A peculiar long wail, like the drawn-out Something must now be said of manmew of a huge cat, first rose from a river-eaters, and it is a comfort to find Captain course a few hundred yards below my tent. Presently from a mile or so higher up the river came a deep tremendous roar, which had scarcely died away ere it was answered from behind the camp by another pitched in a yet deeper tone, startling us from its suddenness and proximity. All three were repeated at short intervals, as the three tigers approached each other along the bottoms of the deep dry watercourses, between and above which the camp had been pitched. As they drew together the noises ceased for about a quarter of an hour; and I was dozing off to sleep again, when suddenly arose the most fearful din near to where the tigress had first sounded the love-note to her rival lovers, a din like the caterwauling of midnight cats magnified a hundredfold. Intervals of silence, broken by outbursts of this infernal shrieking and moaning, disturbed our rest for the next hour, dying away gradually as the tigers retired along the bed of the river. In the morning I

found all the incidents of a three-volume novel

in feline life imprinted on the sand; and marks of blood showed how genuine the combat part of the performance had been.*

Captain Forsyth does not believe that the wild dogs, in however large a pack

• P. 391.

Forsyth's pages herein precise and matterof-fact, after inspecting the highly imaginative halo of myths which in so many books of adventure and sporting surround the subject. Tigers may be roughly divided into three groups, those which lead a perfectly wild, retired life in the jungles, feeding only on game, and often proving positively beneficial to man by keeping down the herds of deer and nilgae that prey upon his crops. Secondly come those which may be termed cattle-lifters; they are large and bulky in contradistinction to the little, agile jungle tiger, and locate themselves near pastures and water frequented by oxen. Disregarding the aheers, these animals consume an ox in about five days, but if fired at when returning to their kill, they will generally strike down a fresh victim, while a tigress and her cubs demand at least an ox a night. Last are the morose brutes which, having once tasted man, turn cannibals, and sometimes spread terror through a whole district before they are destroyed by some European sportsman, for these tigers are too cunning and dangerous to be frequently shot by native

shikarries, though they may occasionally be destroyed by strychnine. Wolves and panthers, like tigers, have a tendency to turn man-eaters in India, and the panther, when once he has established a character for cannibalism, is far more fell and dangerous than a man-eating tiger. He is more agile, more ferocious, and more courageous when attacked; is more difficult to hit, as he is smaller, and can climb trees, which the tiger, save in the case of a sloping trunk, cannot do. In 1858 one of these creatures devastated the northern part of the Seoúi district, killing nearly a hundred persons before he was shot. He never eat their bodies, but merely lapped the blood from the throat, and his plan of attack was to steal into a house at night and strangle some sleeper, or he would climb the platforms from which the villagers guard their fields at night, and drag down a watcher. The tiger lies in ambush, as a rule, and strikes down the unsuspecting wretch as he passes by. Then after a little time some such tragic relics, as in a similar case met Captain Forsyth's eye, are all that remain to tell the sad story.

of abuse that could be heard a mile away; and as on one group of monkeys leaving off their clamours and descending to the ground to obtain berries, the outcry was taken up by another farther up the watercourse, the sportsman gathered that the obnoxious tiger was slowly travelling up its windings.

After thus following up the creature by means of these monkey allies for several miles, reaching a narrow neck of land round which the stream circled, and dashing across it, he managed to arrive very much out of breath in front of the tiger, and to hide himself behind the thick stem of a tree until he should come up. Our readers must pardon one more quotation, as they could not be better introduced to the Bengal tiger at home than in Captain Forsyth's graphic recital, which is sufficiently vivid (we have ourselves suffered from a similar picture) to produce a nightmare of the most terrific potency. It is easy to fancy the grey dawn with the first beams of morning quivering through the tree-tops as the tiger approached the intrepid sportsman.

He came on in a long, slouching walk, with At a place called Motínálá, where a deep his tail tucked down and looking exactly like branching watercourse crosses the pathway the guilty midnight murderer he is. His misseveral times, I was walking ahead of my fol- deeds evidently sat heavily on his conscience, lowers, when I came on the remains of a poor for as he went he looked fearfully behind him, wanderer who had evidently not long before and up at the monkeys in a beseeching sort of been killed by a tiger. He was a religious way, as if asking them not to betray where he mendicant; and his long iron tongs, begging-was going. He was travelling under the opbowl hollowed from a skull, and cocoa-nut hookah were scattered about in the bottom of the dry bed, where he had been resting on his weary march, together with tresses of his long matted hair, and a shred or two of cloth. The bones were all broken to pieces, and with his velvety step and undulating movemany of them were missing altogether. A ments, the firm muscles working through his drover had been taken off near the same spot loose glossy skin, and the cruel yellow eyes about a week before, so that it was not with-blinking in the sun over a row of ivory teeth out some misgivings that I wandered off the road through the long grass to look for red deer.*

In the sea of tall grass where this occurred, it would have been hopeless to have hunted for this tiger. Occasionally Captain Forsyth was more fortunate, as when he was engaged in tracking wild animals one morning by the edge of a stream, whither in hot weather all the creatures in the locality were obliged nightly to resort. His attention was called to the excited demeanour, the and "swearing," of the Hanuman monkeys (Presbyter entellus). This betokened a tiger passing under the trees on which they gesticulated, pouring forth a volley

P. 386.

rage

posite bank to where I was, in the deep shadow of the overhanging trees; but when nearly opposite me, he came out into the middle, in the faint yellow light of the just risen sun, and then he looked such a picture of fearful beauty

as he licked his lips and whiskers after his night's feed. He passed within about twenty yards of me, making for a small ravine that here joined the river from the hills. I let him get to the mouth of this before I fired; and on receiving the shot he bounded forward into its cover a very different picture from the placid creature I had just been looking at, and with a roar that silenced the chattering of every monkey on the trees. I knew he was hit to death, but waited till the shikarries came up before proceeding to see; and we then went round a good way to where a high bank overlooked the ravine in which he had disappeared. Here we cautiously peeped over, but seeing nothing, came farther down towards the river, and within fifty yards of where I had fired at him I saw a solitary crow sitting in a tree, and cawing down at an indistinct yellow object extended below. It seemed like the tiger, and sitting down I fired another

many of the ryots, besieged the camp daily. Many villages were utterly deserted; men lived in barricaded houses, and only left them when compelled by necessity, and then in large bodies, shouting and beating drums as they passed along the roads. This had gone on for a year, and the country was slowly being depop

We are not told whether this was a man-eater, but in the spring of 1862 the captain spent nearly a week in the de-ulated. Through this desert then the struction of a famous man-eater, which had completely closed several roads and was supposed to have devoured over a hundred human beings. He occupied a large triangle of country between the rivers Móran and Ganjál, stopping the work of the sleeper-contractors on the railroad in course of construction in the Narbadá valley, and striking terror into a breadth of not less than thirty to forty miles. Having pitched his camp in this pleasant country under a splendid mangogrove, the captain was laid up for some days by a sprained tendon, during which time sensational news was brought in of whole families of tigers waiting in the riverbeds to be killed, and at length that the man-eater had struck down a man and a boy on the high-road about ten miles away. He now resorted to severe remedies, which after a few more days permitted him once more to resume his quest; but in the mean time numberless stories were told him of the fearful size and appearance of the man-eater, of its belly pendent to the ground, and the white moon it bore in the centre of its forehead of the porkbutcher-like mode in which it would detain a party of travellers while it rolled in the sand, and at length having inspected them all round, select the fattest- of his power of transforming himself into an innocent-looking woodcutter, and calling or whistling through the woods till an unsuspecting victim approached; and how the spirits of all his victims rode with him on his head, warning him of every danger and guiding him to the suitable ambush by which a traveller would pass. It is worth while noticing the despairing terror of the people which such superstitious and imaginary details evince." No clearer proof could be laid before a western reader of the paralyzing effect which a man-eater's ravages appear to produce, when no man's life is safe for a moment, and the whirr of every quail or peacock which springs up near him seems the bound of the fell animal which will strike him down. All the best shikarries of the country, together with the landowners and

• P. 267.

sportsman rode on his trained elephant, preceded and followed by baggage-elephants, and protected by a guard of police with muskets and shikarries with their matchlocks. Traces of the brute were seen here and there, but no recent ones, while heaps of stones at intervals showed where a traveller had been struck down. At length he reached a spot where one of a party of pilgrims had been carried off the day before, and discovered the sad relics and blood-stained grass which yet told of the tragedy, and pointed out where the man-eater had dragged the corpse into a watercourse in which its remains were left. It was of no use waiting for the tiger to return to its horrid feast, as this one had learnt caution and never ventured back to its "kill." All the rest of that day in extreme heat the party beat the jungles of the Moran River, the trackers working in fear and trembling under the trunk of the sahib's elephant and covered by his rifle at full cock. Returning to camp at night, one of the men spied the great square footprint of the creature they were searching. Early next day the captain carefully beat the neighbouring watercourse, but without avail. As he was sitting down to breakfast, however, some men brought in word that about a mile and a half from camp the tiger had that very morning taken away one of them out of the midst of their drove of bullocks as they were starting from their night's encampment. Instantly securing some food and a bottle of claret, the captain mounted the elephant, and pursued. Soon he startled the monster from the lair where he was devouring the unfortunate victim, but the grass was so thick he could not obtain a shot. All that day, however, he held on after him, carefully tracking the footprints through a difficult country, and allowing him no rest. At night the captain slept in a tent he had ordered on to the other river, the Ganjál. Next morning the trail was renewed, until at length the tiger was fairly ringed in a dense cover of tamarisk and jaman, surrounded by the river. After a short rest this cover was beaten out, and the indefatigable captain obtained two shots,

which told on the tiger. Immediately the | assuredly never deplore the disappearance brute turned, and with loud roars charged of the royal tiger.