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In the vicinity hares were numerous, and in the thick jungle bordering the tanks in places, and consisting mostly of nurkool and wild rose, hog-deer and wild pig were abundant. The dried-up bed of an old arm of the Koosee was quite close to my camp, and abounded in sandpiper, and golden, grey, goggle-eyed, and stilted plover, besides other game.
After lunch we made another grand attempt. We promised the coolies double pay if they roused the tigress to flight. The elephant was forced again into the nurkool very much against his will, and the mahout was promised a reward if we got the tigress. The din this time was prodigious, and strange to say they got quite close up to the big withered tree without the usual roar and charge.
We went back two days after with five elephants, which with great difficulty we had got together , and thoroughly beat the patch of nurkool, killed a lot of pig and a couple of deer, shot an alligator, and destroyed over thirty of its eggs, which we discovered on the bank of the creek; and returning in the evening shot a nilghau and a black buck, but the tigress had disappeared.
A neighbour of mine, a most intimate and dear friend, whom I had nicknamed the 'General, and a young friend, Fullerton, were with me. A tigress and cub were reported to be in a dense patch of nurkool jungle, on the banks of the creek which divided the General's cultivation from mine. The nurkool is a tall feathery-looking cane, very much relished by elephants.
My Gomasta, the General, and myself, then took up positions behind trees all along the side of the glade or dell in which was the bit of nurkool jungle. It was a small basin, sloping gently down to the creek from the sal jungle, which grew up dark and thick all around.
A margin of close sward, as green and level as a billiard-table, encircled the glade, and in the basin the thick nurkool grew up close, dense, and high, like a rustling barrier of living green. In the centre was the decaying stump of a mighty forest monarch, with its withered arms stretching out their bleached and shattered lengths far over the waving feathery tops of the nurkool below.
The jungle was too green to burn; but the fireworks raised a dense sulphurous smoke, which penetrated among the tall stems of the nurkool, and by the waving and crashing of the tall swaying canes, the heaving of the howdah, with the red puggree of the peon, and the gleaming of the staves and weapons, we could see that the beat was advancing.
No sooner did the dreadful glistening reptiles hear the click of my rifle, and feel its ball, than they shot forth with all their vigour, and diving, disappeared in an instant under the matted roots of the tall nurkool, and, although I tried, I could not get another glimpse."
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