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Updated: May 14, 2025
As we tore through the tangled dense green patair, the broad leaves crackled like crashing branches, the huge elephants surged ahead like ships rocking in a gale of wind, and the mahouts and attendants on the pad elephants, shouted and urged on their shuffling animals, by excited cries and resounding whacks. In the retinue of the Major, were several men with elephant spears or goads.
Our elephants were quite unsteady, and did not like facing the fire. We made a slight detour, and soon had the roaring wall of flame behind us. We were now entering on a moist, circular, basin-shaped hollow. Among the patair roots were the recent marks of great numbers of wild pigs, where they had been foraging among the stiff clay for these esculents.
Tiffin in the village. The Patair jungle. Search for tiger. Gone away! An elephant steeplechase in pursuit. Exciting chase. The Morung jungle. Magnificent scenery. Skinning the tiger. Incidents of tiger hunting.
The patair is like a huge bulrush, and the elephants are very fond of its succulent, juicy, cool-looking leaves. Those in our line kept tearing up huge tufts of it, thrashing out the mud and dirt from the roots against their forelegs, and with a grunt of satisfaction, making it slowly disappear in their cavernous mouths.
If they are under the sway of a grasping and unscrupulous landlord, they not unfrequently bury their grain in clay-lined chambers in the earth, and have always enough for current wants, stored up in the sun-baked clay repositories mentioned in a former chapter. Beyond the village we entered some thick Patair jungle. Its greenness was refreshing after the burnt up and withered grass jungle.
I broke both his forelegs with my first shot, but the poor brute still managed to hobble along. It was in some very dense patair jungle, and I had considerable difficulty in bringing him to bag. When we reached the ghat or ferry, I ordered Geerdharee Jha's mahout to cross with his elephant.
He was higher up the bank than I was, and in very dense Patair; a ridge ran between his front of the line and mine, so that I could only see his howdah, and the bulk of the elephant's body was concealed from me by the grass on this ridge.
After crossing the sand, we again entered some thin scrubby acacia jungle, with here and there a moist swampy nullah, with rank green patair jungle growing in the cool dank shade. Here we disturbed a colony of pigs, but the four mahouts being Mahommedans I did not fire. As we went along, one of my men called my attention to some footprints near a small lagoon.
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