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Updated: June 18, 2025
An hour passed before at last the river water plashed under the trampling hoofs. Hillyard threw his rifle forward, but the shikari touched him on the arm. "They are going," he whispered, and again the four men waited, until the shikari raised his hand. "It will be good for us to move! They are very near." He looked towards the east, but there was no sign yet of the dawn.
"All this must have raced through Djama Aout's brain in a second, in the very second Shikari Number Two was falling under the lion's blow. In another second he conceived a plan, absolutely the only one that possibly could have saved me.
Natives are very inquisitive, and should the tiger have killed the bait, and dragged the buffalo away to some deep nullah, the shikari and his companion are often tempted to creep along the trace until they perhaps see the tiger in the act of devouring the hind-quarters.
He was of a Hindoo peasant family, entered my service as a workman, rose to be a duffadar or overseer, and for many years has been head overseer on my coffee estates, and he is as good as a planter as he is as a shikari. I could give many instances of his cool daring.
Leaving my wife in charge of the tiffin coolie, I tumbled off after the shikari, whom I found gloating with the messenger over the inspiriting particulars of the monarch of the glen, which, I understood, crouched expectant some paltry 2000 feet above us, near the top of the nullah!
Much to my amusement a lean toddy drawer of mine, an excellent shikari, went a few yards into the swampy ground, got on to a small boulder of rock, squatted down, took out his betel bag, threw some betel into his mouth preparatory to chewing, and then held out his long skinny arm and forefinger and said, "Look! A tiger made a meal of a man close to this last year.
From the eighth milestone I see a doe, and the shikari spots it at the same instant; and two adjutant cranes, silvery grey with dark heads like ostriches about six feet high, and a pair of horn-bills pass overhead lots to interest one every mile of the drive.
It would be the smash of his breast-bone against the forehead of the beast, hoofs and knees kneading his broken body and the thrust and lunge of the short curled horns until long after he was dead, or the new test and preparation to add to those which had gone before! Suddenly the shikari cried aloud.
The tiger asked why he was to be caught and the shikari said that it was because he had made the road unsafe by killing travellers; then the tiger begged and prayed to be let off and promised that he would never kill any travellers again.
We have been working along the north side of the Lolab, as the shikari is full of bear "khubbar," and as long as the weather remains fair we really do not much care where we go!
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