ge, when his whole object is flight. If he
succeed in demoralising the line of elephants, roaring and dashing
furiously about, he will then try in the confusion to double through,
unless he is too badly wounded to be able to travel fast, in which
case he will fight to the end.

Old fellows are well acquainted with every maze and thicket in the
jungles, and they no sooner hear the elephants enter the 'bush' or
'cover' than they make off for some distant shelter. If there is no
apparent chance of this being successful, they try to steal out
laterally and outflank the line, or if that also is impossible, they
hide in some secret recess like a fox, or crouch low in some clumpy
bush, and trust to you or your elephant passing by without noticing
their presence.

It is marvellous in what sparse cover they will manage to lie up. So
admirably do their stripes mingle with the withered and charred
grass-stems and dried up stalks, that it is very difficult to detect
the dreaded robber when he is lying flat, extended, close to the
ground, so still and motionless that you cannot distinguish a tremor
or even a vibration of the grass in which he is crouching.

On one occasion George followed an old tiger through some stubble
about three feet high. It had been well trampled down too by tame
buffaloes. The tiger had been tracked into the field, and was known to
be in it. George was within ten yards of the cunning brute, and
although mounted on a tall elephant, and eagerly scanning the thin
cover with his sharpest glance, he could not discern the concealed
monster. His elephant was within four paces of it, when it sprang up
at the charge, giving a mighty roar, which however also served as its
death yell, as a bullet from George's trusty gun crashed through its
ribs and heart.

Tigers can lay themselves so flat on the ground, and lie so perfectly
motionless, that it is often a very easy thing to overlook them. On
another occasion, when the Purneah Hunt were out, a tigress that had
been shot got under some cover that was trampled down by a line of
about twenty elephants. The sportsmen knew that she had been severely
wounded, as they could tell by the gouts of blood, but there was no
sign of the body. She had disappeared. After a long search, beating
the same ground over and over again, an elephant trod on the dead body
lying under the trampled canes, and the mahout got down and discovered
her lying quite dead. She was a large animal an