and maintain that the tiger merely stretches
himself out to his fullest length, and if he does leave the ground, it
is by a purely physical effort, pulling himself up by his claws.

My friend George writes me: 'In several cases I have known and seen
the tiger spring, and leave the ground. In one case the tiger sprang
from fully five yards off. He crouched at the distance of a few paces,
as if about to spring, and then sprang clean on to the head of Joe's
_tusker_. An eight feet nine inch tigress once got on to the head of
my elephant, which was ten feet seven inches in height. Every one
present saw her leave the ground. Once, when after a tiger in small
stubble, about six feet high, I saw one bound over a bush so clean
that I could see every bit of him.' And so on.

For long range shooting the rifle is doubtless the best weapon. The
Express is the most deadly. The smooth-bore is the gun for downright
honest sport. Shells and hollow pointed bullets are the things, as one
sportsman writes me, 'for mutilation and cowardly murder, and for
spoiling the skin.' Poison is the resource of the poacher. No
sportsman could descend so low. Grant that the tiger is a scourge, a
pest, a nuisance, a cruel and implacable foe to man and beast; pile
all the vilest epithets of your vocabulary on his head, and say that
he deserves them all, still he is what opportunity and circumstance
have made him. He is as nature fashioned him; and there are bold
spirits, and keen sights, and steady nerves enough, God wot, among our
Indian sportsmen, to cope with him on more equal and sportsmanlike
terms than by poisoning him like a mangy dog. On this point, however,
opinions differ. I do not envy the man who would prefer poisoning a
tiger to the keen delight of patiently following him up, ousting him
from cover to cover, watching his careful endeavours to elude your
search; perhaps at the end of a long and fascinating beat, feeling the
electric excitement thrill every nerve and fibre of your body, as the
magnificent robber comes bounding down at the charge, the very
embodiment of ferocity and strength, the perfection of symmetry, the
acme of agility and grace.

Natives are such notorious perverters of the truth, and so often hide
what little there may be in their communications under such floods of
Oriental hyperbole and exaggeration, that you are often disappointed
in going out on what you consider trustworthy and certain information.
They often rem