refused to move, and it was getting late, I went up the ravine, and
they pointed out the tiger, which was lying on its side. I fired a shot at
it, when it got up, then I fired another at once, and it fell and died
almost immediately. This was by far the largest tiger ever killed in our
district, and an old sportsman who had seen much of shooting during a long
residence in India told me that he was sure he had never seen a larger
skin, and did not know that he had ever seen one as big. As evidence of
size, he attached, I may mention, great importance to the width of the
skin of the tail just at its junction with the body. The paws of this
tiger, too, were remarkably larger than those of other tigers. I found
that the first bullet had taken effect in the neck, which it had no doubt
grazed with sufficient force to paralyze the tiger for a time, and Colonel
Peyton records a similar case where great risk had been incurred from
approaching a tiger apparently dead, but where the spine had been merely
grazed.

What I have previously mentioned illustrates one danger from sitting on
the ground, and I may give another instance which occurred to me in 1891.
I had gone after a tiger, and my shikari had prepared an excellent seat on
a tree at an absolutely safe height. The tiger, however, had shifted his
ground, it appears, to an adjacent jungle. This consisted of one long and
rather deep ravine, with several spurs at which the tiger might break. It
had several times previously happened that tigers had come up the bottom
of this ravine, and I had once killed one there from a tree in the jungle,
but the trees so situated are difficult to ascend, and we did not wish to
make a noise nor to waste time by making a ladder, so I determined on
sitting on the ground in the jungle, about twenty yards from the bottom of
the ravine, and made myself perfectly comfortable. While keeping an eye on
the bottom of the ravine up which the tiger was expected to pass, I was
suddenly startled by a roar from some little distance behind us. My old
shikari at once saw the danger we were in, and looked extremely disturbed,
and no wonder, for he saw at once that the tiger had been driven back by a
stop at one of the spurs, and might come down on us from behind, so that
we should have had no chance of seeing him till he was almost on the top
of us, and as a matter of fact he did pass down into the ravine rather
higher up and just out of our sight, and from this w