wont, to the brook already mentioned, to bathe
and fetch water for the household. They had
been absent but a quarter of an hour, when the
startling voice of a tiger, and the piercing
shrieks of the women, suddenly broke the silence
of the hour, and before the roused villagers
could snatch their arms, the girls came flying
back with horror in their faces, and in a few
words announced the dreadful fact that a tiger
had carried off one of their party. It was the
Moonda's daughter. Her stout-hearted kinsmen
rushed, but with hopeless hearts, to the
rescue. Foremost among these was her
intended husband, and close by his side his
sworn brother, allied to him by a ceremony,
common amongst this people, of tasting each
other's blood, and swearing to stand by each
other in after life, come weal, come woe. While
the rest were following with skill and caution
the bloody traces of the monster and his prey,
these two, dashing on through the dense jungle,
soon came upon the object of their search. In
a small open space (which I afterwards visited)
the tiger was crouched over the dead body of
the girl, which it had already begun to devour.
The approach of the hunters roused him, and he
stood over the carcase, growling defiance at the
two men.

In a moment an arrow from the bereaved
lover's bow pierced the tiger's chest. It struck
deep and true, but not so as (in sporting phrase)
to stop the dreadful beast, who, from a distance
of some thirty paces, came down, with his peculiar
whirlwind rush, on his assailant. The young
man had just time to draw his "kappee," or
battle-axe, from his girdle, when the tiger seized
him by the left wrist. The man, leaning well
back to gain room for the swing of the axe,
drove it with all the collected strength of rage
and despair into the tiger's forearm, severing
the massive bone, and leaving the blade buried
in the muscles. Next moment his head was
crushed within the monster's jaws, and he fell
dead upon the ground, while the tiger, tamed
by the loss of blood, turned round and began to
limp away. All occurred so rapidly, that the
surviving comrade had not shot a shaft, but
now, maddened, he ran to the retreating brute
and sent arrow after arrow up to the feather
into its side and neck until it rolled over, dying,
within a few yards of the ill-fated young couple.
The tiger still breathed as the rest of the party
came up. They struck off its head, dissevered
the muscle by which the left forearm still
adhered to the shoulder, and with these spoils, and
the mangled bodies of the poor victims borne on
litters, returned, a melancholy procession, to
the village. The above minute details I had from
the chief actor himself, a stalwart young fellow.
The event had occurred not more than a month
or five weeks before, and the sun-dried strips of
flesh still adhered to the ghastly trophy on the
pole. I wished to have brought the bones
away, but they gave some comfort to the poor
old Moonda's heart. They reminded him that
his daughter had not died unavenged, and I left
them there.

Another instance that became known to me
of heroism among the Kôles, is of a more
homely sort. In another part of Rengrapeer, a
clearing was made in the forest by an old man,
his wife, her sister, and a grown-up daughter.
No other human being lived within miles of their
solitary hut, and the head of the family had to
go frequently, and always alone, to a distant
village for the necessaries of life. His first
season's ploughing was stopped by a tiger killing
one of the only pair of bullocks he possessed,
and he was obliged to sell the other to buy rice
for the rest of the year. Before the next rains,
he managed to procure another pair of oxen,
and patiently recommenced the tillage of his
little clearing. But his unwelcome neighbour
again robbed him of a bullock, and once more
put an end to his operations. This was too much
to bear, and with singular hardihood the old
man determined to rid himself of his enemy or
die of him. The bullock lay dead within a few
paces of a patch of grass which intervened
between the clearing and the forest; and the
man, thoroughly conversant with the habits of
the tiger, knew well that in this grass the beast
would lie until the cool of evening summoned
him to sup upon the carcase. He proceeded
without further ado into the house, armed his
household, the three women aforesaid, with a
bamboo each, placed them in line along the edge
of the grass, posted himself by a circuitous
route on the opposite side of the cover where
it skirted the jungle, and, having given some
preconcerted signal to his auxiliaries, waited,
bow in hand and arrow on string, for his dangerous
enemy. The three women, nothing daunted,
began beating the ground in a business-like
manner. They shrieked and yelled, and
advanced steadily into the cover; it was not
extensive; before long the tiger came sneaking
out towards the man, who, well concealed behind
a tree, let him pass so as to obtain a clear broadside
view, and then let fly an arrow into the
centre of his neck. Fortune favoured the bold,
and the brute fell dead.

So little did the veteran think of this exploit,
that I should probably have heard nothing
about it, had he not come to my office attended
by his family and the mankee, or head of his
circle, with the tiger's skin, to claim the reward
(ten rupees a head) given by government for the
destruction of this animal; a reward which,
shabby as it is, was not to be despised by the
poor settler. He was a short wiry man, some
fifty or sixty years of age, with a dogged determined
look, and spoke of killing the tiger and
making his old wife and sister-in-law beat him
up, in such a matter-of-fact way that we were
all in shouts of laughter, though filled with
admiration for the stout old boy and his
hard-favoured amazons.

There was great luck in such an easy
conquest, but it is not, even within my own
knowledge, a solitary instance of so large an animal
being killed at once by so apparently inadequate
a weapon. A very big tiger was once
brought into the head-quarter station of the