At the time of which I write, our society was at a peculiarly low ebb. The drill season was over; the hot weather was coming on; and the leave season had begun. There was so little work to be done, that our colonel had taken pity on our isolation, and had been unusually, perhaps almost unauthorisedly, liberal in the matter of leave; and our mess, small enough at its best, had dwindled and dwindled, until now not more than half-a-dozen unfortunates daily stretched their legs beneath its well-spread mahogany. For me, the approaching heat had no terrors, the smallness of our society no ennui, and the prospect of escape from Julbarri no charms; for the beginning of the hot weather is the very time when the best shooting can be obtained, and I had long been watching the drying up of the grass in the jungles, and had been looking forward to the time when we might start a tiger with some chance of bagging him. There was one thing in which we were particularly fortunate: we had attached to our regiment nine elephants as a part of our regimental transport. I need scarcely say that it was not long before we had the elephants and their mahouts (drivers) thoroughly trained for shooting. The largest elephants we trained to carry our howdahs, and the smaller we used to form a line to beat the jungles and drive out the game. With these elephants we had lots of fun, and there were few weeks after the shooting season began in which some of us did not go out two or three times. We generally took it in turns; four of us went out, and two remained behind to look after the regiment and the station. We kept three or four shikarees (native hunters), who were constantly going about the villages and jungles within a radius of six or seven miles of cantonments; and as soon as they heard of a tiger having killed a bullock or any other animal, or as soon as they discovered the fresh footmarks of any animal worth going after, they would come in and give the _khubber_ (news); and then those whose turn it was would send the elephants and their arms on towards where the game had been seen, and would follow themselves on horseback as quickly as possible. The best kind of _khubber_ was when a bullock or any other large animal had been killed. The tiger usually prowls round some village or some place where cattle is pastured and kept for the night; and when he sees his opportunity, will spring on some unfortunate animal which has got separated from the rest of the herd, or has remained out too late in the jungle, heedless of the herdsman’s call home, will kill it with a blow of his paw, and drag it into some neighbouring jungle thicker and denser than that immediately around the village.