From Sea to Sea; Letters of TravelKipling, Rudyard
General
From Sea to Sea; Letters of Travel
Kipling, Rudyard
Asia -- Description and travel; Kipling, Rudyard, 1865-1936 -- Travel; United States -- Description and travel; Voyages and travels
There is something unfair in shooting pig; but each man who went out
consoled himself with the thought that it was utterly impossible to ride
the brutes up the almost perpendicular hillsides, or down rocky
ravines, and that he individually would only go "just for the fun of
the thing." Those who stayed behind made rude remarks on the subject of
"pork butchers," and the dangers that attended shooting from a balcony.
There are ways and ways of slaying pig--from the orthodox method which
begins with "_The Boar--the Boar--the mighty Boar!_" overnight, and ends
with a shaky bridle-hand next morn, to the sober and solitary pot-shot
at dawn, from a railway embankment running through river marsh; but the
perfect way is this. Get a large, four-horse break, and drive till you
meet an unlimited quantity of pad-elephants waiting at the foot of rich
hill-preserves. Mount slowly and with dignity, and go in swinging
procession, by the marble-faced border of one of the most lovely lakes
on earth. Strike off on a semi-road, semi-hill-torrent path through
unthrifty, thorny jungle, and so climb up and up and up, till you see,
spread like a map below, the lake and the Palace and the City, hemmed in
by the sea of hills that lies between Udaipur and Mount Abu a hundred
miles away. Then take your seat in a comfortable chair, in a fine
two-storied Grand Stand, with an awning spread atop to keep off the sun,
while the Rawat of Amet and the Prime Minister's heir--no less--invite
you to take your choice of the many rifles spread on a ledge at the
front of the building. This, gentlemen who screw your pet ponies at
early dawn after the sounder that vanishes into cover soon as sighted,
or painfully follow the tiger through the burning heats of Mewar in May,
this is shooting after the fashion of Ouida--in musk and ambergris and
patchouli.
It is demoralising. One of the best and hardest riders of the Lahore
Tent Club in the old days, as the boars of Bouli Lena Singh knew well,
said openly: "This is a first-class scheme," and fell to testing his
triggers as though he had been a pot-hunter from his birth. Derision and
threats of exposure moved him not. "Give me an arm-chair!" said he.
"This is the proper way to deal with pig!" And he put up his feet on the
ledge and stretched himself.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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