Gold, Sport, and Coffee Planting in Mysore: With chapters on coffee planting in Coorg, the Mysore representative assembly, the Indian congress, caste and the Indian silver question, being the 38 years' experiences of a Mysore planterElliot, Robert H. (Robert Henry)
History
Gold, Sport, and Coffee Planting in Mysore: With chapters on coffee planting in Coorg, the Mysore representative assembly, the Indian congress, caste and the Indian silver question, being the 38 years' experiences of a Mysore planter
Elliot, Robert H. (Robert Henry)
Caste -- India; Coffee; Karnataka (India) -- Description and travel; Karnataka (India) -- Politics and government
greatly, and the heat arising from them was very great, hence the need for
the constant application of water. The flow of blood from the arms was
checked by a tourniquet.
I never but once heard of a mad tiger. This animal was made over in an
inoculated condition by a friend of mine to the Garden in Bangalore. He
had caught it when out tiger shooting, and, when on the way to Bangalore,
he had chained it outside his tent where it was attacked and bitten by
what turned out to be a mad Pariah dog.
Before concluding this chapter I must say a few words, which perhaps
ought to have been said at an earlier period, as regards one of the most
important points of tiger shooting--i.e., that of taking up such a
position as will enable you to fire to right or left without moving your
body, or rather I should say without moving it more than in a most
infinitesimal degree, for, as I have previously shown, it is movement of
any kind which alone readily attracts the attention of an animal. It is
evident that, if you sit facing the point from which the tiger is
expected, though you can readily fire at him without moving if he passes
to your left (and, as has been shown, you should not fire till he is just
passing you) you cannot do so if he passes to your right without turning
your whole body half round in that direction--a movement which might catch
the eye of the tiger. To surmount this difficulty Sir Samuel Baker has
invented a small stool with a revolving top, which is no doubt air
excellent thing if there is time to erect a suitable platform on which to
support the stool, but it often happens that positions have to be taken up
in a hurry, and that you have to sit on the fork of a branch, or on the
ground behind a bush or rock, where the tiger may pass on either side. In
such cases the shooter should sit facing nearly full face to the right, as
he can, with hardly any perceptible movement of his body fire readily to
his left, and he should instruct his man with the second gun to point with
his finger in order to indicate the side on which the tiger is
approaching.
In all the books I have read about tigers I have never met with an
allusion to tigers purring like cats from satisfaction, but a brother
planter informs me that he heard a wounded tiger, that had killed one of
the natives who was following him up, purr for several minutes, as he
described it, "like a thousand cats." The evening was closing in when the
accident occurred and as the jungle was thick nothing could be done. On
the following morning the man and the tiger were found lying dead
together.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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