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
One evening at about seven o'clock, and on a clear but moonless night, I
went into the garden in front of my house. This is flanked by a low
retaining wall some three or four feet high--a wall built to retain the
soil when the ground was levelled--and below this a few bushes and plants
had sprung up close to the bottom of the wall. In these I heard what I
supposed to be a pariah dog gnawing a bone, and, in order to frighten it
away, I quietly approached within a few yards of the spot, and made a
slight noise between my lips. I was at once answered by a low deep growl,
which I at first took to be the growl of a panther, and I then walked back
to the bungalow and told my manager to bring a gun, telling him that there
was either a large dog (which on second thoughts appeared to me most
probable), or some animal gnawing a bone. We then quietly approached the
spot where we could hear the gnawing going on quite plainly about five
yards off. By my direction he fired into the bushes, and we then stood
still and listened, and presently heard what was evidently some heavy
animal walk slowly away. On the following morning I sent my most
experienced shikari to the spot, and he reported that the animal was a
wild boar, which had been munching the root of some plant, and the soil
being gravelly, the noise we had heard proceeded from the chewing of roots
and gravel together. This boar then had not only refused to desist from
his proceedings when I was within five yards of him, but had even warned
me, by the low growl afore mentioned, that if I came any nearer serious
consequences might ensue. On the following day I assembled some natives
and beat a narrow jungly ravine below my house, at a distance of about,
fifty yards from it, and there came out, not the boar, but his wife with a
family of five or six small pigs. She was shot by a native, and the young
ones got away, but the boar either was not there, or, more probably, was
too knowing to come out. He did not, however, neglect his family, but in
some way best known to himself, collected them together, and went about
with them, as, a day or two afterwards, he was seen with the young pigs by
my manager, and their tracks were also to be seen on one of the paths in
my compound, or the small inclosed park near my bungalow. This boar
afterwards became very troublesome, ploughed up the beds in my rose garden
at the foot of my veranda stops, and even injured a tree in the compound
by tearing off the bark with his formidable tusks. But, daring though he
was, he was once accidentally put to flight by a slash of an English
hunting whip. The boar, it appears, was making his round one night when my
manager, hearing something moving outside his bath-room, and imagining it
to be a straying donkey--we keep some donkeys on the estate--rushed out
with his hunting-whip, and made a tremendous slash at the animal, which
turned out to be the boar, so startling him by this unexpected form of
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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