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
Many years ago news was brought that a tiger had killed cattle some six or
seven miles off. The distance was considerable, the news came late, and it
was, I think, about three in the afternoon when I reached the spot. The
beaters were all ready and impatient, no doubt, owing to being kept
waiting so long, and as I did not wish to delay them, and had no ladder,
and there was no suitable tree, I took a seat on the ground behind a bush
which lay on one side of, and about twenty yards from, a depression in the
land through the bottom of which, by all the laws of tigers, the tiger
ought to have passed to the main forest beyond. I had no sooner seated
myself than I saw, from the lay of the ground, that if the tiger should
happen to break at a point in a line with my bush he would probably gallop
on to the top of me before it would be possible to make more than a snap
shot. I at once left the spot and climbed a small tree on the opposite
side of the depression, and this enabled me to have my feet some five feet
from the ground. Presently the beat began, and with a roar, and an evident
determination to charge anything in his way, a very large tiger broke
cover at full speed and went exactly over the very spot of ground I had
been sitting on. At the pace he was coming at I do not indeed think he
could have stopped himself, and I hardly think I should have had time to
fire, and I have often wondered what would have happened had he galloped
on to myself and my man. However, as it was, I was all right, fired just
as he passed the bush and knocked him over with one shot, and put another
into him as he got half up and struggled into the jungle, apparently with
his back broken, and lay down about a few yards aside of it. And now by a
curious coincidence we just missed what must have been a very serious
accident, and this is well worth mentioning, as it confirms what another
writer has said as to the care that should be used in approaching a tiger
supposed to be dead.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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