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)
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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
What I have previously mentioned illustrates one danger from sitting on
the ground, and I may give another instance which occurred to me in 1891.
I had gone after a tiger, and my shikari had prepared an excellent seat on
a tree at an absolutely safe height. The tiger, however, had shifted his
ground, it appears, to an adjacent jungle. This consisted of one long and
rather deep ravine, with several spurs at which the tiger might break. It
had several times previously happened that tigers had come up the bottom
of this ravine, and I had once killed one there from a tree in the jungle,
but the trees so situated are difficult to ascend, and we did not wish to
make a noise nor to waste time by making a ladder, so I determined on
sitting on the ground in the jungle, about twenty yards from the bottom of
the ravine, and made myself perfectly comfortable. While keeping an eye on
the bottom of the ravine up which the tiger was expected to pass, I was
suddenly startled by a roar from some little distance behind us. My old
shikari at once saw the danger we were in, and looked extremely disturbed,
and no wonder, for he saw at once that the tiger had been driven back by a
stop at one of the spurs, and might come down on us from behind, so that
we should have had no chance of seeing him till he was almost on the top
of us, and as a matter of fact he did pass down into the ravine rather
higher up and just out of our sight, and from this we failed to dislodge
him. On the whole, for every reason, I am much against sitting on the
ground. You are liable to be run into sometimes, as we have seen, and at
others you are not high enough up to command the ground, and there is a
greater chance of driving a tiger back on the beaters. There are, however,
occasions when one must sit on the ground, and if you have occasion to do
so, it is of course advisable always to try and get about twenty or
thirty yards on one side of the course the tiger is likely to take, and
always let him pass your line of fire before firing. It is also of great
importance to have as your second man one who can remain absolutely
motionless when a tiger is advancing towards him. To illustrate the
importance of this I may mention the following incident:
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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