Government sometimes spends as much as L8000 a year on rewards for the destruction of wild beasts and snakes in British India, and the annual return of the number of human beings reported as having been killed by them shows that they are still sufficiently numerous to be a power in the land. In a recent return this number reached the enormous total of 24,576. But snakes were accountable for 21,827 out of these deaths. In the same year, in the case of 48 people killed by tigers in the Central Provinces, nearly all were the victims of one tigress which had been infesting the jungle for some years. A confirmed man-eater becomes very crafty, and difficult to kill. There are many hills and dales where wild beasts found a congenial home from which they have gradually retreated in the face of man and civilisation. A den in the hillside, visible from the Mission bungalow at Yerandawana, is still spoken of as the "Tiger's den," and a remote, but probably true tradition lingers of an immense tiger who lived there and who was eventually hunted down and slain by order of the then ruler of the district. At the present day, in the immediate neighbourhood of Yerandawana the only wild creatures left are the fox and the jackal, with an occasional hyena. Jackals visit the outskirts of the village at night to see if there is anything eatable to be picked up, and they sometimes race across the Mission compound in the early morning on their way home. It is to be feared that they visit the Hindu cemetery, where the graves are often so shallow that the bodies are scarcely covered. The low-caste men, whose duty it is to bury stray corpses, do not expend more labour over their task than they can help. Jackals generally travel in companies at night, and they utter a most peculiar and rather attractive sharp cry in chorus, which they are commonly said to repeat after exact intervals of time. But solitary jackals are often to be met with. In the mountainous district somewhat farther away wolves are still found, and they do a little damage amongst the flocks of the villages. Some two or three hundred persons are carried off yearly by wolves in British India. The majority of these victims are very young children who have strayed away a little from their parent's hut.