It is demoralising. One of the best and hardest riders of the Lahore Tent Club in the old days, as the boars of Bouli Lena Singh knew well, said openly:--“This is a first-class _bundobust_,” and fell to testing his triggers as though he had been a pot-hunter from his birth. Derision and threats of exposure moved him not. “Give me an arm-chair!” said he. “This is the proper way to deal with pig!” And he put up his feet on the ledge and stretched himself. There were many weapons to have choice among--from the double-barrelled .500 Express, whose bullet is a tearing, rending shell, to the Rawat of Amet’s regulation military Martini-Henri. A profane public at the Residency had suggested clubs and saws as amply sufficient for the work in hand. Herein they were moved by envy, which passion was ten-fold increased when--but this comes later on. The beat was along a deep gorge in the hills, flanked on either crest by stone walls, manned with beaters. Immediately opposite the shooting-box, the wall on the upper or higher hill made a sharp turn downhill, contracting the space through which the pig would have to pass to a gut which was variously said to be from one hundred and fifty to four hundred yards across. Most of the shooting was up or downhill. A philanthropic desire not to murder more Bhils than were absolutely necessary to maintain a healthy current of human life in the Hilly Tracts, coupled with a well-founded dread of the hinder, or horse, end of a double-barrelled .500 Express which would be sure to go off both barrels together, led the Englishman to take a gunless seat in the background; while a silence fell upon the party, and very far away up the gorge the heated afternoon air was cut by the shrill tremolo squeal of the Bhil beaters. Now a man may be in no sort or fashion a _shikari_--may hold Buddhistic objections to the slaughter of living things--but there is something in the extraordinary noise of an agitated Bhil, which makes even the most peaceful of mortals get up and yearn, like Tartarin of Tarescon for “lions"--always at a safe distance be it understood. As the beat drew nearer, under the squealing--the “_ul-al-lu-lu-lu_"--was heard a long-drawn bittern-like boom of “_So-oor!_” “_So-oor!_” and the crashing of boulders. The guns rose in their places, forgetting that each and all had merely come “to see the fun,” and began to fumble among the little mounds of cartridges under the chairs. Presently, tripping delicately among the rocks, a pig stepped out of a cactus-bush, and--the fusillade began. The dust flew and the branches chipped, but the pig went on--a blue-grey shadow almost undistinguishable against the rocks, and took no harm. “Sighting shots,” said the guns sulkily; and the company mourned that the brute had got away. The beat came nearer, and then the listener discovered what the bubbling scream was like; for he forgot straightway about the beat and went back to the dusk of an Easter Monday in the gardens of the Crystal