another cow must have been killed in this _nullah_; and from the fact that the vultures did not dare to settle on it, I concluded that a tiger must be in the immediate vicinity. So I directed my elephant towards the spot. As we drew near I looked at the rows of bald-headed vultures, those repulsive-looking scavengers of India, sitting on the branches. Every few minutes one would fly down towards the ground and, without settling, hurriedly shoot up again into the air. Cautiously approaching the edge of the bank we found, as I expected, the carcass of a cow. We skirted the bank but could not see the tiger, which was probably asleep somewhere in the tangled scrub in the bottom of the _nullah_. So, marking the spot for a visit next day, we went on our way. Arrived at the place where the beat was to begin, we found another _nullah_ filled with jungle, with bare, open ground stretching away on either side of it. We took up our positions in it on our two howdah elephants and put the beaters in farther down. They came on the tiger lying asleep under a tree. He sprang up in alarm and, instead of retreating along the _nullah_ towards us, rushed up the bank and broke away over the open past a group of natives who had come out from a farm close by to watch the hunt. As he was not fifty yards from them, they were very scared. It must have been a fine sight to see the big cat bounding across the bare plain until he reached and plunged into a parallel _nullah_ a few hundred yards away. But we in the bottom of our ravine saw or heard nothing of him until our beaters came up. We searched the other _nullah_ for him in vain. He probably had not stopped until he had reached the shelter of the forest.