Not long afterwards, when on a visit to the Maharajah of Cooch Behar, I was taken by his second son, Prince Jitendra, to inspect the Peelkhana. There I saw an example of how easily elephants recover from terrible wounds. Securely chained to a tree at a distance from the other animals was a large tusker which, while the Maharajah had been having a beat for tiger a few weeks before, had suddenly gone mad and attacked the other elephants. Prince Rajendra, the present Maharajah,[3] had ridden up close to it and fired two shots at it from his heavy cordite rifle. One bullet struck it in the head, the other in the shoulder. Yet here it was feeding in apparently the best of health. Below the right eye was the scar of an almost healed wound; while in the shoulder a hole was still visible but nearly filled up. And five years before, when suffering from a similar attack of madness, it had been shot by the Maharajah with his ·500 rifle, and had completely recovered in a very short time from the wounds then received. In the days of a previous commanding officer of Buxa a tame elephant had been condemned to death on account of old age and infirmity and was handed over to the detachment to be shot. A squad of sepoys with ·303 Lee-Enfield rifles was drawn up five paces in front of it and fired a volley at its forehead. But the elephant only winced at the blows and stood its ground. Then the men drew off to one side and aimed at its heart. A volley here killed it. The British officer had the head skinned and found that the first bullets had only penetrated a very short way into the skull, some of them being flattened against the bone. On the other hand cases have occurred of elephants succumbing easily to chance shots from small-bore rifles. On a tea garden not far from Buxa a rogue had been destroying the crops in the cultivation. A young planter sat up in a _machân_[4] in a tree near the fields to watch for it. He was armed with a ·303 carbine. He fell asleep and suddenly woke up to find the elephant passing right underneath him. Without taking aim he fired blindly into the dark mass below his _machân_. The elephant rushed off. The planter remained on his perch until daylight, and, descending, met his manager and told him what he had done. The latter was an experienced sportsman and inveighed forcibly at the useless cruelty of firing at an elephant with such a small bullet, which could only wound and infuriate the animal. While he was speaking a coolie ran up to inform that the elephant was lying dead a few hundred yards in the fields. The bullet, entering the back from above, had been deflected by bones and had taken an erratic course through the body, seeming to have pierced every vital organ in it in turn.