Then, _bang_, just like that, I remembered about him wiping the leaf off
his paw by rubbing it on his face. It was lucky for me he did that,
because it put into my head something I had read, about the way the
natives in India catch tigers. I read it in a natural history book.
There’s a kind of a tree in India named the prauss tree; anyway, it’s
something like that. And it has big flat leaves. So the natives spread
gum on those leaves. They get the gum from the trees, too. Then they put
the leaves in the path and when the tiger comes along he steps on them
and rubs his paws over his face, so as to get the leaves off. But that
only makes it worse for him, because they stick to his face and over his
eyes and everywhere. He gets just plastered up with them. Then he gets
excited—gee whiz, you can’t blame him. And he rolls around on the
ground and can’t see and just rolls and rolls and bangs against trees
and gets all played out and then he lies still just like a horse does
when he falls down. And that’s when the natives come and get him. And
it’s easy, too, because he can’t see and all the fight is knocked out of
him.
Oh boy, wasn’t I glad I remembered that! I just tore out that box of fly
paper and pulled the sheets apart and dropped them on the ground. Some
of them fell upside down. I should worry. I tried to drop them so they’d
fall around the foot of the tree and a lot of them did. More than half
of them fell right side up. A couple of them stuck to the trunk, but I
didn’t care. Maybe that would be good, I thought. Believe me, in about
ten seconds I had the ground around the tree covered with fly paper.
He’d have to do a fancy two-step if he wanted to get between them.
All the while he was crouching and watching me with those two eyes that
were just like fire. Pretty soon a sheet of fly paper drifted down right
near him and he pawed it. Maybe he thought it was a chop, hey? It just
caught his paw and he tried to wipe it off against his face. Good night!
There he was with one of his eyes and the whole top of his head
plastered flat. He looked as if he had been in a fight.
Then he came closer to the trunk, pawing at his head all the time and
stepped, kerflop, right on another sheet—plunked his foot right down in
the middle of it. Oh bibbie, then you should have seen him! He tried to
rub it off against his head and it stuck there and then there was a
circus. He rolled over on the ground and caught another sheet against
his side. In another second he had one flopping on the end of his tail
and he kept going around after it until pretty soon it got stuck to one
of his legs. Jiminetty! But you should have heard him howl. I bet he was
mad clean through.
But safety first—oh boy! I dropped another one and it landed right on
his nose; lucky shot.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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