I believe that tigers only
take to eating men when they are growing old and their teeth begin to
fail them, a man being easier to catch than a bullock or goat. The
skins of these two tigers have lain on my drawing-room carpet for
thirty years now.
On our second day the Maharajah shot a leopard. He was only wounded,
and I have never seen an animal fight so fiercely or with such
indomitable courage. Of course, the whole cat-tribe are very tenacious
of life, but that leopard had five bullets in him, and still he roared
and hissed and spat, though his life was ebbing from him fast. We must
have worked round in a circle nearer to the camp, for whilst we were
watching the leopard's furious fight the strains of the Maharajah's
orchestra practising "The Gondoliers," floated down-wind to us quite
clearly. I remember it well, for as we dismounted to look at the dead
beast the cornet solo, "Take a pair of sparkling eyes," began. There
was such a startling incongruity between an almost untrodden virgin
jungle in Assam, with a dead leopard lying in the foreground, and that
familiar strain of Sullivan's, so beloved of amateur tenors, that it
gave a curious sense of unreality to the whole scene.
This admirable orchestra made the evenings very pleasant.
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