Yes, on the whole, the early rise and the long climb in the dark were worth it. I knew this as after mounting from 7000 feet to 9000 feet I rested under the lee of a rock, and watched the dawn come and felt the first warmth of the sun. Only so does one capture the first fine careless rapture of the day. Nothing in the twenty-four hours quite equals it, not even the end of the day when the cooling earth gives out her goodliest scents, and the shadows creep out of the dimples in the hills and spread abroad, and the insect world sets up its thousand quiet voices in the thicket. That, too, is rapture, but it lacks the carelessness of dawn. Above us were a few hundred feet more of steep grass slope breaking at the summit into rocks and cliff. Below us the green spurs of the Kundahs reached their long fingers steeply down to the plateau. Between each pair of spurs a shola or wooded ravine, of close-set trees showing every tint of green, with a splash here and there of white dog-rose and crimson rhododendron. These woods of the Kundahs are so neatly and closely packed that, viewed from above, they can only be described as "pin-cushiony." For some cause, which is a puzzle to every one who notices things, the edges of these shola woods are so trimmed and VI. even as to suggest plantations. There are no stragglers or outlying trees. The woods seem to have marched forward and to have halted on the word, and then aligned themselves. Within the heart of every shola is a brook rising close below the crest of the hill. The trees on those windswept rainy slopes are closecropped, gnarled, and hairy with the long growths of mosses, lichens, ferns, and orchids. There is a great charm about these woods, and they form most excellent covert for game. Any one who wanders on the Kundahs will at least hope to see a tiger. For the sholas which afford these beasts the very sort of covert that they love, are often during winter too dense and too cold to give ideal lying; and Mr Stripes prefers sometimes the open sunny hillside, although it lacks the privacy which he also loves. Therefore, tiger have been sighted by day lying or moving on these open hillsides, and occasionally have been shot. From our vantage-point high up the slopes we had an unrivalled view over any amount of country; and while three pairs of eyes, aided by binoculars and telescope, swept the landscape, a young stag, unaware of our presence as we were of his, browsed within fifty yards of us. At last we became mutually He aware of one another. gave us a beautiful view of himself as he dashed down the hill close past us, and then came to a halt, and stood, antlers erect, at gaze. A sambur stag, in full winter coat, with his great neck-ruff dark with dew, is a very goodly sight. To take life at dawn is often the lot of the sportsman, and yet the chase is never so closely akin to murder as when the dew is on the grass, and Nature, under the opening eyelids of the morn, is at her orisons. I was glad, therefore, that the stag did not carry a shootable head, for had he done so my pious reflections would scarcely have saved him. the Then Anthony reported "Ibux." They were the first I had ever seen, and for some days the last. I had just a glimpse of them on the skyline above me, chamois-like animals; and then they were gone. We were now on the top of the Kundahs, or rim, that walls in the western edge of the Nilgiri plateau. We were within a mile of the great precipices which form western and south-western sides of the rim. But there is nothing so invisible from above, or unexpected, as a really first-class precipice, and the ground we were on looked like ideal galloping country of unlimited extent, green downs constantly dipping into little valleys, each containing its happy little stream chattering over sheetrock or pebbles, and all un VOL. COX.-NO. MCCLXIX. conscious of what a short life theirs was to be, if a merry one. For all these streams, looking so strangely out of place so near the tops of these 9000feet hills, run their short course and then go headlong over the precipices above alluded to. Towards noon, after seven hours' walking, we were thinking of boiling the billy and having lunch, when Anthony's eyes glowed a livelier red as he spotted 1000 feet below us and about a mile distant, a sounder of pig. I was glad to see them, for to find pig fairly in the open at midday means that these eminently canny animals have not seen human beings about for a long time. Now no good Christian (in India) likes even to think of killing a pig in any other way than with a spear and from horseback. Still there are occa sions when, in the interests of hungry followers and in country where pig are not ridden, they may be shot. Anthony, with watering mouth and great gusto, was allowed to arrange the stalk. Number one pig presently fell to a pot - shot at 100 yards. Number two was fairly browned in the ranks of the sounder as it bunched and fled at about 200 yards' range. Number three, a solitary fellow and honestly aimed at (still a fluke), fell at 400 yards. Our larder was stocked, and I felt that, when number three toppled over, Anthony had invested me with the blue ribbon only B awarded to really good pigshooters. I felt also that my name-sufficiently mutilated, I hoped, as to be unrecognisable-would go down to other Opposite me the unresponsive face of the cliff caught the levelling rays of the sun. I hoped we might see an ibex here. To the left, below us, long grassy spurs and sholas, to where the young Avalanche river wound over the plateau. Very staggy ground this. Indeed, a sambur grunted in covert while we watched. Away to the right were the green downs with the blue shadows in their hollows spreading and deepening, while here and there amongst them a stream flashed us good night. sportsmen as "This master the ground sank steeply in shooting pig too very far." I now discovered that I was to fade out of the picture; that the day, so far as I was concerned, was to end, and that the Anthonys were to spend the rest of it in cutting up and transporting the meat. I was unable to fall in with this programme, and bade my followers cover up the dead with branches, and have them sent for next day. Toward sundown we were at the cliffs to which we had looked up the evening before from the snipe-bog. A thousand feet below us the smoke from the Avalanche bungalow chimneys curled up invitingly and suggested an immediate descent and tea. But to go blundering downhill just at the hour when one should be sitting quiet and watching for game moving from covert would have been bad work. So Anthony was told to boil the water and make tea. By the time we had drunk that and I had smoked a pipe, we should have seen out the daylight. Then the sun went down, and so did we; and Anthony, who was lost in a reverie of pork on the morrow, blundered into a barking-deer or muntjac animal with the worst bark and the least bite in the world. He had just emerged from covert for his timid evening graze. He and my rifle went off suddenly together, and we picked him up dead just inside covert. I found M- — back when I arrived at the bungalow. He had seen a good stag, but as he said he had come up for air, exercise, and scenery, and had had plenty of each, he was quite content with his day. We had moved camp farther into the Kundahs. On our way up the beautiful Avalanche pass, we had turned aside into a pocket of the hill VII. and inspected the trout nurseries. These are the result of long-continued and for long unsuccessful endeavours to bring trout ova to the Nilgiris. And from these nurseries trout now are sent to all the Nilgiri streams, and to those of other hill ranges in this part of India. At our new camp Anthony now indicated a sure ibex ibex ground six miles away, where, for the trouble of walking that distance, I might take my pick of the finest kinds of saddle-back. I fell in with this attractive programme, except to alter Anthony's hour of start from 7 A.M. to 4.30 A.M. that hour, on a blazing moonlight morning, we set off over a country that was snow-white with a heavy hoar-frost. After a fair heel-and-toe of two hours along the side of a sheeted valley, with a river running black on our right, we left the path, climbed a hill, and then selecting the least drafty-looking tufts of grass, lay down under their shelter, to await the light and keep out of the searching dawn wind as much as we could. We were rewarded for our early start and chilly wait, for when the light came I counted no ibex certainly, but no less than fourteen sambur, stag and hind, on the bare hills round us. This was the more remarkable in that the sambur is essentially a forest animal, and is seldom met with, and I have never seen or shot one out of covert after daylight as these were. The glass was laid into each group as well as shivering hands could manage, but no shootable head was to be seen. Then the sun topped the hill, and what I had taken to be a leafless bush about a mile off suddenly assumed a symmetry and a colour that no bush ever owned. It was the antlers of a shootable stag, couchant. Two staglets and some hinds grazed by him. The wind was right and steady. The ground looked easy for a stalk. The telescope hissed-to, and away we went, very glad of a little exercise. Half an hour later I lay within 100 yards of the stag, a prey to conflicting emotions. Shootable he was, but I had shot many a better one elsewhere. I had, however, never shot a Nilgiri stag. Added to this, through the soles of my boots, near which his nose was, Anthony was breathing out his very soul in slaughterous suggestion. And through my boots his suggestion passed to my dexter index-finger. Meanwhile I lay watching the stag as he moved and grazed in that extremely deliberate way that totally unsuspicious wild animals have first a nibble, then a slow scratching of a flank with his antlers, then a lounging pace forward. And then suddenly a most furious rush at one of the young stags, who must, undetected by me, have given the gladeye to one of the demurelooking hinds. Then all was peace again, and Anthony never ceased breathing temptation up my legs. With the inevitable result. We gave him-stag, not Anthony-a leafy sepulture, where he lay after crashing and rolling down the slope, and sent for him later. The loud river, to the margin of which he had rolled, went on its way bawling murder to the hills. And the breeze, aider and abettor in the murder, now cried it abroad. I dragged the red-handed Anthony from his victim, for it was his, not mine, and we slunk on our way. We had a very long and very fruitless day. There was not the sign of an ibex in the country, and no mark of one under a year old. I arrived very tired and much out of temper in camp, which had had all day to shift in, and only six miles to do. The tents were not up. The kettle was not boiling even! M reported the fresh tracks of a tigress near camp. He had also wounded a sambur, and in following him up had penetrated into a very dense shola. Here he came on the end of a story of which some one else possessed the opening chapters-to wit, the scattered bones of a tiger, many months old. Sticking in the skull was the bullet which had wounded him and sent him away to die where M———— had found his bones, much scattered by hyena and jackal. VIII. It was our seventh day out, and yet no saddle-back in the bag. At sundown we stood on a hill, with a hundred other little hills around us, ready to do what the sweet Psalmist bids them do. Yet they neither leapt not clapped their hands for me, for I was out of humour with the fair scene, and I fear my carriages" towards poor Anthony were something harsh and surly. 66 greasy cloth cap and shapeless legs, also looked in the worst possible taste. Resolved now to be at Anthony's bidding no longer as regards ibex, and to take the matter into my own hands, I drew a bow at a venture, and pointed out a black cliff some four miles away as being our objective for the morrow. Anthony acquiesced drearily, adding a rider as to cliffs being Owing to this, or possibly too very danger." I am no to his having been walked off cragsman, and I was sure his legs, he was looking de- Anthony was not, but where cidedly wilted. His red eye cliffs were (and I noticed that drooped under his drooping we had studiously avoided them old felt hat. His foul old hitherto) there or thereabouts Norfolk jacket, gift of some might ibex be. I had no long-ago sportsman, was al- intention of cliff-climbing, but most more than I could bear; we could at least investigate and John Anthony, in his his their vicinity. We settled to |