THE ROYAL BENGAL TIGER.
BY THE REV. M. G. WATKINS, M.A.
In no region close to civilization can the enthusiastic sportsman find more varied and noble game than in that large extent of country belonging to the NorthWestern Provinces of our Indian Empire which lies between the Ganges and the Soane in the district of Mirzapore! This may be roughly described as a table-land of old red sandstone- rising on the northwest towards the slopes of the Vindhyah range, and on the south often falling abruptly some fifteen hundred or two thousand feet from the crests of the Kaimore Mountains to the valley of the Soane. Ghazeepore, Benares, and Allahabad fringe the northern skirts of this territory, connected for greater convenience by railway communication, so that the shikarri may here shoot tigers in a jungle till towards noon, and repose at night amidst all the comforts of Indian station-life. If he would extend the range of his operations, let him seek the central highlands south of the Nerbudda, with the Tap tee and Mahanuddy rivers respectively on the west and east, comprising a wonderfully diversified country extending over the Meykul range, the Mahadeo and the Satpura Mountains. The Great Indian Peninsula railway has a branch to Nagpore, which runs along the south of this district. In these two territories tigers^ bears, wild buffaloes, swine, deer, antelopes, panthers, may be procured in abundance. Our sportsman might easily secure greater slaughter among the countless herds of bison on the head-waters of the Arkansas or Nebraska rivers; he might slay larger and more powerful game amongst the lions, elephants, and hippopotami of the Zambesi, or in the swamps round Lake Tanganyika; but he will nowhere meet a fiercer antagonist than the royal Bengal tiger, and he will perhaps nowhere obtain more abundant and diversified bags than in the districts named.
In their rough rocky solitudes he may expect bears, which, as a rule, are not partial to jungle. Here too, if fortunate, he may light upon a leopard surprised outside its favourite cavern or stony fastness. The wild dogs hunt in packs through the forests. In October and November multitudes of snipe and wildfowl arrive from the frozen wilds of Central Asia upon the jheels and swamps, to say nothing of the ordinary game-birds of India which abound in the autumnal stubble-fields, in BENGAL TIGER. 3^ the vicinity of villages and the hillsides. Among the cultivated lands after nightfall, and in the tracts of grazing-ground by day, that noble quarry the black antelope {Antelope cervicapra the well-known " black buck " of Indian sportsmen, is atymdant. On wooded slopes the nilgae {Portax pictus) is commonly met, together with the chikara or Indian gazelle {Gazella Bennettii), the spotted deer, the sambur, the four-horned antelope, the hog-deer, the barking-deer, and others of the cervine race. Then wolves, wild pigs, porcupines, wood and green pigeons, ortolans, the broad-snouted magar (or crocodile of the Central Provinces), the mighty bison, and many others offer endless excitement to the hunter. What more could the most ardent sportsman desire? Monarch over every description of locality in these two districts, however, and only fearing the bison, roams the Bengal tiger, of which so many sporting-anecdotes are told. We purpose, after giving a general account of his habits and life-history, to follow the footsteps of some renowned shikarries in search of him through the Mirzapore and Satpura districts.
In the sa.me way as the Crusades introduced the marvels of oriental civilization to Europe, the expedition of Alexander the Great first revealed to the ancients the existence of elephants and tigers. Amongst the earliest classical allusions to the tiger must be reckoned the fiery burst of indignation which flashes from the injured Phoenician queen as our old friend Pius ^Eneas calmly avows his perfidy —
duris genuit te cautibus horrens
Caucasus, Hyrcanæque admôrunt ubera tigres!
Æn. iv. 366.
In the same way Shakespeare has not forgotten to introduce York upbraiding Queen Margaret (Henry VI. pt. iii. 1, 4):
O tiger's heart, wrapt in a woman's hide,
How couldst thou drain the life-blood of the child?
And soon after—
You are more inhuman, more inexorable—
Oh, ten times more—than tigers of Hyrcania!
Hyrcania is indeed all but the western boundary of the tiger's range, where it would most naturally fall within the Roman's ken. Silius also knows the tiger in this locality, the modern Elburz Mountains; he describes a horse—
Caucasiam lustratus virgato corpore tigrim.
v, 148.
