Rensselaer Union, Volume 8, Number 6, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 28 October 1875 — Users and Monkeys. [ARTICLE]

Users and Monkeys.

On one occasion I followed a tiger in the early morning for several miles up the bed of a stream, entirely by the demonstrations of the large Hanum&n monkey, of which there were numbers on the banks feeding on wild fruits. As the tiger passed below them the monkeys fled to the nearest trees, and, climbing to the highest branches, shook them violently and poured forth a torrent of abuse, that could be heard a mile away. (The voice of the monkeys on such occasions is quite different from their ordinary cry. It is a hoarse, barking roar, something like that of the tiger. Is it the first beginning of imita tive language ?) Each group of them continued to swear at him till he passed out of sight and they saw their friends farther on time up the chorus in the tops of their trees, when they calmly came aown again and began to stuff their cheeks full of berries, as if nothing had happened. I think it is the pranks of juvenile tigers, rather than the serious enmity ofold ones, that cause such a terror of them to exist among the monkey community. The natives say that the tigress teaches her cubs to stalk and hunt by practicing on monkeys and pea-fowl. The gorgeous plumage of the latter, scattered about in a thousand radiant fragments, often marks the spot where a peacock has thus fallen victim to these ready learners, but the remains of a monkey are seldom or never seen. Indeed, these sagacious Simians rarely venture to come down to the ground when young tigers are about, though this sign is not always to he relied on as denoting the absence of tigers. I thought so for a long time, till one day in the Betul country, in 1865, after hunting long in the heat of a May day for a couple of tigers whose marks were plentiful all about, we came up to a small pool of water at the head of a ravine, and saw the last chance of finding them vanish, as I thought, when a troop of monkeys were found quietly sitting on the rocks and drinking at the water. I was carelessly descending to look for prints, with my rifle reversed over my shoulder, and another step or two would have brought me to the bottom of the ravine, when the monkeys scurried with a shriek up the bank, and the head and shoulders of a large tiger appeared from behind a bowlder, and stared at me across the short interval. I was meditating whether to fire or retreat, when, almost from below my feet, the other tiger bounded out with a terrific roar, and they both made off down the ravine. I was too much astonished to obtain a steady shot, and I was by that time too well acquainted with tiger-snoot-ing to risk an uncertain one, so they escaped for the time. I quickly regained my elephant, which was standing above, and followed them up. It w;as exceedingly hot, and we had not gone more than a couple of hundred yards when I saw one of the tigers crouched under a bush on the bank of the ravine. I got a steady shot from the hmedah, and fired a threeounce shell at his broad forehead at about thirty yards. No result. It was most curious aud I paused to look; but never a motion of the tiger acknowledged the shot. I then went around a quarter of a circle, but still the tiger remained motionless, looking intently in the same direction. I marched up, rifle on full cock, growing more and more amazed—but the tiger uever moved. Could he be dead ? I went round to his rekr and approached ' close up from that direction. He never stirred. Then I made the elephant kick him, and he fell over. He was stone dead —converted without the movement of a hair into a statue of himself by the bursting of the large shell in his brain. It had struck him full in the center of the forehead. We then went on with the track of the other. It led down into the Moran River, on the steep bank of which there was a thick cover of jaman-buskes, in which the tiger was sure to stop. I had just before come through it, and found the place as full of tracks as a rabbit-warren. Having a spare pad-elephant on that day I sent her round to keep down the bottom of the bank and mark, while I pushed my own elephant—Futteh Rani (Queen of Victory)—through the cover. About the center'l came on the tiger, crouched like the other, with his massive head rested onEis forepaws, the drawn-up hind-quarters and slightly-twitching tail showing that he meant "mischief. " At the first shot, which struck him on the point of the shoulder, he bounded out at me; but the left barrel Caught him in the back before he had come many yards and broke it, when he rolled down right to the bottom of the baok, and fell, roaring horribly, right between the forelegs of the elephant. On another occasion I was much struck with the caution of the monkeys under very trying circumstances. In May, 1864, I had tracked a man-eating tigress into a deep ravine near the village of Pali, in the Seoni district. She wasnot quite a confirmed man-eater, but had killed nine or ten persons in the preceding few | months. She had a cub of about six , months old with her, and it was when this cub was very young and unable to move about that want of other game had driven her to kill her first human pirey. I knew when I entered the ravine that this was her regular haunt; for, though every bush outside had been stripped of its berries by a colony of monkeys, I saw them perched on the rocks above the ravine wistfully looking down on the bushes at thg bottom, which had strewed the ground with their ripened fruit. They accompanied me along the ravine on, the

top of the rocks, as if perfectly knowing the value of their assistance in getting the tigress—and better markers I never had. 1 should probably have passed out at the toD without seeing her, as she was lying close under a shelving bank, but for the profane language of an ancient, graybearded Hanuman, who posted himself right above her, and swore away until he fairly turned her out of her comfortable berth. The excitement of the monkeys soon told me she was on the move; and presently I saw her round lace looking at me from behind a tree with a forked trunk, through the cleft of which I caught sight of about a square foot of her striped hide. It seemed about the right place, so covering it carefully I put in a shell at about forty yards, and she collapsed there and then, forming a beautiful spread-eagle in the bottom of the nala. The youngster now started out,. roaring as if he were the biggest tiger in the country; and, though I fired a couple of snap-shots at him as he galloped through some thick bushes, I coulu not stop him. It is important to extinguish a brute, however young, who lias once tasted human flesh; and I followed him till it grew nearly dark, when I returned to the ravine to take home the tigress, and there I found my monkey friends tucking into the berries in all directions, and hopping about close to the body of the- dead tigress. The cub was met, much exhausted with its run, by a gang of wood-cutters, and killed w'ith their axes.—“ Highlands of Central India," by Capt. James Forsyth.