The Roar of the Tiger: Hunting & Shikar Tales from a Bygone Era

This is a compilation of hunting tales from the jungles of India from the centuries gone by. …We have no word in English that properly embraces all this, but all are expressed by the Persian word ‘shikar!’… …Sitting on the ground in a thorn Boma for a lion in Africa is considered an ordinary enough thing to do; but sitting on the ground for a tiger in dense jungles of the Indian subcontinent can be an entirely different experience. The risk inherent should be obvious to all. Sitting on a machan built on a tree was the more common approach employed by Tiger hunters of yore; but of course, there were exceptions… …In another moment the old Panther sprang out of the jungle, made a pat at the kid, and then crouched by its side. If there had been more space, I should have waited and watched the Panther’s proceedings, but as I was afraid that she would drag the goat into the jungle, I fired at once, and immediately jumped up so as to see above the smoke. The Panther sprang into the air, fell backwards, and then disappeared among the bushes… …I was standing at the junction of two pathways, and the beat had approached to within a hundred yards, when I heard Woof! Woof! I imagined the beaters had started up a big wild boar. The woofing was repeated during the next minute, coming closer each time, until finally there was a resounding Woof in the tall grass about fifteen yards in front of me. By this time I was standing on tip-toe, trying to peer into the grass ahead of me, when suddenly I realized that what I was staring at behind an ant-heap was the tail-end of a tiger… The stories in this collection are extracted from rare works from the 17th, 18th, 19th centuries.