of savage determined fury and fiendish rage.  With ears thrown back, brows contracted, mouth open, and glaring yellow eyes scintillating with fury, the cruel claws plucking at the earth, the ridgy hairs on the back stiff and erect as bristles, and the lithe lissome body quivering in every muscle and fibre with wrath and hate, the beast comes down to the charge with a defiant roar, which makes the pulse bound and the breath come short and quick.  It requires all a man’s nerve and coolness, to enable him to make steady shooting.

Roused to fury by a wound, I have seen tigers wheel round with amazing swiftness, and dash headlong, roaring dreadfully as they charged, full upon the nearest elephant, scattering the line and lacerating the poor creature on whose flanks or head they may have fastened, their whole aspect betokening pitiless ferocity and fiendish rage.

Even in death they do not forget their savage instincts.  I knew of one case in which a seemingly dead tiger inflicted a fearful wound upon an elephant that had trodden on what appeared to be his inanimate carcase.  Another elephant, that attacked and all but trampled a tiger to death, was severely bitten under one of the toe-nails.  The wound mortified, and the unfortunate beast died in about a week after its infliction.  Another monster, severely wounded, fell into a pool of water, and seized hold with its jaws of a hard knot of wood that was floating about.  In its death agony, it made its powerful teeth meet in the hard wood, and not until it was being cut up, and we had divided the muscles of the jaws, could we extricate the wood from that formidable clench.  In rage and fury, and mad with pain, the wounded tiger will often turn round and savagely bite the wound that causes its agony, and they very often bite their paws and shoulders, and tear the grass and earth around them.

A tiger wounded in the spine, however, is the most exciting spectacle.  Paralysed in the limbs, he wheels round, roaring and biting at everything within his reach.  In 1874 I shot one in the spine, and watched his furious movements for some time before I put him out of his misery.  I threw him a pad from one of the elephants, and the way he tore and gnawed it gave me some faint idea of his fury and ferocity.  He looked the very personification of impotent viciousness; the incarnation of devilish rage.

Urged by hunger the tiger fearlessly attacks his prey.  The most courageous are young tigers about seven or eight feet long.  They invariably give better sport than larger and older animals, being more ready to charge, and altogether bolder and more defiant.  Up to the age of two years they have probably been with the mother, have never encountered a reverse or defeat, and having become bold by impunity, hesitate not to fly at any assailant whatever.