Here, There and Everywhere | Page 9

trumpeted loudly with alarm, and refused to enter the water until they were quite out of sight. The curious intelligence of the animal is seen when they are ordered to remove a tree which blocks the road. Chota Begum would place her right foot against the trunk and give a little tentative shove. Not satisfied with the leverage, she would shift her foot again and again until she had found the right spot, then, throwing her whole weight on to her foot, the tree would snap off like a wooden match.
There was a great amount of bird-life in the jungle. It abounded in peacocks, and these birds are a glorious sight sailing down-wind through the sunlight with their tails streaming behind them, at a pace which would leave any pheasant standing. As peacocks are regarded as sacred by Hindoos, the Maharajah had particularly begged us not to shoot any. There were plenty of other birds, snipe, partridges, florican and jungle-cocks, the two latter greatly esteemed for their flesh. I shot a jungle-cock, and was quite disappointed at finding him a facsimile of our barndoor game-cock, for I had imagined that he would have the velvety black wing starred with cream-coloured eyes, which we associate with the "jungle-cock wing" of salmon flies. The so-called "jungle-cock" in a "Jock Scott" fly is furnished by a bird found, I believe, only round Madras. An animal peculiar to this part of Assam is the pigmy hob, the smallest of the swine family. These little beasts, no larger than guinea-pigs, go about in droves of about fifty, and move through the grass with such incredible rapidity that the eye is unable to follow them. The elephants, oddly enough, are scared to death by the pigmy hogs, for the little creatures have tushes as sharp as razors, and gash the elephants' feet with them as they run past them.
I think that we all regretted the Maharajah's keenness about water-buffalo and rhinos, for this entailed long days of plodding on elephants through steamy, fetid swamps, where the grass was twenty feet high and met over one's head, where the heat was intolerable, without one breath of air, and the mosquitoes maddening. A day in the swamps entailed, too, a big dose of quinine at bedtime. Between ourselves, I was terrified at the prospect of having to fire off the heavy four-bore elephant-rifle. The "kick" of fourteen-and-a-half drachms of black-powder is tremendous, and one's shoulder ached for two hours afterwards, though I do not regret the "kick" in surveying the water-buffalo which has hung now in my hall for thirty years. I have only seen two wild rhinoceroses in my life, and of the first one I had only a very brief glimpse. We were outside the swamp, when down a jungle-track came a charging rhinoceros, his head down and an evil look in his eye. One look was enough for Chota Begum. That most respectable of old ladies had quite evidently no love for rhinos. She lost her nerve completely, and ran away for two miles as hard as her ungainly limbs could lay leg to the ground. It is no joke to be on a runaway elephant maddened with fright, and it is extremely difficult to keep one's seat. The mahout and I hung on with both hands for dear life, the guns and rifles crashing together with a deafening clamour of ironmongery, and I was most thankful that there were no trees anywhere near, for the terrified animal's first impulse would have been to knock off both howdah and mahout under the overhanging branch of a tree. When Chota Begum at length pulled up, she had to listen to some terrible home-truths about her ancestry from the mahout, who was bitterly disappointed in his beloved charge. As to questions of lineage, and the morals of Chota Begum's immediate progenitors, I can only hope that the mahout exaggerated, for he certainly opened up appalling perspectives. Any old lady would have got scared at seeing so hideous a monster preparing to rip her open, and under the circumstances you and I would have run away just as fast as Chota Begum did.
The only other wild rhinoceros I ever saw was on the very last day of our stay in Assam. We were returning home on elephants, when they began to trumpet loudly, as we approached a little dip. My nephew, General Sir Henry Streatfeild, called out to me to be ready, as there was probably a bear in the hollow. Next moment a rhinoceros charged out and made straight for his elephant. Sir Henry fired with a heavy four-bore rifle, and by an extraordinary piece of good luck hit the rhino in the one little spot where he is vulnerable, otherwise he must have been killed. The