Varieties of parrots.--A 'beat'
in the forest.--The 'shekarry.'--Mehrman Singh and his gun.--The
Banturs, a jungle tribe of wood-cutters.--Their habits.--A village
feast.--We beat for deer.--Habits of the spotted deer.--Waiting for
the game.--Mehrman Singh gets drunk.--Our bag.--Pea-fowl and their
habits.--How to shoot them.--Curious custom of the Nepaulese.--How
Juggroo was tricked, and his revenge.

Tirhoot is too generally under cultivation and too thickly inhabited
for much land to remain under jungle, and except the wild pig of which
I have spoken, and many varieties of wild fowl, there is little game to
be met with. It is, however, different in North Bhaugulpore, where
there are still vast tracts of forest jungle, the haunt of the spotted
deer, nilghau, leopard, wolf, and other wild animals. Along the banks
of the Koosee, a rapid mountain river that rolls its flood through
numerous channels to join the Ganges, there are immense tracts of
uncultivated land covered with tall elephant grass, and giving cover to
tigers, hog deer, pig, wild buffalo, and even an occasional rhinoceros,
to say nothing of smaller game and wildfowl, which are very plentiful.

The sal forests in North Bhaugulpore generally keep to the high ridges,
which are composed of a light, sandy soil, very friable, and not very
fertile, except for oil and indigo seeds, which grow most luxuriantly
wherever the forest land has been cleared. In the shallow valleys which
lie between the ridges rice is chiefly cultivated, and gives large
returns. The sal forests have been sadly thinned by unscientific and
indiscriminate cutting, and very few fine trees now remain. The earth
is teeming with insects, chief amongst which are the dreaded and
destructive white ants. The high pointed nests of these destructive
insects, formed of hardened mud, are the commonest objects one meets
with in these forest solitudes.

At intervals, beneath some wide spreading peepul or bhur tree, one
comes on a rude forest shrine, daubed all over with red paint, and with
gaudy festoons of imitation flowers, cut from the pith of the plantain
tree, hanging on every surrounding bough. These shrines are sacred
to _Chumpa buttee_, the Hindoo Diana, protectress of herds, deer,
buffaloes, huntsmen, and herdsmen. She is the recognised jungle
goddess, and is held in great veneration by all the wild tribes and
half-civilized denizens of the gloomy sal jungle.

The general colour of the forest i