rs try to secure a quail or partridge, but it is a
point of honour that something must be slain. If game be not plentiful
they will even go to another village and slay a goat, which, rather
than return empty-handed, they will bear in triumph home. The women
meet the returning hunters, and if there has been a fortunate beat,
there is a great feast in the village during the evening and far on
into the night. The nets are used, and in this way they generally have
some game to divide in the village on their return from the hunt.
Ordinarily they seethe the flesh, and pour the whole contents of the
cooking-pot into a mess of boiled rice. With the addition of a little
salt, this is to them very palatable fare. They are very good cooks,
with very simple appliances; with a little mustard oil or clarified
butter, a few vegetables or a cut-up fish, they can be very successful.
The food, however, is generally smoked from the cow-dung fire. If you
are much out in these villages this smoke constantly hangs about,
clinging to your clothes and flavouring your food, but the natives seem
to like it amazingly.

In the cold mornings of December or January it hangs about like the
peat smoke in a Highland village. Round every house are great stacks
and piles of cow-dung cakes. Before every house is a huge pile of
ashes, and the villagers cower round this as the evening falls, or
before the sun has dissipated the mist of the mornings. During the day
the village dogs burrow in the ashes. Hovering in a dense cloud about
the roofs and eaves, and along the lower branches of the trees in filmy
layers, the smoke almost chokes one to ride through it. I have seen a
native sit till half-choked in a dense column of this smoke. He is too
lazy to shift his position; the fumes of pungent smoke half smother
him; tears run from his eyes; he splutters and coughs, and abuses the
smoke, and its grandfather, and maternal uncle, and all its other known
relatives; but he prefers semi-suffocation to the trouble of budging an
inch.

Sometimes the energy of these people is surprising. To go to a fair or
feast, or on a pilgrimage, they will walk miles upon miles, subsisting
on parched peas or rice, and carrying heavy burdens. In company they
sing and carol blithely enough. When alone they are very taciturn, man
and woman walking together, the man first with his _lathee_ or staff,
the woman behind carrying child or bundle, and often looking fagged and
tired enough.