nce through two thousand
years, at last the big game of India has made a good start on the road
to vanishment. Up to 1870 it had held its own with a tenacity that was
astonishing. In 1877, I found the Ganges--Jumna dooab, the Animallai
Hills, the Wynaad Forest and Ceylon literally teeming with herds of
game. The Animallais in particular were a hunter's paradise. In each day
of hunting, large game of some kind was a certainty. The Nilgiri Hills
had been quite well shot out, but in view of the very small area and
open, golf-links character of the whole top of that wonderful sky
plateau, that was no cause for wonderment.

In those days no native shikaree owned and operated a gun,--or at the
most very, very few of them did. If a rogue elephant, a man-eating tiger
or a nasty leopard became a public nuisance, it was a case for a sahib
to come and doctor it with a .577 double-barreled express rifle, worth
$150 or more; and the sahibs had shooting galore.

I think that no such great wild-life sights as those of the plateau
regions of Africa ever were seen in southern Asia. Conditions there are
different, and usually the game is widely scattered. The sambar deer and
muntjac of the dense forests, the axis of the bamboo glades, the thameng
deer of the Burmese jungles, the sladang, or gaur, of the awful Malay
tangle, and the big cats and canines will last long and well. The
ibexes, markhors, tahr and all the wild sheep eventually will be shot
out by sportsmen who are "sheep crazy." The sheep and goats of Asia will
disappear soon after the plains animals of Africa, because no big game
that lives in the open can much longer endure the modern, inexpensive
long-range rifles of deadly accuracy and limitless repetition of fire.

Eventually, I fear that by some unlucky turn of Fortune's wheel all the
native hunters of Asia will obtain rifles; and when they do, we soon
will see the end of the big game.

Even to-day we find that the primitive conditions of 1877 have been
greatly changed. In the first place, about every native shikaree
(hunter) owns a rifle, at a cost of about $25; and many other natives
possess guns, and assume to hunt with them. The logical conclusion of
this is more hunting and less game. The development of the country has
reduced the cover for game. New roads and railways have made the game
districts easily accessible, and real sportsmen are now three or four
times as numerous as they were in 1877.

At Toonacadavoo,