It required eight men with two cross poles to bring him
home.
I reached the tent to breakfast at eight o'clock, having bagged three
fine bucks and two buffaloes that morning; and being, for the time,
satiated with sport, I quitted Ceylon.
CHAPTER VIII.
Beat-hounds for Elk-hunting--Smut--Killbuck--The Horton Plains--A Second
Soyer--The Find--The Buck at Bay--The Bay--The Death--Return of Lost
Dogs--Comparative Speed of Deer--Veddah Ripped by a Boar--A Melee--Buck
at Black Pool--Old Smut's Ruse--Margosse Oil.
The foregoing description of sporting incidents closed my first visit to
Ceylon. I had arrived in the island to make a tour of the country and to
enjoy its sports; this I had accomplished by a residence of twelve
months, the whole of which had been occupied in wandering from place to
place. I now returned to England; but the Fates had traced ANOTHER road
for me, and after a short stay in the old country I again started for
Ceylon, and became a resident at Newera Ellia.
Making use of the experience that I had gained in wild sports, I came
out well armed, according to my own ideas of weapons for the chase. I
had ordered four double-barrelled rifles of No. 10 bore to be made to my
own pattern; my hunting-knives and boarspear heads I had made to my own
design by Paget of Piccadilly, who turned out the perfection of steel;
and I arrived in Ceylon with a pack of fine foxhounds and a favourite
greyhound of wonderful speed and strength, 'Bran,' who, though full of
years, is still alive.
The usual drawbacks and discomforts attendant upon a new settlement
having been overcome, Newera Ellia forms a delightful place of
residence. I soon discovered that a pack of thoroughbred foxhounds were
not adapted to a country so enclosed by forest; some of the hounds were
lost, others I parted with, but they are all long since dead, and their
progeny, the offspring of crosses with pointers, bloodhounds and
half-bred foxhounds, have turned out the right stamp for elk-hunting.
It is a difficult thing to form a pack for this sport which shall be
perfect in all respects. Sometimes a splendid hound in character may be
more like a butcher's dog than a hound in appearance, but the pack
cannot afford to part with him if he is really good.
The casualties from leopards, boars, elk and lost dogs are so great that
the pack is with difficulty kept up by breeding. It must be remembered
that the place of a lost dog cannot be easily supplied in Ceylon.
