For
Twenty-Five Years His Work Lay In Eastern Bengal.
He gradually became
known to the Government for his activity and good sense, but won a far
wider reputation as a mighty hunter, alike with hog-spear and double
barrel.
By 1856 the roll of his slain tigers exceeded four hundred, some
of them of special fame; after that he continued slaying his tigers, but
ceased to count them. For some years he and a few friends used annually to
visit the plains of the Brahmaputra, near the Garrow Hills - an entirely
virgin country then, and swarming with large game. Yule used to describe
his once seeing seven rhinoceroses at once on the great plain, besides
herds of wild buffalo and deer of several kinds. One of the party started
the theory that Noah's Ark had been shipwrecked there! In those days
George Yule was the only man to whom the Maharajah of Nepaul, Sir Jung
Bahadur, conceded leave to shoot within his frontier.
Yule was first called from his useful obscurity in 1856. The year before,
the Sonthals in insurrection disturbed the long unbroken peace of the
Delta. These were a numerous non-Aryan, uncivilised, but industrious race,
driven wild by local mismanagement, and the oppressions of Hindoo usurers
acting through the regulation courts. After the suppression of their
rising, Yule was selected by Sir F. Halliday, who knew his man, to be
Commissioner of the Bhagulpoor Division, containing some six million
souls, and embracing the hill country of the Sonthals.
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