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Show A MAN-EATING TIGRESS. A paper in India has the following: For more than a year past a man-eating tigress has been the terror and scourge of a small tract of hill country in Western Garhwal, which looks down across the Ganges upon the sacred shrine of Rikhikesh. From first to last she is said to have killed between fifty and sixty human beings. A considerably higher estimate, indeed, is current in the neighborhood. Last year she became a proclaimed offender, and a reward of 100 rupees was set upon her head. So widely infamous did she become that it is somewhat surprising she did not obtain more attention from the sporting manhood of our cantonments, particulary [particularly] when it is considered her haunts were within two marches of so well known and accessible a place as Hurdwar. Such attempts, however, as were made to circumvent her, whether on the part of forest hunters and others, or natives invariably failed. Her wariness and activity seemed to be altogether extraordinary. From some spot on the hillside she would watch a group at work in the [unreadable] stalk them by careful and ?? approaches: then, dashing in among them, she would pick off her victim, and in a few seconds be down the side of one hill and under cover up another almost before his companions had time to look around. The sound of bambo cutting was so well known to attract her that that industry for the time entirely ceased within her beat. Of course, occasional failures are recorded against her; one plucky fellow cudgeled her off the friend she seized by his side with a lath; and in another instance she abandoned her prey owing to the lucky circumstance of a mouthful of the bamboo bundle on his back failing to please her taste. But these were exceptions in the monotonous tale of slaughter. One of the very last cases was a particularly painful one. A peasant's wife objected to going into the fields, or rather cultivated terraces, to work, pleading her fear of this beast. The husband forced or persuaded her to go promising to accompany and stay near her while she worked. She was carried off before his eyes. People on the lookout for this tigress with firearms could never find her. Cattle she had never killed; to elephants her haunts were inaccessible, and it seemed ?? if was ever destroyed it would be [unreadable] of a human being or the carcass of a ??, the only animal besides man on which she was known to prey. And so it turned out. About [unreadable] commissioner of Garhwal obtained the services of a dozen ?? from the regiment at [unreadable] little fellows had only been a day or two across the river, when, on the 9th instant, the tigress killed again another woman. They started for the spot in the afternoon, four of them going along the hillside in advance, while the rest of the party kept along the ??. The tigress, startled by the latter, broke in front of the former, and luckily having her back broken by the first shot of the volley fired at her, succumbed without a struggle. ?? was the tigress apparently killed off the body but some of the victim's fingers were found in her stomach. |