"The next moment a tiger sprang clean off the ground, and seized hold of the lower bar of it with both teeth and claws. There was a crash, the elephant fell on to its side ..."
Col. Fitzwilliam Thomas Pollok (1832 – 1909) served in the British military in India from the mid-1850s, stationed in Burma for 13 years and Assam for 7. He was an avid big game hunter, travelled extensively in the surrounding areas, and wrote several books about his experiences.
In 1894, Pollok published "Incidents of Foreign Sport and Travel," a lengthy book covering his hunting adventures around the globe. It is from this 1894 book that its chapters on hunting India's tiger, bear, and rhinoceros have been excerpted for the convenience of the reader interested in big game hunting in India.
The " Incidents" related in this work have been put together as a guide to the numerous class of sportsmen who, year by year, go abroad in search of game. Very many men lose their lives yearly, simply from a superabundance of pluck; and the want of training in wild sports, which is as necessary to a successful hunter. There is no royal road to learning, nor can a man become a proficient as a hunter who has not acquired the knack by undergoing a great deal of toil; for experience is only learnt after years of practice.
Pollok was exceptionally lucky in being sent to a province teeming with game when barely 21 years of age, which had never been hunted over. He was for 21 years in the best sporting countries under British rule; he had under him vast districts; his work lay in surveying, and laying out roads, which enabled him to travel over virgin forests and jungles; he had numerous elephants; he was not only young, but had the constitution of a buffalo, ample means, and had shooting and hunting on the brain. He made the most of his opportunities to the best of his ability, and hopes, by relating his experiences, to not only instruct but also to afford an hour or two's amusement to far better and more successful sportsmen than himself.
The hunting methods used in hunting big game in Colonial India were fraught with danger, and Pollok relates numerous maulings and worse which surrounded his sporting activities in India. Pollok notes regarding hunting tigers:
"Shooting off Elephants out of Hoivdahs is very exciting. There is just enough danger in it to stir up one's blood. If every elephant used could be thoroughly depended upon at all times, there would be little risk, but an elephant that is perfectly staunch one day will probably turn tail the next, and a powerful tiger is capable of pulling down a large elephant. When your mount gets really frightened, it becomes ungovernable, and is as likely to tumble into a pitfall, or to go over the steep side of a nullah or precipice, or what is far worse and far more frequent, if a forest be anywhere near, to run amuck through it, when your howdah will be smashed to pieces, you and your weapons tossed about, and if you are not killed, well, you are lucky! These leviathans, so sagacious at times, when in a panic are really idiotic, and rush for the very place they should avoid!"
In describing the results of a bizarre battle between a tiger, man, and python, Pollok relates:
"The sight that met my eyes was marvellous. A huge rock snake, a python, just over twenty-one feet in length, lay coiled round the body of the tiger, whose fangs in turn were imbedded in the back of the snake's head, while the reptile's folds, after enveloping the tiger, had got a purchase by lashing its tail round the adjoining sapling, and so assisted the vast muscular power it possessed in crushing the tiger to death.
