Place to place, though probably keeping in general within an area of 15 or 20 miles in diameter. In the hot season from March to June their range is usually more restricted, as vegetation is dried up or burnt except near the few spots where water is still found.
As has already been remarked, tigers are very much less in the habit of roaring than lions are. Where the latter are common scarcely an evening passes without their being repeatedly heard. I have often been in places where tigers were equally abundant, but it is an exception for their roaring to attract attention[1]. Their usual call is very similar to that of the lion, a prolonged moaning, thrilling sound, repeated twice or thrice, becoming louder and quicker, and ending with three or four repetitions of the last portion of it. Besides this, there is a peculiar loud "woof" produced when the animal is disturbed or surprised, a growl that it utters when provoked, and the well-known guttural sound of rage repeated two or three times when it charges. When hit by a bullet a tiger generally roars, but tigresses, at all events, very often do not; I have on three occasions at least known a tigress receive a mortal wound and pass on without making a sound.
Tigers swim well and take readily to water, even crossing arms of the sea. They but rarely ascend trees, and appear quite incapable of climbing a vertical stem, large or small, it is true that they have been knovvn to take men out of trees, from heights it is said of even 18 or 20 feet; but such cases are always due to some peculiarity in the tree, a sloping trunk, or a fork 8 or 10 feet from the ground, from which the animal can get a fresh start. As a rule a tiger, like other mammals, pays no attention to men in a tree even a very few feet from the ground, if they do not move or speak.
In fact tigers are much less addicted to springing than is popularly supposed, and rarely move their hind legs off the ground except to clear an obstacle. Still they are capable of springing some distance. They have a habit, like cats, of scratching wood, and often show a predilection for the trunk of a particular tree, on which the marks of their claws may be seen up to a height of 10 or, it is said, 12 feet.
The ordinary game-eating tiger of the forest lives mainly on deer and pigs, and avoids the neighbourhood of human habitations. Almost all tigers, however, occasionally kill cattle. The wild animals commonly eaten by tigers are pigs, deer of all kinds, nylgai, four-horned antelope, and porcupines. The last are evidently a common prey. I have repeatedly, in the Central Provinces, when skinning tigers, found fragments of porcupine-quill encysted beneath the sldn. Peafowl may be slain at times, but more often, I think, by leopards than by tigers, and the same may be said of monkeys. Bears, though not often attacked, occasionally fall
- ↑ It is true that my own experience was at not quite the same time of the year. I have been repeatedly in jungless inhabited by tigers from November till June, and only in lion-haunted tracts in July and August. But all travellers notice the noisiness of lions.
