Page:The Zoologist, 4th series, vol 2 (1898).djvu/194

162 again released, the sitter resuming his seat, and he would at once commence to restalk. At last he got too big and too dangerous, and we had to chain him at the foot of a tree, in which he spent the greater part of his time. I had bought two English Greyhounds of some considerable value. They got loose one night and attacked the Panther, who, chained as he was, soon put both hors de combat, and they were so mauled that, though by timely interference we saved their lives, they were ever afterwards useless for coursing. We had a large Sambur, fully three years old. In passing under a branch of the tree, where the Panther was crouching, the beast sprang down upon it, and would have killed it, had not our servants been at hand to rescue the Deer. We eventually turned him and a Bear we had, loose on Mole Alley Race-course, and speared them.

Shikaries sitting upon trees and machans have been carried off by them; and two Karens travelling through a forest in the Tenasserim District got benighted, and erected bamboo platforms on the branches of a large tree. During the night, the lower man was awakened by a Leopard climbing up the tree; he called out to his comrade, who was too sleepy to pay any attention, and was seized and carried off.

It is uncertain the number of cubs a Leopardess brings forth at a birth; but a chum of mine killed one with no fewer than seven young ones. Black Leopards are but a lusus naturæ. They are more abundant in moist climes overrun with sombre forests than in more open country, though they are occasionally found here and there in open as well as wooded lands. In the dense forests of Malaya and Lower Burma Leopards exist principally on the Gibbon Apes, as other game is scarce. Nature therefore adapts their colouration to their surroundings. An ordinarily marked Leopard would be too conspicuous, and would die of starvation. The fittest—the black—survive, as they are not so easily seen. A black Pantheress who mated with an ordinary Leopard had two or three litters which showed no signs of being melanoid. In Africa the ordinary Leopard, as distinguished from the Panther, is most plentiful, and great numbers are killed every year by the natives with poisoned arrows. Numbers are caught in traps, and Colonel Montagu, of the Commissariat, caught twelve Leopards and one small Tiger in a trap in his compound at Shillong.