Page:The Zoologist, 4th series, vol 2 (1898).djvu/206

174 Although timid and anything but pugnacious, if driven to a corner and sore from wounds they will charge savagely. I never had one close with an Elephant of mine, though I have had them several times within a foot or two, but always managed to drop them before they did any harm; but I had an Elephant which I bought from Tye of Koliabar, a good and successful tea-planter, who had been mauled by one, and she was as good on Rhinoceros as an English pointer is on partridges. If there was one within two hundred yards of her, and she scented him, off she would go, and nothing in the world would stop her. At times they are gregarious, and Jackson, Adjutant of the 43rd Assam Light Infantry, and I came across fully twenty, if not more, in a (comparatively speaking) small patch of long grass and reeds, and dropped four and lost several others severely wounded; but there was an impenetrable jungle close at hand, into which they took refuge, and there was no following them up there.

These are distinguished by their size, by their shields being less prominent, and their skins covered with square angular tubercles. The grow up to 4½ ft. high—a monster may be 5 ft. These Rhinos are found in the Sonderbunds, in the delta of the Ganges, and extend throughout Assam, Sylhet, the Garrow Hills, Tipperah, Chittagong into Arrakan, and Burma, probably extending into the western provinces of China. The Burmese dread them very much, and declare that if they see a camp-fire they rush at and devour it! They live in swamps, almost quagmires and quicksands, between the lower ranges of the mountains in Burma, where it is impossible for a sportsman to get at them, though I shot a two-horned variety once near Cape Negrais by sitting up at night for one; but the sport is not worth the candle. The tortures we underwent that night from mosquitoes and sand-flies I shall never forget.

The ordinary R. sumatrensis is the best known two-horned variety. It is common in Burma and Malaya. Its body is covered with bristles, and the folds of the skin are deep, especially that behind the shoulder; the folds on the neck are not very distinct. The horns are generally mere knobs, but the one I shot