It is a queer experience to be even for a moment in the grip of a great beast. I had been put into the fork of a tree, so that I could shoot with the big stem behind my back. The fork wasn't, I suppose, more than a score of feet from the ground. It was a safe enough place from a tiger, and that is what we expected. We had been misled by our tracker, who had mistaken the pugs of a big for a tiger's,—they were over rocky ground for the most part and he had only the spoor of a chance patch of half-dried mud to go upon. The beast had killed a goat and was beaten out of a near by me in which he had been lying up. The probability had seemed that he would go away along a ravine to where Captain Crosby, who was my host, awaited him; I, as the amateur, was intended to be little more than a spectator. But he broke back towards the wing of the line of beaters and came across the sunlit rocks within thirty yards of my post.  
Seen going along in that way, almost to the ground, he wasn't a particularly impressive beast, and I shot at his shoulder as one might blaze away at a rabbit,—perhaps just a little more carefully, feeling as a Lord of Creation should who a merited death. I expected him either to roll over or bolt.
 
Then instantly he was coming in huge bounds towards me....
 
He came so rapidly that he was covered by the big limb of the tree on which I was until he was quite beneath me, and my second shot, which I thought in the instant must have missed him, was taken rapidly as he to spring up the trunk.
 
Then you know came a sort of , and I think,—because afterwards Crosby picked up a dropped at the foot of the tree—that I tried to reload. I believe I was completely incredulous that the beast was going to have me until he actually got me. The thing was too completely out of my imaginative picture. I don't believe I thought at all while he was coming up the tr............