But a heavy animal, such as a cow, he carries in a different manner. Yes, a tiger _carries_ away a cow; he does not merely _drag_ it along the ground, as a lion does. This is the way the tiger carries a cow, after killing it:
He first seizes the cow in his jaws by the back of its neck. Then he rears up on his hind legs and swings the cow over his shoulder on to his back--just as a man swings a loaded sack on to his back. Then the tiger stands on all four legs again, and trots along with his burden. Of course, he still holds the neck of the cow in his jaws, just as the man carrying the sack holds the upper end of the sack in his hand.
I shall now finish with tigers by telling you three stories,--true stories, of course. From these stories you will understand that tigers and tigresses sometimes have the same kind of feelings that _we_ have.
_Both Tiger and Tigress Defend their Cubs_
I have told you that in a tiger family, when the cubs are very young, they must be guarded all the time by either their father or their mother. One day it happened that a tiger had killed a bullock. As he could not carry it to his den, he first ate enough of the bullock to satisfy his hunger. Then he came home to his den, and sent the tigress out to eat her share, while he guarded their two cubs in the den.
But three English officers had gone hunting in the jungle, each of them on an elephant; and it so happened that they came toward the tiger's den.
The three hunters saw the tiger and the two cubs he was guarding. The hunters knew that if they killed the tiger they could catch the two cubs alive. So they fired their guns at once at the tiger; and as they were then only about a hundred yards away, they all hit the tiger.
Now, if the tiger had not had the cubs to defend, there would not have been much of a fight. Why? Because, as I shall tell you later, it usually takes much more than three hunters on three elephants to hunt one tiger. Each of the three wounds the tiger got might have killed or disabled any other wild animal; but instead, the three wounds together only made the tiger furious.
If he had been alone, he would have come like a flash of lightning at the nearest elephant, leaped upon its back, and killed the hunter on it--before the hunter could shoot again. Of course, the other two hunters could then kill the tiger; but the tiger would at least have killed _one_ of the hunters.