The great Terai Forest stretches for hundreds of miles along the foot of
the Himalayas, from Assam through Bengal to Garwhal and up into Nepal. It
is a sportsman's heaven; for it shelters in its recesses wild elephants,
rhinoceros, bison, bears, tigers, panthers, and many of the deer tribes.
Dermot loved it. He was a mighty hunter, but a discriminating one. He did
not kill for sheer lust of slaughter, and preferred to study the ways of
the harmless animals rather than shoot them. Only against dangerous beasts
did he wage relentless war.
Dermot knew that he could very well leave the routine work of the little
post to his Second in Command. The fort was practically a block of
fortified stone barracks, easily defensible against attacks of badly armed
hillmen and accommodating a couple of hundred sepoys. It was to hold the
_duar_ or pass of Ranga through the Himalayas against raiders from Bhutan
that the little post had been built.
For centuries past the wild dwellers beyond the mountains were used to
swooping down from the hills on the less warlike plainsmen in search of
loot, women, and slaves. But the war with Bhutan in 1864-5 brought the
borderland under the English flag, and the Pax Britannica settled on it.
Yet even now temptation was sometimes too strong for lawless men.
Occasionally swift-footed parties of fierce swordsmen swept down through
the unguarded passes and raided the tea-gardens that are springing up in
the foothills and the forests below them.
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