Getting his forefeet on the tiger's prostrate carcase, the boar now gave two or three short, ripping gashes with his strong white tusks, almost disembowelling his foe, and then exhausted seemingly by the effort, apparently giddy and sick, he staggered aside and lay down, panting and champing his tusks, but still defiant with his head to the foe." But the tiger, too, was sick unto death, and the end of this battle-royal was that he who saw it emptied the contents of both his barrels into the two stricken belligerents, and put them out of their agony.
[Illustration: "Beetle."] It is against such a fierce, resolute, and well-armed enemy that Baden-Powell loves to match his strength and cunning.

Mounted on his little fourteen-hand Waler, in pith solar topee, grey Norfolk jacket, light cords, and brown blucher boots, and grasping in his hand his deadly seventy-inch spear, he goes forth to slay the wild boar, with all the feelings of romance and knightliness which some people think vanished from the world when Excalibur sank in the Lake of Lyonnesse.
It is a battle whereof no man need be ashamed; in which only the strong man can glory.

Many a time has the wild boar hurled his great head and mountainous shoulders against the forelegs of a horse, bringing the hunter to the ground for mortal combat on foot.

Many a time has the novice, who went out as gaily and contemptuously as the fox-hunter, returned to his bungalow cut and gored on a stretcher.

He who goes up against the wild boar must, in Baden-Powell's words, "have matured not only the 'pluck' which brings a man into a desperate situation, but that 'nerve' which enables him to carry the crisis to a successful issue." When Baden-Powell returned to India from Afghanistan in 1882, he became an enthusiastic pig-sticker (for reasons which we shall give in our chapter on Scouting), and during that year he killed no fewer than thirty-one pigs.