Big game is varied and on the whole plentiful, chap. I. Fauna. but it is practically confined to the wilder portions of the Agency, where no one but the local officers can command transport, supplies or beaters and where malaria is ever present. Along the southern part of the coast, and also inland, black-buck are fairly plentiful and there are some pig, barking deer- and spotted deer, but no other game worth mention exists.Game. The hills contain wild buffalo (found nowhere else in this Presidency), bison (gaur), spotted, swamp, ravine, and barking deer, sambhur, nilghai and four-horned antelope, as well as pig, bears, leopards and tigers. The flesli of the pig is highly esteemed by many of the hill people as an aphrodisiac, and fetches high prices. The bears, as elsewhere, are very fond of the mohwa flower, and often get extremely drunk upon it. Tigers used to be a perfect pest. The reports of oven twenty years ago are full of acconuts of the panics caused by man-eaters (especially in the Golgonda Agency), which the natives picturesquely called the tiger fitúris, or ' tiger rebellions.' Some of these brutes became extraordinarily bold.People were frequently carried off in broad daylight in the villages; on one occasion a woman was taken out of her walled backyard; on another a constable forming one of a guard escorting about a hundred people back from market was killed; and one tiger used even to claw down the doors of the houses to get at the inmates. Between June 1881 and March 1883, 133 persons were killed in the Nandapuram and Pádwa taluks alone. In their terror, the people fled from their villages, avoided the gháts and left whole tracts depopulated. In Golgonda the evil was increased by the current superstition that any one who killed a tiger would come out all over stripes. One officer tried to persuade the people that an infallible safeguard against the latter disaster was to stroke one's nose slowly with the dead tiger's tail, and in 1884 a number of old police carbines were distributed among the hill men to enable them to meet the foe on more equal terms.
The most famous tiger of recent times was the Tentulakunti man-eater in the south of Naurangpur, which was credited with having killed 200 persons before it was at length slain by Mr. H. D. Taylor, I.C.S., then in charge of Jeypore estate during the Mahárája's minority.
The Government reward for tigers is Rs. 100, or more than in any other district, and these animals are now almost scarce. In the Golgonda hills the professional shikaris and skin-hunters turned the carbines supplied to them against the deer-tribe and the bison, regardless of sex and age; and they shot the latter (over the salt-licks) in such numbers that it was reported that22
