Amen, brother! Yet, Reverend Caldwall is credited with 48 tiger kills. One of these he recalled as:
"The finest trophy taken from Fukien Province in years I shot in May, 1910. Two days previous to my hunt this tiger had killed and eaten a sixteen-year-old boy. I happened to be in the locality and decided to make an attempt to dispose of the troublesome beast. Obtaining a mother goat with two small kids, I led them into a ravine near where the boy had been killed. The goat was tied to a tree a short distance from the lair, and the kids were concealed in the tall grass well in toward the place where the tiger would probably be. I selected a suitable spot and kneeled down behind a bank of ferns and grass.
For more than two hours I sat perfectly still, alert and waiting, behind the little blind. I had about given up hope of a shot when suddenly the huge head of the man-eater emerged from the bush.
I had implicit confidence in the killing power of the gun in my hand, and at the crack of the rifle the huge brute settled forward with hardly a quiver not ten feet from the kids upon which he was about to spring. A second shot was not necessary but was fired as a matter of precaution. The beast measured more than nine feet and weighed almost four hundred pounds."
A family member related:
"Father's hunting was done in the spirit of the 117th Psalm. His gun did more than effectively reduce the man-eating tigers of South China. It brought us many and varied friendships. It was the key to the hearts of the mountain people, making possible the building of new churches and new schools. It even brought better health along the Coast. For the Lister Institute in Shanghai was to discover the source of the deadly fluke in the human body through a study of the tiger organs Father contributed to research. Thus it was that the rifle, together with the Bible, became a formidable weapon against the superstitions and diseases of the China Coast."
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