CHAPTER III. Mountain Game of the Caucasus

MOUNTAIN GAME OF THE CAUCASUS

BY CLIVE PHILLIPPS-WOLLEY

Wild and beautiful as they are in their way, it is not in the deep mountain gorges at the head of the Kuban, nor in its vast reed beds, neither is it in the rich forests of Circassia, or the dreary steppes of the Mooghan, that the true spirit of the Caucasus dwells, and the finest sport of the country makes slaves of natives and aliens alike.

Round the Mamisson Pass, in the wild and beetling precipices of Svânetia, wherever nature is most cruel and most forbidding, lives a race of men to whom, not only luxury, but every ordinary comfort of the most primitive forms of civilisation, is unknown.

Stronger tribes than theirs drove them, in the dark ages, from the rich plains below into the mist-hidden fastnesses in which they now dwell.

Their villages are perched at heights varying from 6,000 to 9,000 feet; their pastures are such dizzy slopes as lowlanders would hesitate to climb; their harvests travel down to the villages in rough log toboggans, the impetus afforded them by their own weight and the precipitous nature of their descent being their only motive power; while the houses in which the natives crouch for shelter from the bitter blast are mere irregular cairns of grey stone, without windows, smoke-blackened, unfurnished, unmorticed even, and lit only by a flaring pine knot carried uphill from the nearest straggling group of stunted trees. A Russian writer says of these men that ‘as children they learn the lessons of life from the lammergeiers wheeling round their mountain-tops, until robbery and the chase become for them all that makes life worth living.’

It is to their hunting-grounds that a true sportsman’s eyes will always turn from plain or forest; to the region of desolate ironstone peaks by the snow-line and above it, where, amidst the chaos of an unfinished world, the tûr and the ibex, the chamois and the mountain goat, share the solitudes with the vultures and the Ossetes or Lesghians.

If the truest sport is that into which most dangers and most hardships enter; in which the odds are longest in favour of the quarry and against the hunter; in which the sportsman hunts for the love of the chase alone and not as a pot-hunter, still less for any reward of ‘filthy lucre,’ then is the ragged Ossete a prince amongst sportsmen. Unless Nature has given a man a good head, the mere sight of the Ossete’s hunting-ground is enough to turn him dizzy.

Starting at midnight from Teeb, or Tlee, or any other of those grim but shattered citadels of the mountain-men in the Valley of the Mamisson, you may climb until the stars fade and the dawn comes, and then, having started at a height close on 9,000 feet above sea-level, you will reach the ragged ironstone crags amongst which your game lives, just half an hour too late, although since the moment you started you have had but one short breathing space, and have plodded bravely on in the steps of the lean grey hunter who is your guide, by a track which seems to lead as persistently upwards as the flight of a skylark.

It is almost impossible to give any adequate idea of the weird desolation which surrounds the home of the Ossete and the tûr. At Alaghir, a village of the plains, some seventy-three versts from the summit of the Mamisson, there are good houses and orchards and many of the comforts of life. A few miles from Alaghir the road enters a gorge full of the fumes of sulphur, the stream becomes a milky blue, the road grows steeper and steeper, hour after hour vegetation becomes more beggarly, until at last there is no timber on the side of the gorge, only half of which gets the light of the sun at any one time; the features of man and of nature are pinched as if by the cold and misery; everything is hard and grey, and the chill of the glaciers seems to have got hold of the very heart of life.

In old days the Caucasian mountaineer had two pursuits open to him--brigandage and the chase. The shattered keeps, which no one has troubled to repair, tell the story of the first of these.

Russian cannon has knocked the eyries of the mountaineers to pieces, and cut short their career as warriors. It is for sport alone that the best of them still live, and their one sport is the chase of mountain game.

With a skin of sour milk over his shoulder, and a few thin cakes in his bashlik (hood), the Ossete will disappear for days and days among the crags which overhang his miserable home. To him the ironstone rocks are as familiar as Piccadilly to a Londoner, and wherever dark or the mountain mists may catch him, he knows of some lair under a boulder where he and his predecessors have passed many a night before. After two or three days of lonely hunting, the man comes back, if empty-handed, uncomplaining; if successful, just as silent and undemonstrative as the stones he lies down amongst. By a custom of his country, the very game he kills is not his own, but must be given to his fellows, his own share being but the massive horns, which he hides away among the blackened rafters of his hovel, or hangs on a post before the door of his tiny church.

There are, as far as I know, four varieties of mountain game between the Black Sea and the Caspian, but the country has been but very superficially explored by sportsmen, and the reports of naturalists who base their theories upon the stories of the natives are not worth much.

On the lower ridges, and on the high grassy shoulders of Svânetia, and elsewhere, chamois abound, identical in all respects with the common chamois of Switzerland and the Tyrol. Being less hunted than the European variety, the Caucasian chamois is generally found fairly low down, just above timber limit, or in summer round the lower edges of the glaciers. There is seldom a day in the mountains when the hunter will not hear that long whistle so strangely human in its note, and, turning, find that he has been detected by the mountain sentinel. In Svânetia I have seen chamois in large herds (one herd which I remember numbered at least fifty head), and every ‘sakli’ has its crevices or its roof adorned with the little black horns.

But the tûr is the mountain beast, par excellence, of the Caucasus. The chamois is looked upon as comparatively small game.

‘Tûr’ is a native name, and is applied to several different beasts indiscriminately.

When a Svân, or an Ossete, or any man, native or Russian, talks to you of tûr in the main chain between Kazbek and Elbruz, he means either Caucasian ibex or Caucasian burrhel.

Of the two in Svânetia the ibex is the commoner beast, while, judging by the horns found in the saklis, the burrhel is commoner in the Mamisson district. I have, however, seen the burrhel in Svânetia, and any intelligent native hunter will tell you that there are two kinds of tûr in his country, one with notched and one with smooth horns. There are now specimens of both in the Natural History Museum at Kensington, and any one who will take the trouble to compare them will find abundant points of difference, though their general similarity of appearance is enough to account for the confusion which exists among native hunters. The burrhel (Capra pallasi or cylindricornis) stands about 3 feet high at the shoulder (a big ram would stand higher), and measures from shoulder to rump about 3 inches more than that. His horns are something like the Indian burrhel’s, not being indented, and turning out laterally before bending back. The coat of the burrhel is hard and deer-like, in colour closely resembling that of the ibex, both beasts being furnished by nature with coats of reddish brown to match the ironstone rocks amongst which they live. In the ibex (Capra caucasica) the colour and the size vary very little from the colour and size of the burrhel, but the horns are true ibex horns, curving back at once from the head towards the quarters, and deeply indented. A glance at Mr. Littledale’s trophies of 1888 will give an idea of the head of C. caucasica, while the little sketches of horns in my possession and of the head in the Kensington Museum will illustrate the difference between C. cylindricornis and C. caucasica. Before dealing with the hunting of any of these mountain beasts, all of which live in the same kind of country and are hunted in the same way, let me describe the fourth variety to which I have alluded.

C. cylindricornis and C. caucasica are found in Central Caucasus, and from personal knowledge I know that the former, C. cylindricornis or pallasi, is found also in Daghestan; but it is only in Daghestan and the neighbouring mountains, and I believe in Ararat, that that splendid wild goat, Hircus ægagrus, is to be found.

Unfortunately Ararat is an impossible country for the sportsman, as a gentleman named Kareim was in 1886, and perhaps still is, actively engaged in the native industry of brigandage; and, moreover, what few natives there are in the mountains are perpetually at war with one another, in consequence of which the Russian officials will not permit sportsmen, with or without an escort, to wander about Ararat. In Daghestan, in 1878, there were also brigands, and, if you believed the resident Russians, some of those with whom I associated were distinctly no better than they ought to have been; but to me they were the kindest of hosts, and in the part of Daghestan in which I shot, life was absolutely luxurious compared with the life in the villages of Central Caucasus, and, indeed, quite as comfortable as any healthy man need desire. The whole population is composed of shepherds and hunters; the half of their flocks being of goats, so like Hircus ægagrus in type that the suspicion that he himself was but a tame goat ‘gone wild’ would force itself upon one. The reverse of this may be the truth; but undoubtedly there are among the herds which the little Lesghians drive up to the mountain pastures every morning many old he-goats which it would be hard to distinguish from those so well set up at Kensington, or those others which I saw wild in the mountains about the Christmas of 1878.

(Hircus Ægagrus)]

Hircus ægagrus is somewhat smaller in size and lighter in build than either C. caucasica or C. pallasi. He is a rich creamy brown in colour, with a dark stripe along the spine and what a saddler would call a ‘breast-plate’ of the same colour, and dark knees and dark markings on the legs. The beast described and figured as Capra ægagrus by Mr. Sclater in the Proceedings of the Zoological Society for May 1886 seems to me to represent the animal in question.

There are three ways at least in which the mountain game of the Caucasus may be hunted. First, there is the royal method practised by the Prince of Mingrelia, who was good enough to invite me to participate in a mountain drive with him in 1887. This gentleman owns a large tract of country between Kutais and Svânetia, in which tûr and chamois are preserved. Once a year the Prince and his friends assemble their retainers, of whom every Caucasian chieftain keeps and feeds a vast number; and, having stationed the guns in the passes and runways of the mountains, the beaters drive the tûr and chamois past the guns. On one occasion I am informed that a bag of forty tûr was thus made in one day’s driving. To those who prefer grouse driving to walking up the wild old birds later on in the season, this may be fine sport. For my own part I don’t consider it so. But it is a mere matter of opinion. Then there is a second method which appeals strongly to those who care to watch Nature and her wild things closely, when they are most off their guard. This is the shepherd’s way. Wherever there are tûr, there are what the natives call springs of bitter water, in some cases mere yellow licks on almost inaccessible crags, in others big springs of water very strongly impregnated with iron. The natives are extremely fond of this water, believing that it cures all ailments and endows a man with every physical virtue, and the mountain goats are as fond of it as the men. Wherever there is such a spring or lick, the tûr will, if possible, come down to it at least once in every twenty-four hours, and the shepherds, knowing this, lie in wait for their coming. All day long, at any rate during the warm months of the year (June, July, and August), the tûr keep well up in the crags above the snow-line, where neither man nor insects nor the broiling heat of a Caucasian sun can annoy them. But as night begins to approach, the listening hunter will hear the rattling of stones upon the moraines above the glacier. The tûr are coming down to the little patches of upland pasture to feed. By-and-bye he may catch sight of them as one by one they come slowly on to a knife-like ridge of rock looking down upon the patch of sweet grass below. But they are in no hurry, and the probability is that they will stand there like statues, gazing into the gulf below, for what seems to the watcher to be half a day, and really is half an hour, while the chill mist wraps him round, numbing him with cold and gradually hiding his game from his sight. Later on, if he has crawled up to his eyrie opposite the bitter-water spring, where he has just room to curl himself up on a ledge overhanging a hideously dark profound, he may watch the moon sail up over the peaks, and towards morning he may hear again that rattling of falling stones displaced by unseen feet. Peer as he will into the silvery mists on the other side of the ravine, he can see nothing; but the falling stones continue to set his heart beating, and at last he hears that shrill bleat from which the tûr gets its local name, djik-vee. Straining his eyes to the utmost as cry after cry comes from the ‘lick,’ he at last makes out shadowy forms moving like flies across the face of the sheer rock opposite, and, praying to his patron saint, he startles the solemn night with the sharp ring of his rifle. In nine cases out of ten, if he kills anything it will be a ewe or a young ram at best; for, though the young rams and the ewes go in large herds, the old beasts keep themselves apart, retiring, so say the natives, to inaccessible fastnesses above the snow-line, and not coming down until later on in the season. This is to some extent corroborated by a note of Mr. Littledale’s to the effect that in 1886 he found the old rams in a certain remote district on the south side of the chain, 13,000 feet and more above sea-level.

But the only true way to hunt ibex is to follow them to their own haunts, and if they will go high up, then must you go higher. There is but one top to a mountain, even tûr cannot get above that; and the man who, having got to the crest of the ridge, has the hardihood to sleep there (no great hardship if he has a sleeping bag with him) is pretty sure of success, even with Capra cylindricornis. The first rule in hunting mountain game is, that if you want to get near them you must hunt them from above. A few hawks, an occasional eagle, and the great snow-partridge are the only living things which share the mountain peaks with the tûr, and from these they have nothing to fear. But watch them before they lie down for their midday siesta, and you will see how they stand and stare from their dizzy resting-place down on to the lower slopes of the mountain; notice, too, how the old solitary rams choose their beds on some narrow ledge commanding every possible approach from the lowlands. They know that man, their one enemy, lives below them, and it is for him that they are incessantly on the watch. The smoke of a camp fire on the edge of the pine forest in Svânetia, if seen, as it probably will be by some of the sentinels of the mountain herds, is sufficient to scare every beast from that side the ridge for days; for, remote as his haunts are, the tûr has been hunted by the natives for generations, and is alive to every move in the hunter’s game. But from above the tûr expects no danger, and is therefore comparatively easy to approach, always provided that no eddying gust of wind brings the scent of man to his keen nostrils. If this happens the hunter’s next view of him will be on a skyline which it would take human feet a couple of hours to reach, and the direct road to which appears impossible for anything without wings. There is only one sense in which the tûr is inferior to the lowland beasts, and that is in his hearing. A broken twig will disturb half a forest; but stones may go rattling away from under your feet, making a noise like volley-firing, and the tûr will hardly turn their heads. Presumably stone slides and the fall of single detached rocks from natural causes are so common that the ibex become indifferent to the noise.

Having then found a country, about the end of August, in which tûr are said to be plentiful, make your permanent camp just inside the edge of the forest where a tiny stream trickles from the glacier through the pine-trees. It is ten to one that, if the country chosen is really a good one for game, you will find traces of an old camp near at hand, if it be but a smooth round nest among the fallen pine-needles.

Leave your supplies and a man to look after them here, and see that the man left behind understands that if he shows himself outside the forest, or goes hunting on his own account, he will forfeit his pay.

If you can persuade a Caucasian to submit to such a thing, it would be safer to leave your man without firearms, and therefore out of the reach of all temptation to wander. As this is difficult to do, I always prefer to simply ‘cache’ my supplies and leave them unguarded. Even if they should happen to be found by some wandering Tcherkess, they will not be touched. The supplies having been cared for and a central camp established, take a sleeping bag for yourself (your man very likely will not even trouble to take his bourka with him if it is only for a couple of nights), as many flat cakes of bread as you can manage to pack, some cooked meat in the most portable form you can devise, an extra pair of moccasins, and a suit of flannel for night. This last item takes up very little room, and is worth more than all the whisky you could carry.

Let your clothes be of good stout tweed, as near the colour of the rocks as possible. Wear knickerbocker breeches, made very loose at the knee, so as not to stop your stride uphill, and get from your man a pair of the stout felt gaiters which he himself wears, to save your shins from the sharp edges of the rocks. I find that a spare bourka (native blanket) and a tanned skin are useful things to take into camp with your other stores, for making and repairing gaiters and moccasins. A pair of loose-fitting deerskin gloves, with (at any rate in September) another pair of woollen gloves inside them, are generally worn by the native hunters, and are almost a necessity. Even with two new pairs of gloves to protect them, I came home, after my last twenty-four hours in the ironstone rocks of Ossetia, with my palms badly cut and bleeding. However, that was an exceptionally rough twenty-four hours in an exceptionally rough bit of country, even for the Caucasus. Add to the above outfit an alpenstock (the point fire-hardened, not iron-shod), your rifle, with a sling to carry it over your shoulders, your stalking glass and your cartridges, with a small coil of rope, a compass, matches, tobacco, a knife for skinning, and any other small luxuries which you feel inclined to ‘pack’ on your own shoulders, or which your man offers to carry. Don’t let him have a rifle if you can help it. A Caucasian is as keen after game as a terrier after rats, and if he has a rifle it is quite on the cards that at the critical moment he may think your movements too slow, outpace you in getting to your game, or even fire over your shoulder.

I have had this happen once in my life, at the end of a long day of hard work, and think I know now what is the utmost which a man can be called upon to endure at the hands of his fellow-man.

Equipped as suggested, a man should be able to stay on the top of the ridge for three or four days, and in that time it is hard indeed if he cannot get a shot, at fairly close range, at a really good ‘head.’ In such quarters as he will have to sleep in, there is no fear that the hunter will lie abed too long; but it is worth remembering that ibex, especially, are somewhat nocturnal in their habits, and that as soon as ever it is light you should be on some point of vantage from which you can see your game returning from their feeding grounds to lie down for the day. An old tûr, when he has once settled himself for his siesta, is very hard to distinguish from the red rocks amongst which he lies, and even when you have found one or more of the really big fellows the probability is that they will be lying in some spot to which it is impossible to approach unseen.

By sleeping, as suggested, at the top of your ground, or near it, you avoid the necessity of rising at midnight; of forcing your way in the dark through thickets of tall weeds, which soak you with rain or dew; you are sure of being at your look-out station in time; you can examine several faces of the range at once, and choose that on which you see game in the most approachable position; you begin your day’s work fairly fresh, instead of being dead beaten by a stiff climb before dawn; you get a chance of stalking your game from the only point from which it can be stalked with any reasonable hope of success, and all at the price of a somewhat uncomfortable and chilly night’s rest.

There is one other point worth noticing before I tell the story of a day’s stalk as illustrating tûr-hunting generally, and my last point is this: Having fired your shot, lie still until you know certainly what the result of it has been. If you have missed, you may, if you do not show yourself, get a second shot, and this is especially the case with mountain beasts like the tûr, which do not seem to ‘locate’ sound as accurately or quickly as lowland beasts.

If the animals fired at move off at a run, wait a few moments before firing again, and you will be rewarded by seeing them pull up and stand at least once more before they are out of range. Unless you are a very first-class performer, one chance at standing game is worth a dozen at game ‘on the jump.’ Again, in any case lie still at first, for if your beast is wounded he may either lie down before going very far, or even come towards you if he has not seen you. I have had a brown bear blunder almost over me when wounded, and that not because he meant mischief, but because he had not seen me and did not know where the shot came from. Even when badly scared, game will sometimes stop for a second in full flight if the unseen hunter gives a shrill whistle. But once a tûr, unhit or wounded, has discovered the hunter, nothing will induce him to stop travelling for the next quarter of an hour, and no beasts which I know will take so much lead with them (uphill even) as rams generally, and more especially Caucasian rams.

Having elsewhere published the story of most of my own best days amongst the tûr, I have drawn upon some notes of Mr. Littledale (the most successful hunter, I verily believe, who ever carried a rifle between the Black Sea and the Caspian) for a story illustrative of tûr shooting, and have told it almost in his own words.

Being camped at the extreme limit to which it was possible to take horses, even with half-loads, and having his wife in camp with him, Mr. Littledale was obliged to rise every day by starlight and do half a day’s work before getting to his shooting grounds. In order to lighten the work for his hunters, he had sent them on to a spot higher up, some four hours’ walk from camp, there to await his coming every morning.

The interpreter he had with him was an untrustworthy sort of fellow, and the camp was full of half-wild natives, good enough men in their way, but as troublesome and mischievous as boys. This state of affairs in the main camp made it essential that, instead of sleeping where he shot, Littledale should return to camp every evening.

On the first day he rose at 2 A.M., and, guided by a native over some extremely bad going, reached the hunters’ camp by 6 A.M. Here Littledale left his guide and went on with the hunters, who were up and ready for him.

That first day Littledale saw a band of tûr feeding on a slope above his party, but as the day grew older the band made for the crags, and, in spite of all the hunters’ efforts, reached their regular haunt on an inaccessible ledge and lay down there. An attempt to get at them by making a wide détour only resulted in moving the game, although the hint of man’s proximity conveyed to them by some eddy of wind was not sufficiently strong to make them move far or fast. However, it was enough to render any further attempt useless that day; so that, after making another détour and killing a chamois on his road home, Littledale reached his camp and turned in by 8 P.M. Next morning he and his guide were delayed at starting by the mountain mists, which hid everything, so that they did not reach the hunters’ camp until 6.30 A.M. Going at once to the spot at which they had seen the tûr the day before, they hunted high and low without success, and then took a line along a ridge, which they stuck to until it grew so steep and dangerous that the guides showed signs of striking and Littledale had to give the order for ‘home.’ On their way back the party saw their old friends the tûr far away below them, with such a yawning gulf between them and the hunters as to render any attempt to reach them that day absolutely hopeless. That night Littledale reached camp at 9 P.M., and at 2 A.M. next day was again on foot. But on this third day the tûr were not upon their usual ground, and, weary with incessant early rising, hard work and hope deferred, the hunters gave way for a time to disappointment. But honest hard work generally gets its reward, if there is only enough of it, and as Littledale’s glass swept slowly over the crags and snow-fields round the point on which he lay, luck turned, and lo! there was the herd not half a mile away in a place where they could apparently be stalked with ease, whilst even the wind for once was in the right direction.

At first all went well; too well, Littledale thought. Experience had taught him that such luck could not last. Nor did it. When the stalk seemed almost at an end and success assured, he came to a sheet of snow at least 100 yards in width, set between him and the tûr, and within full view of the latter.

In vain he sought for a way round, or for some covert, however small, behind which there would be some chance of crawling across; but it was no use, there was absolutely no way for him except across that glaring white patch in full view of his game. It seemed, after all his hard work, too cruelly tantalising even for that sport of which the Russian says that it is ‘harder than slavery’; but, unfortunately, there was no help for it, so there the hunters lay, the game almost within range of them, and yet hopelessly inaccessible. As they lay silently watching, the heat which exercise had generated in their bodies slowly oozed away, the wind began to twist and shift dangerously, so that at any moment they might expect to have their presence betrayed, and down below the mist-wreaths began to gather. All at once one of these detached itself from the rest and came floating up towards the peaks. Nearer and nearer it crept up the mountain-side, until, to Littledale’s inexpressible delight, it rested for one moment upon that odious snow-patch.

That was all that was wanted, and in a moment Littledale and his companions had taken advantage of it, had flitted like ghosts through the shifting veil before it had time to pass on, and had thrown themselves, with a sigh of thankfulness, behind a huge boulder on the other side of the snow-field. They were only just in time, for as they gained their shelter the little mist floated off the snow, and the tûr, which were still above the party, began to show unmistakable signs of uneasiness.

From the boulder Littledale tried to worm himself still nearer to his quarry, but as he did so, first one and then the whole herd got slowly up, one big fellow standing, broadside on, upon a little pinnacle above the rest. Putting up the 150 yards sight, and taking the foresight very fine, as the shot was uphill, Littledale pressed the trigger, and the great ram sprang from the rock with a stagger which looked as if he had got his death-wound.

As the first beast left it, another big ram took his place upon the rock, and as the left barrel rang out he too vanished on the other side of the rock.

Uncertain as to the result of his shots, Littledale hurried to the spot, to find one tûr in extremis and the other gone.

However, the hunter, following at his leisure, pointed out the second beast, dead, within ten or fifteen yards of the first. The fact that Mr. Littledale (no novice, mind you) overlooked the second dead beast, although so close to him, gives some idea of the way in which a tûr’s rusty hide matches his surroundings.

But the game was not bagged yet, although Littledale had settled down to skin one beast, and the hunter was preparing to skin the other.

In turning his ram over, on the steep incline upon which it lay, the hunter lost control of it, and, in spite of his efforts, the dead beast broke away from him, rolling over and over at first, and then going in great bounds down the mountain until it lay on a snow-bank several thousand feet below, upon which it appeared, even through the field-glass, a mere speck. This misfortune complicated matters, and in order to save both heads, Littledale was obliged to let both hunters go down to the fallen tûr and pass the night alongside of it, whilst he was left to find his way back to camp alone. This generally sounds much easier than it is, and so Littledale found it upon this occasion. As evening approaches, the mists begin to sail about among the crags, first like great ostrich plumes, and then growing larger and more dense, until they make the smooth places difficult and the difficult places impossible. I have myself a very vivid memory to this day of a certain rock to which I had to cling for half an hour until one of these mist-wreaths floated away, leaving me almost too stiff and tired to climb down, and far too tired to climb up any higher, though a wounded ibex was above me. As for Littledale, upon this occasion he put his best foot forward and made all the speed he could to get off the ridge, and on to better going. For hours he had to grope his way along a precipitous ridge, in dense fog, throwing small stones down either side from time to time to tell by the sound whether he was still upon the main ridge or not. Only now and again did a gleam of sunshine break through the mist, and in a few hours the sun would set.

It was a horrible position for a lonely man, uncertain where his camp lay and tired with three days’ hard work; but Littledale’s cup was not yet full.

The Caucasians, like all mountaineers, are full of superstitions. Gods and devils haunt their mountains now as they did when the ancients only knew them as a part of misty Turan, the home of storm and evil, or at least the mountain men so believe. And what wonder? As Littledale stopped to scrape together a few more fragments with which to sound the abysses on either side of him, he noticed with a shudder a huge figure crouching in the mist beside him. As he sprang to his feet the awful shape reared up, and small blame to a level-headed and cool man if he did not remember, until his express was pressing against his shoulder, that there was such a thing as the spectre of the Brocken, and that this huge shape which followed and mimicked his every action was, after all, only his own shadow in the clouds.

It was long after this that, lying at the top of a ravine which had taken him an hour and a half to climb, he struck a light to find a few more pebbles and get a drink, and found as he bent down his own track of that morning.

He says the sight of it made him feel years younger, and those who have been in such tight places and found their way out of them will know the feeling; but it was 10 P.M. when he got back to his camp, and here are the last words in his notes: ‘Reached home a little after ten, had some food in bed, and registered a vow that I had done my last solitary scramble in the Caucasus.’

I have registered that vow many times, when cold, and starving, and dead tired, with hands and feet bleeding, and no massive ‘head’ to compensate me for my toil; but I have never kept my vow, and I venture to doubt whether my much more successful fellow-sportsman will keep his.

The great peaks are sorcerers whose spells no man may resist, and the feeling that every manly quality in you has been tried to the utmost, and has borne the strain, is worth more than all the cruel toil endured.

In conclusion let me say that there is so much confusion as to the correct classification of the Caucasian goats, that before venturing to publish this contribution I went for information to the British Museum, considering that the nomenclature used by that Museum should be the standard for British sportsmen. At the Museum I learned that on this particular subject even our savants are in some doubt, whilst in Russia the leading naturalists of St. Petersburg and Moscow disagree. However, Mr. Thomas courteously supplied me with the following definitions, which may be sufficient for present purposes.

Capra cylindricornis, or pallasi, is the name properly applied to the Caucasian burrhel, a beast with smooth cylindrical horns; C. caucasica is applied to the Caucasian ibex, a beast with horns recurved and modulated as in the true ibex; while C. ægagrus is an animal with horns of the common goat type, with sharp front edges irregularly modulated. The best horn measurements of these three beasts known to me are:

Length Circumference

{38¼ inches 12½ inches C. cylindricornis {36 ” 15 ” C. caucasica 40⅛ ” 12⅝ ” C. ægagrus 48¼ ” 8⅜ ”

These measurements have been kindly supplied by Mr. Rowland Ward from his notebook.