II. NORTH-WEST CAUCASUS.
The Caucasus includes not only the great range which gives its name to the isthmus, but also a district as large as France, bounded on the north by Russia, on the east by the Caspian, on the south by Armenia and Persia, and on the west by the Black Sea and the Azov.
In any similar area you would expect to find districts varying considerably in their fauna, but in the Caucasus the districts to the north and south of the chain vary to such an extent, that the naturalist Eichwald speaks of the ‘tall peaks of Caucasus,’ as putting the most distinct limits to the fauna of Asia and Europe.
The northern side of the chain, from what is called the Manitch depression to the foot-hills of the main chain, is simply a continuation of the steppes of Russia, a land without trees, and, until you get near the foot-hills, devoid of all game except feathered game and wolves.
To the north-west of the mountains, the great game district is that which lies along the banks of the Kuban, a river rising in the main chain near Elbruz, and flowing thence due north for a space, after which it turns sharply westward, and flows parallel to the main chain, finally emptying itself into the Black Sea. On its road from Elbruz to the sea it receives the waters of every stream which drains to the north-west of the chain; and it is here, between the Kuban and the mountains, and upon the banks and head waters of the Kuban’s tributaries, that the hunting grounds of Northern Caucasus are to be found.
Going east from Taman along the line of the Kuban, the country is broken up by huge beds of a tall reed called kamish by the natives (Arundo phragmites of the naturalists), which grows to such a height as to hide a man riding through it. In places these reed beds stretch for miles, and through them the Kuban runs, a dull sluggish flood, more like a great canal than a mountain-born river.
Its banks of black mud, however, are interesting enough to the sportsman, written over as they are with the ‘sign’ of the beasts which find safe harbour in the adjoining jungles.
Of these beasts the commonest is the wild boar, an animal which I believe grows to larger proportions, and exists in greater numbers, in the Caucasus than anywhere else on earth. A pair of tusks, the tracings of which are before me now (the originals being in the possession of Colonel Veerubof, Governor of Naltchik), measure round the outside edge 11½ ins. and 11¼ ins. respectively.
Like the European wild boar, the Caucasian beast is of a blackish-grey colour, covered with a long coat of stiff bristles, which he erects along his spine when irritated, making him appear some inches taller than he really is. Professor Radde, of the Tiflis Museum, has been kind enough to supply me with the following particulars. ‘The largest solitary boars,’ he says, ‘measured at the shoulder and measured straight, stand about 105 centimeters, and their total weight not dressed rarely exceeds 15 puds (600 lbs.).’ These are undoubtedly big beasts, but in the chestnut forests of Circassia, and in the reed beds of the Kuban, there are such rich feeding grounds that in them even a 600-lb. boar seems possible. In India, I suppose, to shoot a boar is as vile a crime as vulpecide in Leicestershire, but, except on the plains of Kabardah, there is no place in the Caucasus where the boar could be hunted on horseback, and even there the hunting would be but a very short scurry at early dawn from the maize fields to the foot-hills, the shelter of which once gained, the quarry would be absolutely safe from any mounted enemy.
Enormous as their numbers are, wild boars would be even more numerous between the Black Sea and the Caspian, were it not for their nocturnal raids on the maize fields of the natives, most of whom, being Mahommedans, only hunt the marauders in self-defence, not deigning to so much as touch them when dead. The Cossacks, of course, have no such scruples about pork, and the principal object left in life to the old scouts (‘plastouns’), who were wont to keep the Kuban red with Tcherkess blood, is the pursuit of the boar.
In the great reed beds in which they used to lurk waiting until the men of some native ‘aoul’ went out to harvest, that they might give the village to sword and flame, these same scouts wander to-day, grey as the boars they hunt, rough, savage, and uncouth as their quarry, wounded probably in a score of places, but silent-footed, enduring, and as well acquainted with every game path in the reeds as the very beasts which made them. These are the men to obtain for guides if you can get them, but beware of paying them a single kopeck as long as there is a cabak (whisky shop) within a day’s march of you. As a rule the plastoun shoots his game at night, waiting by some wallow or by the side of some swine path leading to water or fruit trees, until he hears a rustling among the reeds, sounding strangely loud in the moonlit August night, and growing nearer and nearer until between the watcher and the skyline comes a great dark bulk. Round the muzzle of his old musket the plastoun ties a white string with a large knot in it, where the foresight should be, and aiming low into the middle of the dark mass, pulls his trigger when the boar is almost on the muzzle of his rifle. My first experience of boar shooting was connected with such a shot as this; but on that occasion the victory rested with the boar. Through a long summer night I waited for my gillie to come back from his vigil by the Kuban, and at dawn he came, four men carrying him. He had wounded the old grey beast on a narrow path through the kamish, and had lain still while the boar gnashed his teeth and glared about for his foe. But the tall reeds hid the hunter, and the boar turning retraced his steps, leaving a broad blood trail as he went. Until the grey dawn the Tcherkess waited, and then, confident that he would find his enemy cold and stiff not far away, he got up and followed the tracks. Before he had gone far, there was a crash among the reeds behind him, followed by a fierce rush along the trail, and as he turned to face his foe, the keen white tusks ripped him from knee to thigh-joint and across and across his stomach, until his bowels rushed out and he lay across the pathway nearer death than the boar.
The boar’s charge
When his companions found him he had still life enough left to tell the story, and an examination of the scene of the encounter proved the extraordinary cunning of the wounded boar, who, failing to ‘locate’ his enemy when first struck, had retraced his own steps along the trail, had entered the reeds at a point higher up and on the opposite side to that from which the shot had come, and, returning by a line parallel to the trail, had lain in hiding opposite to the ambush of the hunter.
Only once in eighteen years’ wanderings have I seen anything to match this in cunning, and as it was in the same neighbourhood, I may be allowed to allude to it here.
In the Red Forest, near Ekaterinodar, the wood is cut up into square versts, divided by rides. The snow had fallen, and in one of these squares old Colonel Rubashevsky, the forester, showed me where a pack of wolves had surrounded a small band of roe deer, having taken up positions along the four sides of the square, from which, on some preconcerted signal, they appeared to have converged simultaneously upon the centre where the deer lay. They had surprised in this manner four or five roe deer, whose remains we found. But to return to the boar. If anyone should care to hunt this beast specially, the best plan to ensure success is to sit up for him at night when the pears round some Cossack settlement are fresh fallen, or else to hunt him with a small pack of hounds. Half a dozen curs will suffice, and with these, in the chestnut forests on the Black Sea, or in the lovely pheasant-haunted woods near Lenkoran, very good sport may be obtained, for not only will the boar, shifting rapidly from holt to holt in an almost impervious tangle of thorns, tax the endurance of the hunter to the utmost, but should that hunter be tempted to take a snap shot at the black quarters and crisply curling tail of which he gets a glimpse as it vanishes into dense covert, it is a thousand to ten that the next thing which he sees will be the other end of the gallant beast coming straight for him at something less than a hundred miles an hour. There is no beast alive for whose uncalculating courage I have so much admiration as I have for the boar’s. I have seen him scatter a pack of hounds nearly as big as mastiffs (they were mongrel harlequins) and go straight for the hunter. I have seen a sow with her back broken trying to worry with her teeth a hound nearly as big as herself, and fighting till death stiffened her muscles, and I have also seen an old boar, with a bullet in his neck, trying for my wind like a pointer trying for birds, and as angry as a drunken Irishman who can find no one to fight with. Luckily, he gave me a broadside shot at him before he had discovered my whereabouts.
As to a locality suited for hunting boar, it is hard to choose in the Caucasus. Wild swine swarm on the coast of the Caspian; they are the road-makers and chief denizens of the kamish jungles on the Kuban; they abound in all the scrub oak districts among the foot-hills, but perhaps they are most numerous where Circe tended her herds of old, on the wooded slopes near the Phasis, between Sukhoum and Poti. Like most beasts, they are more or less nocturnal in their habits, coming out to feed on the peasants’ crops, wild fruit, oak-mast, chestnuts, or the roots of the common bracken at dusk, and retiring during the day to the densest thorn thickets, where neither sun nor man can molest them, and where the thick black mud is most moist and dank.
A smooth-bore (No. 12), with a round bullet in it, is the handiest weapon for shooting wild boar over hounds, as with it you can make better practice snap shooting in the dense jungle than you could possibly hope to make with a rifle.[5]
But the kamish beds and the foot-hills hold nobler beasts of chase even than the wild boar. Besides the tracks of the roe and the wild swine, the hunter’s eye will be gladdened now and again by the big track of the ollèn, although the proper habitat of this noble beast is in the foot-hills and the lower ridges of the main chain.
The ollèn is the red deer of the Caucasus, and is found from the Red Forest (‘Krasnoe Lais’), near Ekaterinodar on the Kuban, to the snows on the mountains of Daghestan. Naturalists may be able to detect some points of difference between this deer and the red deer of Europe and the wapiti of the New World. To the ordinary hunter he is the same beast, only that in size he more nearly resembles the great stag of America than our Scotch red deer.
Mr. St. George Littledale puts the ollèn midway in size between the bara singh of Cashmere and the wapiti, whilst Dr. Radde, curator of the Tiflis Museum, maintains that the quality of their food makes the only difference (a difference merely of size) between the wapiti, bara singh, ollèn and red deer. When I hunted the ollèn I had no notion that I should ever be called upon to carefully discriminate between them and their kin in other countries, so that I am obliged to rely upon my memory for any points of difference, and memory only suggests that whereas the wapiti rarely (if ever) has ‘cups’ on his antlers, the ollèn royal has the peculiar cup formation as often as the red deer. Again, the call of the Caucasian stag in the rutting season (September) is similar to that of the Scotch stag, and does not resemble the weird whistle of the wapiti. In size both of body and antler the ollèn comes very near to the great American stag. The dimensions of four heads, obtained by Mr. Littledale at one stalk, will give a very fair idea of the average size of ollèn heads, and a glance at the illustration taken from a photograph of this gentleman’s bag for 1887 will convey an idea of the general character of ollèn heads as well as of the sporting capabilities of the Caucasus. In this photograph, to make it a complete record of his year, Mr. Littledale should have included trophies of boar and bear which also fell to his rifle.
On the day upon which Littledale’s four heads were obtained, this fortunate sportsman, lying on a ridge near the summit of the divide, looked down at one coup d’œil upon a dozen old male tûr in an unstalkable position, two bears whose skins (it being in August) were not worth having, a chamois scorned as small game, and the stags which he ultimately bagged.
MR. ST. G. LITTLEDALE’S CAUCASIAN BAG FOR THE SEASON OF 1887
The following are the dimensions of three of the four heads referred to; the fourth, a 12-point head, had some of the velvet still clinging to it in shreds, and the dimensions I see are not given.
| Points | Girth of beam | Length of brow antler | Length from skull to tip along the curve of antler | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| (1) | 14 | 6¾ inches | 20 inches | 44½ inches |
| (2) | 13 | 7 ” | 16¼ ” | 46½ ” |
| (3) | 13 | 7¼ ” | 13½ ” | 48 ” |
Compare these measurements with those of the biggest wapiti exhibited at the American Exhibition of 1887, belonging to Mr. Frank Cooper, of which the length along the curve was 62½ ins., the girth of the beam 8 ins., and the number of points 16, and it will be seen that, given as large a number of picked Caucasian heads to choose from as there were picked American heads in England in 1887, the probability is that the ollèn would not be very much surpassed by the wapiti.
Like the latter, the ollèn is daily growing scarcer. In Mingrelia, before the Russian conquest of that province, this grand red deer abounded, and for some time after that date the Russian peddlers did quite a lively trade in antlers, which they obtained by the cartload for a mere song from the natives. But ill-blood arose between the Russian officers and the native princes, which led to a wholesale slaughter of the ollèn, so that to-day it is comparatively scarce in its old haunts, although on the head-waters of the Kuban and its tributaries, and in Daghestan (where the natives call it ‘maral’), the ollèn still exists in sufficient numbers to satisfy any honest hunter. The worst characteristic of the beast is that, as a general rule, he is as fond of timber as a wapiti in Oregon.
The Caucasian ollèn has his antlers clean from about the middle of August, and his rutting season is (in the mountain regions near Naltchik) about the middle of September.
The only other deer in the Caucasus is the roe (Cervus capreolus), a pretty graceful little beast, which is plentiful on the Black Sea coast, amongst the foot-hills, and forms the principal item in the bag made at the big drives in the Imperial and other preserves of the district. The sharp bark of these little bucks, as they bound away unseen from some thicket above you, or a glimpse of a group of roes standing as still as statues, dappled with the shadows of the foliage above them, are incidents in most days’ still hunting in Circassia.
In the Crimea, round Theodosia and Yalta, men may hunt specially for roe, as there is no larger game (except, they say, a few red deer near Yalta), but in the Caucasus he is only looked upon as useful for filling up the void in one’s larder.
After all, in big game hunting half the charm lies in the mystery of the dark silent forests and the mist-hidden mountain peaks. Once well away from the haunts of men, you are in a land of romance, and if you do not actually believe in the eternal bird who broods upon Elbruz, at the sound of whose voice the forest songsters become dumb, and the beasts tremble in their lairs; if you don’t believe, as the natives do, that the tempests are raised by the flapping of her hoary wings; if you scout the camp-fire stories of the tiny race seen riding at night upon the grey steppe hares; you have still some superstitions of your own—you look for some wonder from every fresh ridge you climb, in every dim forest that you enter. In America it is the hope of a 2,000-lb. grizzly or a 20-in. ram which buoys up the hunter; on the head-waters of the Kuban, on the Zelentchuk, on the Urup, on the Laba, and especially upon the Bielaia river beyond Maikop, in the least known and most unfathomable wooded ravines from which the Kuban draws his waters, it is the rumour of a great beast, called zubre by the natives, which draws the hunter on.
If the zubre differs at all from the aurochs,[6] he is the only beast left, now that Mr. Littledale has slain the Ovis poli, of which no specimen has fallen to an Englishman’s rifle.
That a beast nearly allied to the great bull of Bielowicza does exist, and in considerable numbers, in the districts indicated, there can be no doubt. A fine is imposed by the Russian Government upon anyone who slays a zubre, and this in itself goes a long way to prove the beast’s existence; but there is better evidence than this. In 1879 I knew of two which were killed as they came at night to help themselves in winter to a peasant’s haystack, and in 1866 a young zubre was caught alive on the Zelentchuk and sent to the Zoological Gardens of Moscow, where the savants decided that he was identical with the aurochs of Bielowicza. Unfortunately the chance of adding the head of a zubre to the sportsman’s collection is becoming more and more remote, as, in addition to the law protecting the beast, the districts in which he is most common are now included in a preserve set apart for the sons of the Grand Duke, who formerly ruled at Tiflis.