IV. PLAINS OF THE CAUCASUS
I have said that the Caucasus is divided by nature into several distinct districts: the plains of the North, the deep forests of the Black Sea coast, the great wild region at the top of the ‘divide,’ and the arid eastern steppes, deserts such as Kariâs and the Mooghan.
Each district has its typical game. On the barren lands outside Tiflis, where nothing will flourish without irrigation, except perhaps brigandage, and on the great wastes through which the Kûr and the Araxes run, there is a short period, between the stormy misery of winter and the parching heat of summer, when the steppe is green with grass and dotted with the flocks of the nomad Tartars.
Later on the sun burns up everything; the Tartars move off to some upland pastures, and the natives of the steppes have the steppes all to themselves. These natives are the wolf, the wild dog, and two kinds of antelope, not to mention the turatch, a sand grouse as fleet-footed as an old cock pheasant and as hard to flush as a French partridge. The two antelopes are Gazella gutturosa and Antilope saiga, of which the former is by far the most plentiful; indeed, in stating that A. saiga is found at all in the Caucasus, I am relying upon the authority of a Russian author (Kolenati), upon whose authority, too, I have enumerated the wild dog (Canis karagan) as among the denizens of the steppe.
Wolves, djerân (Gazella gutturosa) and turatch I saw daily in 1878, when I crossed the steppes from Tiflis to Lenkoran, before the Poti-Tiflis line had been extended to Baku. The saiga antelope, unless misrepresented in drawings and badly stuffed in museums, is an ill-shaped beast, with a head as ugly as a moose’s, the ‘mouffle’ being, like that of the moose, abnormally large and malformed. But the djerân is a very different creature, built in Nature’s finest mould, with annulated, lyre-shaped horns, coat of a bright bay with white rump, of which the hunter sees more than enough, always on the skyline, receding as the rifle approaches.
A gutturosa
In the young djerân the face is beautifully marked in black and tan and white, but the old lords of the herd get white from muzzle to brow. The illustration is from a photograph of a full-grown young buck shot at Kariâs.
There are many beasts in the world which are hard to approach. It is not easy to creep up to a stand of curlew, or to induce a wood-pigeon to get out of your side of a beech-tree: it is fairly hopeless to try to stalk chamois from below when they have once seen you—but all these feats are easy compared to the stalking of djerân on the steppes of Kariâs.
Nature has given the pretty beasts every sense necessary for their safe keeping, and, like wise creatures, they generally stay together in herds, so as to have the benefit of united intelligence, some one or other of the herd being always on the look-out while the rest are feeding. They do not appear to want water often, as no one ever tries to waylay them at their watering places (indeed, I never met anyone who knew where they went to drink), and the country they live in is flatter than the proverbial pancake, and as smooth as a billiard-table. There is hardly a tree in the whole of it; not a reasonably sized bush in a mile of it; I almost doubt if there is a tuft of grass big enough to hold a lark’s nest in an acre of it. I remember once finding cover behind a bed of thistles on Kariâs, and the incident is indelibly fixed upon my memory, I suppose, by the rarity of such comparatively rank vegetation in that country. Add to this scarcity of cover the fact that a floating population of shepherds, Tartars and outlaws from Tiflis, hunt the djerân incessantly, and it is easy to imagine that a shot at anything less than 500 yards is difficult to obtain. The Tartars have a method of their own for circumventing these shy beasts. Knowing that under ordinary circumstances even the long-haired Tcherkess greyhound would have no chance of pulling down G. gutturosa, the dog’s master manages so to handicap the antelope that the greyhound can sometimes win in the race for life. Choosing a day after a thunderstorm, when the light earth of the steppe will cake and cling to the feet, half a dozen Tartars ride out on to the steppe, each with his hound in front of him on his saddle. Having found a herd of antelope, the hunters ride quietly in their direction. Long experience has taught the antelope that at from 500 to 1,000 yards there is no danger to be apprehended either from man or horse, so that for a little while the herd fronts round, calmly staring at the intruders, and then quietly trots away, turning again ere long to have another look. From the moment the herd is first found the Tartars give it no rest, nor do they hurry its movements unduly, but are content to keep it moving at a slow trot, not fast enough to shake the caked mud off the delicate legs and feet of their quarry. In this way they gradually weary the poor beasts (who seldom have wit enough to gallop clean out of sight at once), and then, as the weaker ones begin to lag behind, the Tartar’s time comes, and, slipping his great hound, man and dog rush in upon the tired creatures. The antelope of course is half beaten before the race begins, whereas the dog is fresh and would at any time get over the sticky soil better than the antelope; so that, thanks to this and to the aid of other hounds and men who head the devoted beast at every turn, one djerân at any rate is pretty sure to reward the Tartars for their pains. To us this always seemed unfair to the antelope, besides which we had neither hounds nor horses at Kariâs, so that we had to resort to stalking pure and simple.
Long before the dawn we used to rise, and, with some local Tartar for our guide, steal out silently across the level lands. Arrived at what our guide considered a favourable spot, we would lie down and wait for dawn. As the morning approached, the cold increased; then the sky grew lighter, and the mists began to roll off the plain. By-and-bye a long string of laden camels, which must have started from camp by starlight, would appear upon the horizon, and then the sun came up and it was day. The Tartar’s idea was that when the sun rolled up the mist-curtain for the first act, a band of antelope would be seen feeding within rifle-shot; but, as a matter of fact, we only used to see those antelopes as usual making their exit over the skyline. One of the two I killed I shot at over 400 yards, going from me, and the other was found feeding behind what I think must have been the only ant-heap in Kariâs. As I had spent some days going as the serpent goes in a vain endeavour to approach a djerân unseen, I found no difficulty in stalking this comparatively confiding beast. On the Mooghan steppe the djerân is less hunted than at Kariâs; there is more cover, and the game is less shy. It may be worthy of remark that, having tasted game flesh of many kinds, including bear in America and Russia, deer of all sorts from Spitzbergen to Elbruz, white whale and a score of other questionable delicacies, I consider that there is no meat which I have ever tasted to be at all compared with that of G. gutturosa.
CHAPTER III
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.
‘STANDING LIKE STATUES’
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.
IBEX
(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 SPECTRE
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 | |
|---|---|---|
| C. cylindricornis{ | 38¼ inches 36 ” | 12½ inches 15 ” |
| C. caucasica | 40⅛” | 12⅝” |
| C. ægagrus | 48¼” | 8⅜” |
These measurements have been kindly supplied by Mr. Rowland Ward from his notebook.
Dead aurochs
CHAPTER IV
CAUCASIAN AUROCHS
By St. G. Littledale
Bos bonasus is the scientific name for the aurochs, the great ox that roamed in bygone ages over the whole of Europe: its remains are found in Spain and Great Britain on the west. How far east it ranged I cannot say, but when on the Upper Irtish in Siberia, close to the Mongolian frontier, I obtained a skull which had been dug up from the river bank. Like the American bison, it has been driven from the low ground forests and open plains, and has tried to find refuge in a secluded mountain range; and thanks to the inaccessibility and impenetrable nature of its chosen retreat it is still to be found, though in very limited numbers, in as wild and savage a state as it was in the days of Cæsar. In the forest district of Bialowicza in Lithuania, belonging to the Emperor of Russia, there are a number of them living under very efficient protection; but the Caucasus is the only place where they are still found absolutely wild. On my first visit to the Caucasus in 1887, the natives told me about the aurochs, and, fired with the idea, I made several attempts to get one; but we were too late in the year, and were, so our guides informed us, in imminent danger of being snowed up in the mountains, so we had to leave without my ever seeing a fresh track. Mrs. Littledale and I returned the following year, and for three months not a week passed without my making two or three excursions after the aurochs. We were camped just about the timber-line at an elevation of (approximately) 6,000 feet, and we only found their track in the densely timbered valleys below. There were no means of getting our camp pitched lower down, for the valleys were quite impassable for horses, and even if possible it would have been questionable policy, as such extremely shy and retiring animals would certainly not have remained within a feasible distance of our tents. The only way we got into the country at all was by following up a ridge: when the ridge ceased to be practicable then we had to stop. In the early morning I used to descend into the timber, sometimes trying the higher ground, on other days the lower; and I frequently crossed the valley and up the other side, which entailed a descent of about 3,000 feet, a similar ascent up the corresponding side, and the whole thing over again on returning to camp. We rarely saw a fresh track. The aurochs seemed to love a level piece of ground, perhaps because when the ground was level there was always a swamp with facilities for wallowing, or because, being originally a plain animal, some latent hereditary instinct made them feel more at home there than on the steep hillside. But whenever we were able through an opening of the trees to look down and see a level spot, we used to make straight for it, because we found from experience that if there were any of the animals near at hand we should find traces of them there, and if there were no tracks then it was almost useless spending any more time in that neighbourhood. I had with me Tcherkess hunters—we had not a Russian in the party that trip—and they worked very hard to get me a shot at a dombey, the Tcherkess name for the aurochs. We found places where they had stripped the bark off rowan trees, both the bark and berries evidently being a favourite food, and where they had grazed on the bracken one afternoon we thought we heard some below us.
The wind being right, we lay down for a couple of hours in the hope that they might come towards us. Presently we heard the snapping of twigs getting nearer and nearer. I made myself a little peep-hole through the bracken and cocked the rifle; about sixty yards off I saw some young fir-trees sway about as an animal forced its way through, and there stood before me, not the aurochs I had hoped for, but a young stag. He sauntered past within forty yards without getting our wind, and we then crept in the direction where we imagined the aurochs were, for the hunters were positive it was not the stag they had heard. The two men were barefooted and I wore tennis shoes, but the bracken was dead, and with all our care it was impossible to go through it without making some little noise. Suddenly there was a disturbance as of an omnibus crashing through the branches, but we saw nothing; and that was the nearest I got to an aurochs on that expedition. The same weary plodding through dense timber brush and bracken, and every evening the same story, a tired frame and a clean rifle, was continued week after week till the natives told us that unless we wished to leave our baggage behind we must get out of the mountains.
The autumn of 1891 saw Mrs. Littledale and myself back in the Caucasus, and on our arrival we immediately inquired for our old hunter. He had embraced and kissed me fervently on both cheeks at parting, and we looked forward to seeing that fine old man again. He had snow-white hair, but his springy walk and keen eye made me hope that I too, at his age, might still be able to toddle along with a rifle after big game. But he had gone, emigrated with some thousands of his tribe to Turkey. The best of our new hunters was a Lesghian, who spent most of his life in the mountains, and it would have been better for him if he had spent it all there, for he only came down to the settlements to get vodky, and there he would remain till his last rouble had vanished.
We had occasion to pass through a village in changing our shooting ground, and once in the village it took us three clear days to get our Russian followers out of it; baking bread, buying sheep, changing ponies, all in turn were pleaded. At last we were ready, but the Lesghian did not show. When he arrived he was ridiculously drunk; his drunkenness taking the form of excessive politeness. If either Mrs. Littledale or I spoke to him, off went his cap and he bowed nearly to the ground. Near the village we crossed a river with some difficulty; directly he saw us well started in the water, back he doubled for the village. I recrossed at once and captured him. I thought it would keep him out of mischief if he led a baggage pony. He objected, pointing out that he was over forty, and that one of the Russians was a younger man, who ought to lead the pony. I shook my head, and said he was much too young to be trusted, but that, as I was over forty too, I arranged that he and I should lead the pony alternate versts.
I agreed, at his earnest desire, to let him have my alpenstock when he had not the pony; if he said he was tired and sat down I said it was the very thing I was dying to do; when he wished to carry my field glasses I took a fancy to pack his rifle, and so the farce went on; Mrs. Littledale was in fits of laughter at us. But he was worth the trouble, and knew more about the habits of the game than all the rest of them put together. Before we camped that night he was himself again, and he had no other opportunity of breaking out; once or twice he expressed a wish to go down to look after his bees, and we appealed to his feelings by telling him he was the only trustworthy person in camp, and that Mrs. Littledale would not feel safe were he to leave. Little presents of tea and quinine kept him contented till we broke up our party. As an instance of a curious custom in the Caucasus, I relate the following circumstances. I had had bad luck in losing a wounded beast or two, and the Lesghian told me the rifle wanted washing. I let him look through the barrels, which were bright as silver, for never under any circumstance do I go to sleep without first cleaning my rifle. He said it looked clean, but it wanted washing. After wounding and losing a stag, the Lesghian insisted on returning to camp. He said I might fire at all the animals in the whole Caucasus, but until my rifle was washed we should get nothing. To humour the man we retraced our steps, and I asked him to cure the rifle; he said we must wait till the morning, and then get water from different streams before any animal had drunk, or man had washed in it. The Russian hunters were equally confident of the necessity, so the following day they brought water from three different springs, carefully boiled it, and then washed out the rifle with the hot water. Whether it was owing to their fetish, or to my having substituted solid for hollow bullets, I express no opinion, though the hunters were less modest, but from that time forth I lost no more wounded beasts.
Early one August morning, with my two best hunters, I made another attempt after zubr (this being the Russian name for aurochs). We struck right down into the timber, making for a mineral spring, where we hoped to find tracks. On our way we passed and examined another small spring and found nothing fresh, but on reaching the lower spring we came on the track of a bull that had drunk there the previous evening. We followed his trail as quickly and silently as we could. The tracks showed that he had gone up the hill and had been browsing about there, and we found a comfortable bed which he had scraped out for himself in the pine needles, under a big pine with low spreading branches. We now redoubled our precaution; the head hunter went first, tracking; I, with the other man carrying the rifle, kept a sharp look-out ahead. Several hours passed, and we were still steadily creeping through dense pine woods, when the aurochs dashed out of a thicket, and down a watercourse, barely allowing us a glimpse; but soon I saw about a hundred yards off, ascending the other bank, a great ungainly brown beast. There he was at last—‘everything comes to him who waits.’ What struck me most during the moment that I was bringing the rifle up was not his size, but the extreme shortness between his knee and fetlock. Bang, bang, went the double Express, the first bullet catching him through the ribs, as he was sideways on, the other just by his tail as he disappeared into the brush. I made record time down that hill, jumping fallen trees, and loading as I went. How I escaped a broken leg I don’t know, but I got below him, and saw the beast coming down, evidently very sick. Again, again, and again, I let him have it. I ran up to within forty yards, and when he saw me he lowered and shook his head, but he was too far gone to do more. Not wishing to spoil his skull, I waited till he turned and gave him his quietus behind the shoulder; he ran twenty yards and fell on his back into a deeply cut watercourse. As we stood on the bank looking down at his great carcase, it struck me as strange that such an ungainly beast, without excessive speed or activity, with eyes and ears small in proportion to those of a stag, should have managed to survive at all in this thickly populated Europe of ours, his very existence being only known to comparatively few people. As he lay I took the following measurements:
| ft. | in. | |
|---|---|---|
| From nose to root of tail | 10 | 1 |
| From top of hoof to top of withers | 5 | 11 |
| Circumference of leg below the knee | 0 | 10 |
| ”of the knee | 1 | 4 |
| ”below the hock | 0 | 10½ |
| ”round the hock | 1 | 7 |
| Girth of body | 8 | 4 |
The last measurement, girth of body, is a little uncertain, as the beast was lying huddled up, I could not get the tape underneath him, and therefore had to measure one side and then double it. The Lesghian and I prepared to sleep out. We gralloched the bull, and a difficult and dirty business it was, as his carcase had dammed up the rivulet, and we were working up to our knees in water and blood. We took some of his rump steak, cut it into little chunks and skewered it alternately with lumps of fat on a long stick carefully trimmed. When cooked it looked and smelt so delicious that I would not then have traded those kabobs for the best dinner Delmonico could turn out. I was very hungry, and fell to with a will: the will was there but not the power. One might just as well have tried to chew a stone. Even the hunter was beaten. He tried again with liver, but as I draw the line at that, I omitted supper, and looked forward to what the morrow might bring forth. Early next morning the men came with food, &c. We cut down some small trees, barked them, and got them partially under the aurochs, then tying ropes to a horn and to each of his legs, all hands hauled first at one leg then at another, making fast the slack gained with each haul, until by degrees we got him out of the stream on to the bank. We then skinned him and cut the meat roughly off his skeleton. His bones were all carefully put into sacks. The skin, bones, and a little meat formed a heavy load for three ponies, which the men had managed to bring from camp somehow. That afternoon and the two following days we were busy drying and preparing the skin and skeleton. Having been successful with the bull, I thought I would try to get a female, so we pursued the same tactics and I eventually shot a cow, whose skin and skeleton we also preserved. Some weeks after that, I found myself face to face with a grand old bull, bigger than my first victim. We were hidden in the bush and he stood in the open wood, and grand indeed he looked. I laid my rifle down, for the temptation was great, and I would not have slain him for 1,000l. I took off my cap to him out of respect for a noble representative of a nearly extinct species. I had got what I wanted, and mine should not be the hand to hurry further the extermination of a fading race for mere wanton sport. I shot the aurochsen for the express purpose of presenting them to the British Museum, where I have every reason to believe they are extremely appreciated.
The aurochs of Europe is closely allied to the American bison (Bos americanus), but surpasses it in size. Its legs and tail are larger, and its hind quarters not so low. The mane is much less developed, composed of shorter hairs, and not extending so far back as in the New World species, in which, besides, it is of a black colour.
CHAPTER V
OVIS ARGALI OF MONGOLIA
By St. George Littledale
The Ovis argali is, thanks to his richly-coloured coat of reddish grey, an exceedingly handsome beast, but his horns, though more massive, lack the sweeping character which is the glory of the Ovis poli. So like, however, are these great sheep of the Altai and the Pamir, that Dr. Günther, to whom I am deeply indebted for much valuable assistance, says that to distinguish between them ‘is a very hard nut to crack, and perhaps the only solution will be to find a distinction (if such exists) in the osteology of the ewes.’ He adds that in the poli group the horns are less massive at the base than the horns of the argali; and that the argali has never a ruff or mane.
It was in the summer of 1889 that my wife and myself, accompanied by Mr. Whitbread and Mr. Cobbold, reached the Tabagatai Mountains in search of argali. Though anxious to help us, the Russians knew nothing for certain about the districts in which we were most likely to find our game, and such hearsay evidence as they had from the Kirghiz I knew from former experience to be utterly untrustworthy.
Our best chance appeared to be to take a line of our own, and this we eventually did, guided in our choice of ground by the consideration of elevation alone, knowing well that as a rule the biggest ‘heads’ are to be found in the highest mountains or in the largest forests. Nor had we any cause to regret our course; for, on our return journey, a flying visit to the mountains originally recommended to us proved that game in them was scarce and the dimensions of the heads insignificant.
Leaving Zaizau, on the frontier of Russian territory, with a pack train of ponies, bullocks, and camels, we travelled by an easy road through the Saiar range, into the desert, with its familiar pests of mosquitoes and horseflies and its never-to-be-forgotten odour of sage-brush and horse-sweat.
But on the high ground beyond were the great sheep which we had come so far to seek, and in the high range of the Saiar Mountains and two neighbouring ranges we had fair sport, killing not only the beasts we came especially to find, but also specimens of Antilope subgutturosa, and the ibex (Capra sibirica) which shares the ground with the argali, bears and tigers.
A passport which the natives could not read, in vermilion and yellow, secured the neutrality of those we met, but a letter of introduction to the Chinese Governor of the district procured us a typical escort of natives, excellent horsemen and good fellows, armed, however, somewhat oddly—to wit, one carrying a Russian Berdan rifle without cartridges; another provided with an old Tower musket cut off halfway down the barrel, consequently without a foresight; a third with a matchlock; and a fourth with a horn arrangement on his finger for archery. With this little army at our back we naturally threw fear to the winds, and pressed on into the strongholds of the sheep.
Like all their race we found the argali keen of scent and quick-sighted to such a degree as to make a successful stalk a feat to be proud of. Here, as elsewhere, we discovered that separate hills seemed to be set apart for the ewes and lambs, while the rams sought a dignified seclusion elsewhere.
The reddish-grey coat of the argali is an additional point in his favour, since in a country the dominant tone of which is that of a gravel walk it is extremely hard to pick out the beasts with the spy-glass. Moreover the Altai does not resemble the Pamir in its general features. The Pamir being at a much greater elevation and the ground less broken, the sheep which inhabit it neither feel the heat so much as the argali do, nor are they able to find such shelter, even if they should want it, as is afforded by the broken ground of the Altai. The lower portion of the hills we hunted in 1889 was of sandstone formation, eaten out into fantastic shapes and curious cavities, in which the sheep sought shelter from the sun, actually going to ground under rocks and in holes to such an extent as to make a search for them during the five or six hottest hours of the day absolutely useless.
The nature of the ground in which each variety of these great sheep live accounts, I think, for the different character of their horns. The wide sweep of the poli’s horns is fitting and natural in a beast whose home is on the broad rolling upland plateaux, and no less natural is it that the argali’s horns should be more contracted and heavy, since he lives in a land of rocks, where sharp corners and narrow paths are in the order of his daily life.
Perhaps it is not as easy to explain the great size of the horns of the poli, compared with those of the argali, bearing in mind the cruel climate and scanty herbage to which the former is accustomed. Added to natural advantages of scent and sight of a very high order, Ovis argali had a good deal in his favour in the land he inhabited; for, owing to the immediate neighbourhood of a good deal of snow with sun-baked rock and shale, unforeseen currents of air were continually being generated which were fatal to many a stalk, whilst upon stormy days (which were many) the wind roared and twisted about in the rocky gorges in the most exasperating manner. In the highest range, indeed, of those which we tried, which was a regular cloud trap, we were soaked to the skin nearly every day.
There is still another point in this Central Asian sport against the shooter: that is, the difficulty of judging distance consequent on the clearness of the atmosphere and the general absence of objects by which to test the relative size of your game. As a rule, the shots you get are fired from the top of one mound at a sheep on the top of another, and unless you are using a rifle with a very flat trajectory, and have (as all men should in Central Asia) a rough mental table, to suit your own eyesight, of the distances at which an eye or an ear would be visible, you are extremely likely to throw a great many shots away.
Altogether, we were somewhat unlucky in this expedition. The sheep’s habit of disappearing in cavities and under rocks from 10 a.m. until evening made the sport less interesting than the pursuit of Ovis poli, who is always ‘on view,’ and even when hard hit the extraordinary vitality of the beast not infrequently enables him to escape the hunter. However, in the second range which we tried I had fair success, bagging six or seven heads varying from thirty-six to forty inches. The ground here was a range some three thousand feet above the level of the plains, whose top was reached by occasional valleys up which it was possible to ride, while the northern face of the range was steep and rocky, a favourite haunt of Capra sibirica.
My biggest ram was killed in ground even lower than this, among the sandstone hollows of the third range which we tried, at an elevation of not more than two hundred feet above the plain. This was a nice head of fifty inches.
Before closing these notes upon the sheep of Asia, may I respectfully invite the scientific naturalist to come to the assistance of the unlearned sheep-shooter?—to whom the inconvenient question is often put, ‘Are your trophies Ovis poli, karelini, or argali?’ for to this he is constrained in his ignorance to reply ‘I’ll be shot if I know!’
Would it not be well to place on record a revised classification of the sheep of Asia, before erroneously-applied names attach too firmly by common usage?
In no contentious or captious spirit I would plead for a new and distinct classification, in which the sheep of Asia, the tûr of the Caucasus, and the ibex of the different parts of the world may be clearly distinguished the one from the other.
CHAPTER VI
THE CHAMOIS
By W. A. Baillie-Grohman
Chamois are to be found in all the higher mountain systems of Central and Southern Europe. They are indigenous to timber-line regions from the Caucasus to the Pyrenees, and from the Carpathians to the Alps of the Epirus. Switzerland and the Austrian Alps have, however, always been their chief home. To the sportsman the latter region, with its large estates and sport-loving landed aristocracy, offers a much more inviting field than does Switzerland, where the republican spirit and peasant proprietorship make the preservation of game by individuals almost impossible, and the chase in consequence uncertain and difficult. It is fair, however, to add that the efforts made by several of the Swiss Cantons in the course of the last ten or twenty years will presumably prevent the extermination of the chamois in Switzerland, which but for strictly enforced regulations would at one time have been only a matter of a few years. That the democratic spirit of republics is not one favourable to the preservation of game, we can see by the dire results it has worked in the Great Transatlantic Federation, where some species of feræ naturæ have practically become extinct.
The experience of those who have killed or tried to kill chamois in the Pyrenees or in Albania would show that sport in those countries is somewhat uncertain, and to obtain it lengthy expeditions have to be undertaken, which in the majority of cases, the writer’s not excepted, are not successful. It will therefore, we are inclined to think, best serve the practical purposes of these volumes if prominence is given to chamois shooting in those regions of the Central Alps which may be considered the true home of that sport.
In Tyrol, the Bavarian Highlands,[7] Upper Austria, and Styria, the regions best adapted for chamois shoots are in the hands of the Austrian nobility, or of the Imperial House, or of foreign potentates, who in their own countries cannot establish chamois drives. Besides these large and well-guarded preserves, there are also peasant-shoots where strangers can with comparative ease procure permission to stalk. With few exceptions, to one of which more detailed reference will be made, the sport obtainable in peasant-shoots is poor; for where it is open to the natives (born mountaineers, and as keen and hardy sportsmen as can be found anywhere), game is in consequence of constant molestation more difficult of approach, and less plentiful than in preserves where, with the exception of a fortnight or two in the autumn, it is never disturbed. In the peasant-shoots chamois are never driven but always stalked, and the stranger attempting to do as the natives do must make up his mind to undergo very hard work, put up with very rough fare, and must consider himself lucky if he manages to get a shot the third or fourth day out. Indeed, there can be no better test of a man’s love for sport or of his woodcraft than to let him attempt to get a chamois in a peasant’s-shoot unassisted by native hunters. On the other hand, to stalk chamois in a preserve under the guidance of a keeper is really a very ordinary matter; good wind, a fairly clear head, and moderately good eyesight are the chief qualifications beyond the knack of doing exactly what one is told.
The spy chamois
The nature of the ground where chamois are found differs vastly. Thus in the Bavarian Highlands where the shooting rights are almost entirely in the hands of the Royal House, and where game is very closely guarded, the mountains frequented by chamois are low, hardly reaching beyond timber-line, and so easy to ascend as to almost allow a man on horseback to climb their slopes. Here stalking is sometimes easier than deer stalking is in Scotland, for there is more cover for the sportsman. In an easy country such as this, a rigorous day and night watch has to be kept up, and poaching is made a matter of life and death; indeed, in the eyes of the Bavarian keeper, his Tyrolese neighbour used to be regarded much in the same light as the American frontiersman looks upon redskins, i.e. the only good Indian he knows is a dead Indian. Chamois poachers are by no means to be placed on the same low level as Bill Sikes or Tom Stubbs of evil mien, who sneak about English preserves. The ‘Freeshooters of the Alps,’ as they are often called, are invariably brave fellows, who literally take their lives in their hands, and are not moved by mercenary motives, but by their inborn love of the chase. As a rule, they make the best and most faithful keepers; experience in hundreds of cases testifying to the correctness of the old saying, that a good keeper is but a good poacher turned outside in. No finer specimens of manhood can be discovered than among such reformed and unreformed poachers, and most of the great lords take pride in having the most dare-devil fellows and best cragsmen as keepers. Their whole lives are passed in the great silent solitudes of timber-line, and for weeks at a time they don’t see a human being, and undergo hardships of which the ordinary dweller in civilisation has no conception.
CHAMOIS
(From an instantaneous Photograph)
The shooting season varies triflingly; in some parts of the Alps it begins in July, and ends in December, in others it begins only in August. The rutting season is in November, and that is the only time when old bucks are found constantly mingling with the does. Were it not for the inclemencies of the Alpine climate, which usually covers inhospitable timber-line with several feet of snow by the end of October, the rutting season would be the best for stalking, for chamois are then less wary, and their coats have by that time got darker in colour, and hence they are more easily seen than earlier in the season; but as a rule the chase is made impossible to all but the most hardy by the deep snow. The interesting instantaneous photograph taken of chamois during the rutting time shows how dark their coats have got by that time. September and October are as a rule the months chosen for driving and stalking. The kids, which are dropped in April, have by that time attained a sufficient growth to enable them to get their own living under the care of a foster-mother should their own parent accidentally fall a victim to the rifle of a tiro who in the excitement of a stalk has failed to distinguish the doe from the buck; by no means an easy task, for both have the same sized horns, though triflingly different in shape and position, those of the buck being a little thicker at the base and rising more parallel to each other. Speaking of horns, it may be as well to give the size of the largest of the many hundred heads of which the writer has kept record. The two largest pair are in the collections of the reigning Duke of Saxe-Coburg at the Hinter Riss, in Tyrol, and in that of Count Arco at Munich, where over seven thousand horns and antlers form a particularly interesting collection. They each measure over twelve inches along the curve and over four inches in circumference at the base; the former are those of a buck killed by the Duke in Tyrol, the other was bought by the late Count Arco. Eleven-inch heads are still obtainable, though very rare, the largest of my own killing being of that length, and four inches in circumference. A first-rate ordinary buck tapes ten inches. Abnormally long doe’s horns are also occasionally seen, but the slimness at the base invariably betrays the sex. In some of the mountain ranges isolated from other homes of chamois, the heads, in consequence of constant inbreeding, assume a certain type by which those versed in antler-lore can recognise their origin. Thus the horns will perhaps be closer together or be wider apart, or have a more or less developed crook, or stand at a slightly different angle than they ordinarily do. The chamois horns of the Epirus, the Carpathians and the Pyrenees are smaller than those found in the Central Alps, and the animals are also lighter. The weight of a good buck of the Alps is about 60 lbs., though the writer has killed one in the Dolomites weighing 73 lbs., and Tschuddi mentions an authentic instance of 125 lbs., and another of 92 lbs., the latter buck being killed in 1870 on the Santis. The does are not as heavy, ordinarily weighing from 45 lbs. to 50 lbs.
A trophy one often sees on the hats of sportsmen on the Continent is the so-called ‘Gamsbart,’ literally ‘beard of the chamois.’ This name is misleading, for these bunches are made of the hairs that grow along the backbone, from the neck to the tail. These hairs are in summer not much longer than any other part of the coat, but as the rutting time approaches they grow longer, and in November they are from six to eight inches, and the longer they are the greater their beauty in the eyes of the natives, who will pay large prices for particularly long bunches. A peculiarity little known to naturalists is the fact that when these hairs are stroked from the roots toward the tips they become positively, and when rubbed in the opposite direction they become negatively, electric.