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.
III. SOUTHERN SLOPES OF THE CAUCASUS
The black hills and the pine forests on the northern side of the chain are the favourite haunts of the red deer and the aurochs, as the reedy bed of the Kuban is the favourite home of the boar and the pheasant; but though bears are found on the northern slopes in fair numbers, occurring sometimes even above the snow-line, the true home of Michael Michaelovitch (as the peasants call him) is on the sunny slopes of the southern side of the chain, as for instance in the great wild fruit districts of Radcha, between the Kodor and the Ingur, or in the sweet-chestnut forests and deserted orchards of Circassia.
The change from one side of the main chain to the other is as marked to-day as ancient legend made it It is a change from a northern land of storm and mist and pine forest to a land of tropical luxuriance, of rank vegetation, of enervating sunshine. Vines and clematis, and that accursed thorny creeper which the Russians call ‘wolfs-tooth,’ form impenetrable veils between the trees, while huge flowering weeds, thickets of rhododendron and azalea, and jungles of the umbelliferous angelica pour down dew upon you in the morning until every rag of your clothing is soaked through, or later on in the day impede your progress and render every footstep noisy.
Through all this wild tangle of forest growth run the brown bears’ paths. Down below are tracts of wild currant bushes; in the gullies made by the mountain brooks are patches of raspberry canes, and leading to them, from the cool lairs higher up (which he affects at noontide), are the broad pathways down which the lazy old gourmand half walks, half toboggans, just as the sun goes down, when you can hardly tell the outline of his clumsy bulk from the other great silent shadows which people the gloaming.