The natives of Radcha and the mountain forests to the north-west of that province, having but little arable land, clear small patches in the forests and grow crops of oats amongst the charred stumps. These are the places in which to wait for Bruin at night, and earn the thanks of your neighbours, as well as the brown coat of the old thief himself. I well remember once in Radcha, when the moonlight was so bright that I could read a letter by it, waiting with my Tcherkess until it grew so late that we gave up all hope of a bear that night. Suddenly a bough snapped in the forest above us, and within ten minutes a great brown shadow was biting at a bullet hole near its shoulder, after which it galloped off into the rim of gloom which hedged in our little oat-field. Within half an hour from that time the field seemed full of bears, four or five of which we could distinguish plainly, their backs moving about slowly just above the level of the crop, and all of them as silent as spectres. We got a bear every night we stopped at that camp, and left feeling sorry for the local agriculturists.
Amongst the chestnuts and old orchards between Tuapsè and Sukhoum bears are as numerous as in Radcha, and I have frequently seen half a dozen in a day’s still hunting. Being undisturbed, they feed or wander almost all day long through the still, shady forests, and though early morning and evening are the best times to look for them, the man who with moccasined feet will ‘loaf’ slowly upward, standing still from time to time to listen and to watch, will rarely go half a day without a shot, at any rate in late autumn.
Still hunting in October is the best way of obtaining game in the forests by the Black Sea; but later on in December, when the berries are over, the fruit rotten and the chestnuts eaten, the bears ‘house up’ (or hibernate), and the only chance of getting any sport at all is with hounds; even then pigs and roe deer will be your only quarry, and nine times out of ten you will waste your day hunting wild cats or jackals, your pack appearing to prefer these beasts to nobler game.
The common bear of the Caucasus is a small brown bear, like, but not as large as, his cousin of Russia, although I have once killed a young specimen (full grown, but with teeth unworn) as light in colour and as large as the ordinary Russian bear. As a rule the Caucasian bear is an inoffensive brute, but, like all his race, he will every now and then turn upon his assailants. I said above ‘the common bear’ of the Caucasus, and I said it advisedly; for, although I am aware that I may meet with contradiction from high authorities, I am myself firmly persuaded that there is another variety of bear found, for the most part in the highlands of Central Caucasus about Radcha, Svânetia, and on the uplands of Ossetia, and the head-waters of the Baksan, Tchegem and Tscherek, tributaries of the Terek.
It may well be that these bears occur elsewhere in the isthmus; but I have never seen them or their skins in the lowlands by the Black Sea. The highland bear of the Caucasus, whose tracks I have found over and over again among the snow and ice far above timber level, is called ‘Mouravitchka’ (the ‘little ant-eater’) by the natives, who allege that he is as savage as the common bear is pacific; that he preys upon the flocks and herds, which the ordinary bear never does; that he is much smaller and more active than his fruit-eating cousin of the lowlands, and that his skin is greyish in colour, with a broad white collar round the neck. The coat altogether reminds one rather of the Syrian bear than of any other variety of the tribe.
Unfortunately, I have never killed one of these bears myself. Every man who has shot bears anywhere knows that it is a good deal a matter of chance whether you meet one or not, and with this particular kind of bear chance has been against me; but I have found their tracks above the snow-line; and I have had exactly the same story repeated to me year after year in different villages by the natives. On the Balkar pastures in 1888 the herdsmen told me that they had suffered very severe loss from this beast’s depredations, and sold me a fresh skin of a bear of this kind which they had slain on one of the high passes between Svânetia and Balkaria, after putting eleven bullets into him. I have seen some dozens of skins, among them those of bears in every stage from cubhood to toothless old age, and in all the marking was like the marking of the skin I bought in Balkaria, a coat of silvery grey with a broad pure white collar round the neck.
The coats of bears, I know, vary enormously. I have in my own library at this moment skins of the same variety which differ in hue, from a brown which is nearly black to a pale straw colour; but amongst them all the Caucasian mountain bear’s skin looks distinct. The native hunters all believe as firmly in the existence of two distinct varieties of bear in their mountains as Western trappers believe in the grizzly as distinct from the black bear; and I agree with and believe in the hunters.
In a Western camp the tales told at night are invariably of the ‘grizzly.’ He is the devil of the mountains. In the Caucasus and in Russia it is otherwise.
The Russian peasant makes Mishka (a pet name for the bear) the comic character of his stories. The ‘bogey’ of the woods on the Black Sea coast is the ‘barse,’ of whom all sorts of terrible yarns are spun. Most of them, I fear, are lies. In nine cases out of ten the barse is merely a lynx, of which there are very many all along the coast, and in the foot-hills on the southern slope of the Caucasus. Now and again, as you come home late with your hounds, you may be lucky enough to tree one, but you don’t see them often. The tenth time the barse may really be what he is supposed to be, a leopard, but whether this leopard is Felis pardus or Felis panthera, I don’t know.
Professor Radde mentions both in his list of Caucasian mammals. All the skins of barse which I have ever seen were similar to the leopard skins of India and Persia, on the borders of which country, near Lenkoran, the Caucasian barse is most common.