In spite of the stories told in his honour, I am inclined to think the Caucasian leopard as great a cur as the panther of the States, which he resembles a good deal in his habits. My own experience of the beast is, however, limited. In a district which I used to hunt a certain barse had his regular beat, appearing even to have a particular day of each week allotted to each little district in his domains. One moonlight night I was obliged to sleep by myself in a ruined château, once the property of General Williameenof, standing where the shore and the forest met. The old Caucasian fighter had made no use of the land given him by a grateful government, so the roof had come off the château, the trees had climbed in through the empty frames of the great low windows, and I flushed a woodcock in the nettles which grew on the hearth.
At midnight I woke, the moonbeams and the shadows of the boughs making quaint traceries on floor and ceiling, whilst underneath the window, a barse was expressing his earnest desire to taste the flesh of an Englishman, in cries in which a baby’s wail and a wolf’s howl were about equally represented.
The brush was too thick for me to be able to get a shot at my visitor that night (though I got a shot on a subsequent occasion), and though I wandered about among the trees looking for him, and went to sleep again lulled by his serenade, he never dared to attack me. Hence I fancy that the Caucasian bogey is as harmless as other bogeys.
Everything on the southern slope of the Caucasus warns you that you have left Europe behind you. It is not only the jackals’ chorus at sundown, or the antelopes’ white sterns bobbing away over the skyline, but now and again a report comes in that somewhere down by the Caspian a man has killed or been killed by the tiger.
I have even seen the tracks of ‘Master Stripes’ myself, and sat up for nights over what a native said was his ‘kill,’ not very far from Lenkoran.
Still tigers are too scarce to take rank amongst the great game of the Caucasus.
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.