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.