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.