Starting at midnight from Teeb, or Tlee, or any other of those grim but shattered citadels of the mountain-men in the Valley of the Mamisson, you may climb until the stars fade and the dawn comes, and then, having started at a height close on 9,000 feet above sea-level, you will reach the ragged ironstone crags amongst which your game lives, just half an hour too late, although since the moment you started you have had but one short breathing space, and have plodded bravely on in the steps of the lean grey hunter who is your guide, by a track which seems to lead as persistently upwards as the flight of a skylark.
It is almost impossible to give any adequate idea of the weird desolation which surrounds the home of the Ossete and the tûr. At Alaghir, a village of the plains, some seventy-three versts from the summit of the Mamisson, there are good houses and orchards and many of the comforts of life. A few miles from Alaghir the road enters a gorge full of the fumes of sulphur, the stream becomes a milky blue, the road grows steeper and steeper, hour after hour vegetation becomes more beggarly, until at last there is no timber on the side of the gorge, only half of which gets the light of the sun at any one time; the features of man and of nature are pinched as if by the cold and misery; everything is hard and grey, and the chill of the glaciers seems to have got hold of the very heart of life.
In old days the Caucasian mountaineer had two pursuits open to him—brigandage and the chase. The shattered keeps, which no one has troubled to repair, tell the story of the first of these.
Russian cannon has knocked the eyries of the mountaineers to pieces, and cut short their career as warriors. It is for sport alone that the best of them still live, and their one sport is the chase of mountain game.
With a skin of sour milk over his shoulder, and a few thin cakes in his bashlik (hood), the Ossete will disappear for days and days among the crags which overhang his miserable home. To him the ironstone rocks are as familiar as Piccadilly to a Londoner, and wherever dark or the mountain mists may catch him, he knows of some lair under a boulder where he and his predecessors have passed many a night before. After two or three days of lonely hunting, the man comes back, if empty-handed, uncomplaining; if successful, just as silent and undemonstrative as the stones he lies down amongst. By a custom of his country, the very game he kills is not his own, but must be given to his fellows, his own share being but the massive horns, which he hides away among the blackened rafters of his hovel, or hangs on a post before the door of his tiny church.
There are, as far as I know, four varieties of mountain game between the Black Sea and the Caspian, but the country has been but very superficially explored by sportsmen, and the reports of naturalists who base their theories upon the stories of the natives are not worth much.
On the lower ridges, and on the high grassy shoulders of Svânetia, and elsewhere, chamois abound, identical in all respects with the common chamois of Switzerland and the Tyrol. Being less hunted than the European variety, the Caucasian chamois is generally found fairly low down, just above timber limit, or in summer round the lower edges of the glaciers. There is seldom a day in the mountains when the hunter will not hear that long whistle so strangely human in its note, and, turning, find that he has been detected by the mountain sentinel. In Svânetia I have seen chamois in large herds (one herd which I remember numbered at least fifty head), and every ‘sakli’ has its crevices or its roof adorned with the little black horns.
But the tûr is the mountain beast, par excellence, of the Caucasus. The chamois is looked upon as comparatively small game.
‘Tûr’ is a native name, and is applied to several different beasts indiscriminately.
When a Svân, or an Ossete, or any man, native or Russian, talks to you of tûr in the main chain between Kazbek and Elbruz, he means either Caucasian ibex or Caucasian burrhel.