CHAPTER VI
THE CHAMOIS
By W. A. Baillie-Grohman
Chamois are to be found in all the higher mountain systems of Central and Southern Europe. They are indigenous to timber-line regions from the Caucasus to the Pyrenees, and from the Carpathians to the Alps of the Epirus. Switzerland and the Austrian Alps have, however, always been their chief home. To the sportsman the latter region, with its large estates and sport-loving landed aristocracy, offers a much more inviting field than does Switzerland, where the republican spirit and peasant proprietorship make the preservation of game by individuals almost impossible, and the chase in consequence uncertain and difficult. It is fair, however, to add that the efforts made by several of the Swiss Cantons in the course of the last ten or twenty years will presumably prevent the extermination of the chamois in Switzerland, which but for strictly enforced regulations would at one time have been only a matter of a few years. That the democratic spirit of republics is not one favourable to the preservation of game, we can see by the dire results it has worked in the Great Transatlantic Federation, where some species of feræ naturæ have practically become extinct.
The experience of those who have killed or tried to kill chamois in the Pyrenees or in Albania would show that sport in those countries is somewhat uncertain, and to obtain it lengthy expeditions have to be undertaken, which in the majority of cases, the writer’s not excepted, are not successful. It will therefore, we are inclined to think, best serve the practical purposes of these volumes if prominence is given to chamois shooting in those regions of the Central Alps which may be considered the true home of that sport.
In Tyrol, the Bavarian Highlands,[7] Upper Austria, and Styria, the regions best adapted for chamois shoots are in the hands of the Austrian nobility, or of the Imperial House, or of foreign potentates, who in their own countries cannot establish chamois drives. Besides these large and well-guarded preserves, there are also peasant-shoots where strangers can with comparative ease procure permission to stalk. With few exceptions, to one of which more detailed reference will be made, the sport obtainable in peasant-shoots is poor; for where it is open to the natives (born mountaineers, and as keen and hardy sportsmen as can be found anywhere), game is in consequence of constant molestation more difficult of approach, and less plentiful than in preserves where, with the exception of a fortnight or two in the autumn, it is never disturbed. In the peasant-shoots chamois are never driven but always stalked, and the stranger attempting to do as the natives do must make up his mind to undergo very hard work, put up with very rough fare, and must consider himself lucky if he manages to get a shot the third or fourth day out. Indeed, there can be no better test of a man’s love for sport or of his woodcraft than to let him attempt to get a chamois in a peasant’s-shoot unassisted by native hunters. On the other hand, to stalk chamois in a preserve under the guidance of a keeper is really a very ordinary matter; good wind, a fairly clear head, and moderately good eyesight are the chief qualifications beyond the knack of doing exactly what one is told.
The spy chamois
The nature of the ground where chamois are found differs vastly. Thus in the Bavarian Highlands where the shooting rights are almost entirely in the hands of the Royal House, and where game is very closely guarded, the mountains frequented by chamois are low, hardly reaching beyond timber-line, and so easy to ascend as to almost allow a man on horseback to climb their slopes. Here stalking is sometimes easier than deer stalking is in Scotland, for there is more cover for the sportsman. In an easy country such as this, a rigorous day and night watch has to be kept up, and poaching is made a matter of life and death; indeed, in the eyes of the Bavarian keeper, his Tyrolese neighbour used to be regarded much in the same light as the American frontiersman looks upon redskins, i.e. the only good Indian he knows is a dead Indian. Chamois poachers are by no means to be placed on the same low level as Bill Sikes or Tom Stubbs of evil mien, who sneak about English preserves. The ‘Freeshooters of the Alps,’ as they are often called, are invariably brave fellows, who literally take their lives in their hands, and are not moved by mercenary motives, but by their inborn love of the chase. As a rule, they make the best and most faithful keepers; experience in hundreds of cases testifying to the correctness of the old saying, that a good keeper is but a good poacher turned outside in. No finer specimens of manhood can be discovered than among such reformed and unreformed poachers, and most of the great lords take pride in having the most dare-devil fellows and best cragsmen as keepers. Their whole lives are passed in the great silent solitudes of timber-line, and for weeks at a time they don’t see a human being, and undergo hardships of which the ordinary dweller in civilisation has no conception.