HISTORY OF THE CHAMOIS AND ITS CHASE
Marvellous stories of the chamois’s wily artfulness in evading the hunter have from time immemorial been told. For instance, that when cornered by its pursuers it would hang itself by the crook of its horns from ledges overhanging deep precipices to evade the hunter’s ken. As late as forty years ago, absurd nonsense was still being written about the chamois. Thus an English author gravely quotes: ‘The chamois hunter rarely shoots his game, but drives it from crag to crag till further pursuit becomes impossible, when he draws his knife and puts it to the side of the chamois, and the animal pushes it into its body of its own accord!’
To the chamois’ blood valuable medicinal qualities were for many centuries ascribed, and the healing properties of the famous ‘Bezoar stone’ (Ægagropilæ) have been vaunted and written about by numerous authors from Pliny to Lebwald. This ball-shaped secretion, consisting of resinous fibres and hairs, is occasionally found in the stomach of very old bucks, and is really the result of the unnatural contraction of the muscles of the stomach, which in the chamois consists of four much more distinctly separated divisions than is usual with other ruminants. Up to fifty years ago these stones (which occasionally reach the size of a billiard-ball) fetched their weight in gold, and they were considered specifics for half a dozen deadly ills, among them ‘the loss of one’s intestines,’ as Pliny calls a malady which it is to be hoped has since disappeared.
Emperor Maximilian I. chamois hunting A.D. 1500 (from ‘Theuerdank’)
In the Middle Ages, before the invention of gunpowder, the chase of the chamois must have been infinitely more arduous than it is to-day. They were usually stalked, and were killed either with the cross-bow or with spears thrown like javelins. These were shafts 9 ft. long with thin tapering lance points, and a skilled man could throw them with fatal effect a distance of forty steps. The great mediæval sportsman, Emperor Maximilian, has left us some quaintly worded descriptions and pictorial representations of chamois stalking and its dangers. He was undoubtedly the first to use the unwieldy ‘fire-tube’ weighing 20 or 22 lbs., with its forked prop and fuse which was carried in the hand, and which had to be lighted with steel and flint before game hove in sight. The only bit of advice smacking of our own luxury-loving much-beservanted sport four centuries later, is the quaint remark of the royal sportsman: ‘that it is a convenient thing to have at one’s side a trusty man with good lungs to keep the fuse alive.’
CHAPTER VII
THE STAG OF THE ALPS
By W. A. Baillie-Grohman