CHAPTER XV.
THE RAINS.
Poti—Chasing wild boar—Red-deer—Turks and Cossacks—Sotcha—Lynxes—Game in the Caucasus—A hunting party—A wounded sow—Beautiful scene—An unexpected bag—Our cuisine—The ‘evil eye’—Overtaken by the rains—Our tent inundated—Surrounded by wolves—Cheerless days—A terrible catastrophe—Welcome help—Golovinsky—A wild scene—Eluding the storm—Fording a torrent—A refuge—Scant supplies—Cossack cradle-song—The Cossacks of to-day—Russian plantations—A terrible ride—Struggling for life—Cossack loafers—Ride to Duapsè—Forlorn days—Mad wolves—Wrestling a Tartar—Laid up with fever—Return to England.
We left Tiflis in a snow-shroud, which had, after three days’ continual fall, frozen hard. We found Poti in her spring dress, bright with violets and cyclamen. Here we were detained two days waiting for the steamer, and it may give some idea of the place, when I say that the second day was passed in hunting wild boar within a verst of our hotel, which is the centre of the town; and so successfully, that after plunging about in pools waist-deep from dawn to mid-day, we carried back a fine porker in triumph for our dinner. To help us in the hunt we had some sixteen dogs and all the able-bodied roughs of Poti, one of whom was armed with the only specimen of an ancient blunderbuss which I ever saw in actual use.
The neighbourhood of Poti must at no very distant date have been one of the most favourite habitats of the red-deer in the whole world. The Mingrelian nobles were all staunch preservers of game, and it was not until Russian greed of territory had angered them, that they in revenge for their wrongs, real or fancied, at the hands of their somewhile ally, and to deprive that ally of his favourite recreation, taken with or without their consent, slew all the tall stags and graceful roebucks in their land, whenever they could find them, by foul means or fair. So it came to pass that within the last ten years speculators have bought cartloads of stags’ horns in the neighbouring ‘aouls’ for a few roubles the load, and even to within the last three years it was still possible to find in out-of-the-way places ladders used to reach from the peasants’ ground-floor to his loft, composed entirely of the branching glory of the forest king. These things are now of the past, for the Mingrel has discovered that stags’ horns are marketable commodities: native middlemen have ferreted out every pair of antlers in the province, and established a regular trade in these and in boars’ tusks, the majority of which articles were sent to France to be made up into the hundred and one knicknacks with which people adorn their libraries. Still the red-deer is by no means extinct even now; in proof of which a gentleman working at Poti, in the capacity of a civil engineer, told me that a few months before my arrival he had been invited to a large shooting party on the domains of one of the neighbouring princes, on which occasion not less than one hundred shots were fired at red-deer during the day, although, owing to bad shooting, very few were bagged.
From Poti we steamed to Sotcha, where I was entertained by the agent of a German gentleman, Mons. G., who stayed on the estate to protect it throughout the late war. The danger to the property, he informed me, was to be apprehended not from the Turks but from the Russians, more especially the Cossacks, against whose evil doings he inveighed very bitterly. According to my authority, wherever the Turks camped during the war, private property was respected, and crops only mulcted of as much as was necessary for the immediate use of the troops. On the contrary, whereever the Cossacks were, there too was wanton destruction. Their only excuse if remonstrated with was, ‘if we don’t do it the Turks will;’ and their officers refused to interfere. At a small place in the immediate neighbourhood of Sotcha, for example—Adler or Pol Salian—the Turks never showed their noses, and yet the place is in ruins. No compensation was granted to any of the sufferers from Cossack wantonness after the war by the Government.
In Sotcha roses were in bloom when I arrived, as well as strawberries; and my host told me that a few days before my arrival he gathered half a dozen ripe strawberries in his garden, which had ripened out of doors, and this in the beginning of February. Up to the time of which I write there had been no frost at Sotcha. The chief produce of the neighbouring gardens are grapes, of which several varieties grow in great luxuriance on the slopes just above the town—if town you can call the few houses that surround the landing-place. But if the Governor has not been misinformed and is not too sanguine, Sotcha has a future, and may at no distant date develop into a second Yalta. A little table-land on the Poti side of the town has already been laid out in sites for villas, to be erected as summer residences for a number of old military officers and their families. Better still, all the sites are bought and paid for.
During the day which I lost at Sotcha waiting for horses—for of course I lost one, as every impatient traveller in this land of delays must be invariably content to do—I heard again of the fearless depredations of the lynx. During the night the dogs of Sotcha—an extremely large and influential body—were heard raising their voices in a manner altogether unusual even with them; and on inspection it was found that one large beast of half sheep-dog, half setter breed, had been killed on his chain by a lynx in the very middle of the town, and partially eaten where he lay.
It has been said that there is very little game in the Caucasus, and it was partly to correct that mistake that this book was written. To show how far from true the assertion is, Mons. G., with whom I was staying at Sotcha, told me that before the Tscherkesses left the Caucasus it was their custom to make an annual expedition to the main chain of the mountains along the Black Sea coast, between, say, Anapa and Sukhoum, to obtain game to salt for winter use. On one of these expeditions my informant accompanied seven Circassians, a few years before their evacuation of their native wilds; and, during a fortnight, of which at least a week was spent in coming and going, the eight guns made an enormous, though by no means unusually large bag, of which one single item was forty-two chamois. There were also bears, ibex, mouflon, and red-deer among the slain; and though on this occasion they saw no aurochs, Mons. G. assured me that he has seen some even more recently than that.
On the second day at Sotcha, after a row with the chief of the Cossacks, I managed to get horses for my now formidable party, composed, with the exception of myself and servant Ivan, of volunteers from the little town we were leaving. Some of these volunteers, however, when they had it finally explained to them that my little bell-tent would really only hold two, and those two would certainly be my friend Mr. Digby Lyall and myself, made up their minds wisely to stay behind; so that in the end the party only consisted of Mr. L. and myself, my servant Ivan, a guide Niko, an Imeritine—whose services, had I only been lucky enough to obtain them on my first visit, would have been invaluable—Ivan Kotoff, a Russian moujik or peasant proprietor, and a Cossack with the horses named Kalivan; while at Golovinsky I added my old ally Stepan to the motley crew. This was by far the largest party I had ever had with me in the Caucasus; and by their aid, and the aid of Stepan’s dogs, I expected to do great things with the bears and boars of Golovinsky.