While the head of heads is feeding out of range?
It is there that I am going, where the boulders and the snow lie,
With a trusty, nimble tracker that I know,
I have sworn an oath, to keep it on the Horns of Ovis poli,
And the Red Gods call me out and I must go!
Kipling, The Feet of the Young Men.
Life in the East, more especially away from important centres, lacks most of the amenities which are taken as a matter of course in the civilized West. Family life is broken up, society is restricted, communications are bad, involving few and irregular posts, and health frequently suffers from the climate and from indifferent food. So much for the debit side. But fortunately there is a credit side, and for the Englishman sport is a large item on this side and does much to brighten the otherwise trying monotony of life in Asia. It also helps him to maintain his energy and health, and with it that sane outlook which is one of the main secrets of our success as a world-power.
When appointed to Kashgar I had hopes of fulfilling the ambition of a life-time by stalking one of Marco Polo’s great sheep, the Ovis poli. As a youth I had been fascinated by the record of the celebrated Venetian traveller, and after joining the army had made considerable efforts to travel in the Pamirs in 1891 and 1892. But the arrest of Younghusband, mentioned in Chapter XV., closed the “Roof of the World” to the private traveller, and it seemed as if I were not destined to tread these mysterious upland valleys. But the fates were kind. On the way to Kashgar I stopped at Petrograd, where a high Russian official, whose colleague I had been at Meshed, said that he felt sure I should wish to shoot an Ovis poli in the Pamirs. I replied emphatically in the affirmative, and it was speedily arranged that I should receive an invitation to travel in the regions which for so many years I had longed to visit.
Before describing the Ovis poli, which confers the blue riband upon the hunter of big game, both from the magnificence of the trophy and the inaccessibility of its habitat, I will quote Marco Polo, who wrote: “There are great numbers of all kinds of wild beasts [in the Pamirs]; among others, wild sheep of great size, whose horns are good six palms in length. From these horns the shepherds make great bowls to eat from, and they use the horns also to enclose folds for their cattle at night.”
The credit of Marco suffered through the ignorance of mankind, and it was not until the nineteenth century that his character for accuracy was vindicated by Lieutenant Wood, who, when he reached England in 1838 after his famous journey to a chief source of the Oxus, exhibited some skulls with horns 4 feet 8 inches long, and on the strength of these specimens the species was appropriately named Ovis poli or “The sheep of (Marco) Polo.”