On September 1, 1887, a chamois was seen by an Englishman who was driving on the high-road at Frauenkirch, near Davos-Platz. The coachman also saw it, and the distance from the road to the right bank of the Landwasser, where it was first perceived, was so short that an excellent view of the animal was obtainable. It swam vigorously across the river, and disappeared in the forest beyond. Perhaps as September 1st is the date on which chamois-hunting commences, it had been driven down the valley by terror.
Chamois take freely to the water, and several instances are on record of their having been enabled by swimming to elude their pursuers.
Many hunters look upon one particular animal in the district they inhabit as a pet, and refrain from shooting it themselves, or allowing it to be shot. These favoured beasts are sometimes so tame that they linger round the alps where the chasseurs live, and allow them to approach to within a distance of a few feet.
In common with many other animals, chamois dearly love salt, and in certain districts where the rocks are flavoured with a saline taste, the animals come in flocks to lick them. The hunters sometimes put down salt for the benefit of the chamois, refraining, however, from shooting them when they come to eat it, as they might thus frighten them away from that part of the country.
There are several ways of hunting chamois. Sometimes they are driven, either as in the great preserves of the Duke of Coburg near the Achensee, that of the Archduke Victor near Kufstein, and others in Tyrol and Germany (it is needless to add that there are no private preserves in Switzerland), or in a more sportsmanlike manner, when three or four hunters drive the chamois down from their pastures at dawn, and, later on, remounting the slopes, drive them up again, often imitating the barking of a dog, towards their retreat. Here several chasseurs are lying hidden, and as soon as the animals arrive within range, they shoot. It is, of course, often difficult to drive the chamois in the right direction, but the knowledge of their haunts displayed by the hunters is frequently most astonishing in its exactitude.
The most usual way of hunting chamois is to stalk them, and I think there can be no question as to the infinite superiority of the sport thus obtained. I would here add, in the words of a sportsman, that “the wholesale slaughter of an animal that Nature herself has placed in the most sublime recesses of her creation, and endowed with such noble qualities and wonderful organisation, is a proceeding which a true sportsman ought not to countenance.”
It is supposed that there are as many as 2000 head of chamois in the Grisons alone. The oldest chamois ever shot was believed to have reached the age of forty years. It was killed in the Engadine in 1857, but its age is probably much exaggerated. As for the heaviest chamois, one weighing 125 Swiss pounds was shot on the Tschingel (Bernese Oberland). I can find no record of a chamois of greater weight than this.
It has been estimated, from measurements made on Monte Rose, that a chamois can jump crevasses sixteen to eighteen Swiss feet in width, while it can jump down twenty-four feet or so.
Every year the number of chamois shot in the Grisons exceeds 500, and in December a corresponding number of skins are offered for sale at St. Andrew’s market at Chur.