We sent men to the village to bring in hunters and after dinner four or five picturesque Mosos appeared. They said that there were many serow, goral, muntjac and some wapiti in the forests above the village, and we could well believe it, for there was never a more "likely looking" spot. Although the men did not claim to be professional hunters, nevertheless they said that they had good dogs and had killed many muntjac and other animals.
They agreed to come at daylight and arrived about two hours late, which was doing fairly well for natives. It was a brilliant day just warm enough for comfort in the sun and we left camp with high hopes. However it did not take many hours to demonstrate that the men knew almost nothing about hunting and that their dogs were useless. Because of the dense cover "still hunting" was out of the question and, after a hard climb. We returned to camp to spend the remainder of the afternoon developing photographs and preparing small mammals.
Our traps had yielded three new shrews and a silver mole as well as a number of mice, rats, and meadow voles of species identical with those taken on the Snow Mountain. It was evident, therefore, that the Yangtze River does not act as an effective barrier to the distribution of even the smallest forms and that the region in which we were now working would not produce a different fauna. This was an important discovery from the standpoint of our distribution records but was also somewhat disappointing.
The photographic work already had yielded excellent results. The Paget color plates were especially beautiful and the fact that everything was developed in the field gave us an opportunity to check the quality of each negative.
For this work the portable dark room was invaluable. It could be quickly erected and suspended from a tree branch or the rafters of a temple and offered an absolutely safe place in which to develop or load plates. The moving-picture film required special treatment because of its size and we usually fastened in the servants' tent the red lining which had been made for this purpose in New York. Even then the space was so cramped that we were dead tired at the end of a few hours' work.
One who sits comfortably in a theater or hall and sees moving-picture film which has been obtained in such remote parts of the world does not realize the difficulties in its preparation. The water for developing almost invariably was dirty and in order to insure even a moderately clear film it always had to be strained. For washing the negative pailful after pailful had to be carried sometimes from a very long distance, and the film exposed for hours to the carelessness or curiosity of the natives. In our cramped quarters perhaps a corner of the tent would be pushed open admitting a stream of light; the electric flash lamp might refuse to work, leaving us in complete darkness to finish the developing "by guess and by gosh," or any number of other accidents occur to ruin the film. At most we could not develop more than three hundred feet in an afternoon and we never breathed freely until it finally was dried and safely stored away in the tin cans.
We left Habala, on November 28, for a village called Phete where the natives had assured us we would find good hunters with dogs. For almost the entire distance the road skirted the rim of the Yangtze gorge and there the view of the great chasm was even more magnificent than that we had left. While its sides are not fantastically sculptured and the colors are softer than those of the Grand Cañon of the Colorado, nevertheless its grandeur is hardly less imposing and awe-inspiring. If Yün-nan is ever made accessible by railroads this gorge should become a Mecca for tourists, for it is without doubt one of the most remarkable natural sights in the world.
About two o'clock in the afternoon we saw three clusters of houses on a tableland which juts into a chasm cut by a tributary of the great river. One of them was Phete and it seemed that we would reach the village in half an hour at least, but the road wound so tortuously around the hillside, down to the stream and up again that it was an hour and a half before we found a camping place on a narrow terrace a short distance from the nearest houses.
Next day we could not go to the village to find hunters until mid-forenoon because the natives of this region are very late risers and often have not yet opened their doors at ten o'clock. This is quite contrary to the custom in many other parts of China where the inhabitants are about their work in the first light of dawn.
The hills above Phete are bare or thinly forested and every available inch of level ground is under cultivation with corn and a few rice paddys near the creek; the latter were a great surprise, for we had not expected to find rice so far north. The village itself was exceedingly picturesque but never have we met people of such utter and hopeless stupidity as its inhabitants. They were pleasant enough and always greeted us with a smile and salutation, but their brains seemed not to have kept pace with their bodies and when asked the simplest question they would only stare stupidly without the slightest glimmering of intelligence.