Either my luck has been particularly bad (and I think it has, as the Colonel got a fine bear below Gulmarg, and had another chance at Rainawari), or else there are not so many bears in real life as exist in the imaginations of those who know. My own theory is, that, unless he has remarkable luck, a stranger, in the hands of an ignorant shikari, and knowing nothing of the language, has but a remote chance of sport. If the shikari does not happen to know the district thoroughly, he is necessarily in the hands of the villagers, and has to trust to them to arrange the beats and place the guns. The villagers want their four annas for a day’s shouting, but do not know or care if a bear is in the neighbourhood, so, having planted the gun (and shikari with him), they proceed to beat after their own fashion, in other words to stroll, in Indian file, like geese across a common, along the line of least resistance, instead of spreading out and searching all the thickest jungle.
Much yelling serves both to cheer the sahib, and frighten away any bear which might otherwise haply frighten them.
I cannot say I regret the time I have spent looking for bear. The scenery has always been fine—sometimes magnificent, and there has always been a certain cheering hope, which sustained me as I lay hour after hour in the Malingam Nullah, or sat expectant amid ever varying and always beautiful glades and passes, watching the bird life, and storing up scenes and memories which I know I shall never forget.
Alas! we have but a very few days yet before us in Kashmir, and it is lamentable, for now the climate is simply perfect, the air clear and clean, and without the haze of summer; the first crispness of coming autumn making itself felt most distinctly in the early hours of morning ere
“Nor dim nor red, like God’s own head,
The glorious sun uprist;”
and each dawn saw us up and out to watch these sunrises, whose splendour cannot be expressed on paper. This morning it was more than usually wonderful, the whole flank of Nanga Parbat and his lesser peaks, turning from clear lemon to softest rose, stood radiant above the purple shades of the great range which lies around Gurais. In the middle distance, rising above the level yellow of the plain, still dim and shadowy below the morning light, rolled wave upon wave of the blue hills which hold in their embrace the fruitful Lolab. At our feet the deodars, still dark with the shadow of night, crept up the dewy slope upon whose top we stood. Then suddenly
“The sanguine sunrise, with his meteor eyes,”
flamed over the eastern ridges, and in a flood of glory the soft shadows and pallid lights of the dawn became merged in the brilliance of a Kashmir autumn day.
Our march yesterday from Rainawari to Kitardaji was charming. I had no idea that this Machipura country, which is not much visited by summer sojourners in Kashmir, was so fine. The district lies along the lower shoulders and foothills of the Kaj-nag, and, while lacking the savage grandeur of the Lidar or Upper Sind, yet possesses the charm of infinite variety and, in this early autumn, a climate in which it is a pure joy to live. On leaving Rainawari we followed up a river valley for some distance, and then wound through richly cultivated hollows and past well-wooded hills, where the dark silver firs and the deodars were lit up by splashes of scarlet and orange, and the deciduous sumach and thorn-bushes hung out their autumn flags. Walnuts—the trees in many places turning yellow—were being gathered into heaps, and the apple trees, reddening in the autumn glow, hung heavy with abundant fruit.
Turning into a narrow gorge, where the trees overhung the path and shaded the wanderer with many an interlaced bough; where ferns grew in great green clumps, and the friendly magpies chattered in the luminous shade, I hurried on, having stayed behind the others to sketch. Up and up, till only pines waved over me, and the track, leading along the edge of a deep khud, opened out at last upon a plateau, hot and sunlit; here an entrancing panorama of Nanga Parbat and the whole range of mountains round Haramok caused me to stop “at gaze” until a mundane desire for breakfast sent me scurrying down the dusty and slippery descent to Larch, where I found, as I had hoped, the rest of the party assembled expectant around the tiffin basket, while the necromancer, Sabz Ali, had just succeeded in producing the most delightful stew, omelette, and coffee from the usual native toy kitchen, made, apparently, in a few minutes with a couple of stones and a dab of mud!