Shooting antelope in Tibet is not more exciting—or interesting, for that matter—than shooting them elsewhere, and I do not know that anything special can be said about this sport beyond the fact that the number of Hodgson antelope which we met in parts of northern Tibet was sometimes extraordinarily great. These animals suffer greatly, however, from some plague, which frequently sweeps off enormous numbers of them. I have passed over places where the bones of a hundred or more of them might be seen, one near the other; and districts which I had visited in 1889, and where I had found great numbers of them, were absolutely without a sign of one when I was there again in 1892.
Of bear-hunting I can say but little. On different occasions, in various parts of northern Tibet, I killed six or eight pretty good sized brown bears; but a man would have to be blind not to be able to hit one at twenty-five or thirty yards, and it is always possible to get as near them as that, even in the open country which they frequent. They have apparently no dens, but live in the holes in the ground which they dig to get the little marmots on which they feed. These bears are, however, very fleet, as I once or twice found out when trying to ride them down on horseback, and when they nearly proved a match for the best ponies I had. The natives stand in great dread of them, and will never attack them except when there are three or four men together, when they approach them from different directions and open fire all at the same time. They say these bears are man-eaters, and even when the men with me saw them lying dead they showed great repugnance to touch the body, or even to come near them; though they might have made eight or ten dollars by splitting them open and removing the gall—a highly-prized medicine among the Chinese, who also find a place for bears' paws in their pharmacopœia.
On the whole, though Korea, Mongolia and Tibet have plenty of big game, they are not countries for a sportsman, and unless he has some other hobby to take him there, he had better seek his fun elsewhere in more accessible quarters of the globe.
W. W. Rockhill.
FOOTNOTES:
[13] See Nouvelles Archives du Museum de Paris, X., pp. 18 and 20.
Hunting in the Cattle Country
The little hunting I did in 1893 and 1894 was while I was at my ranch house, or while out on the range among the cattle; and I shot merely the game needed for the table by myself and those who were with me. It is still possible in the cattle country to kill an occasional bighorn, bear or elk; but nowadays the only big game upon which the ranchman of the great plains can safely count are deer and antelope. While at the ranch house itself, I rely for venison upon shooting either blacktail in the broken country away from the river, or else whitetail in the river bottoms. When out on the great plains, where the cattle range freely in the summer, or when visiting the line camps, or any ranch on the heads of the longer creeks, the prongbuck furnishes our fresh meat.