And it speaks to the Spirit of the Fell.
For little hollows and little hills Scott's dogs, that
raved through the hollow pass amain,
Chiding the rocks that yelled again,
may have been highly effective when his mediæval sportsmen, who carried no guns, could keep within a furlong of them. But in the depths of the great mountains, with point-blank range of six hundred yards and long pops of nearly twice that, they would be preposterous. Fancy the Quorndon or the Pytchley on the flanks of the Matterhorn!
Chamois-hunting, the sporting specialty of the Swiss and the Tyrolese, appears to be dying out. The hunter of our day keeps it up rather as a tradition than as a practical pursuit. He rarely bags a "goat," for goats are very few to bag, and those few even more supernaturally fleet and sure of foot and keen of nose than their less-hunted ancestors. Still, somewhere in that upper world of lilac-white that melts into the clouds in vast but distance-softened chasms of viscid ice and rifts of gray gneiss, there is an object for him. In some nook or on some crag of the square leagues of desert that swell around him a troop of the desiderated ruminants is grazing, if grazing it can be called where grass is none. He is very sure of that. Even from the door of his chalet he scans the slopes in the half hope of detecting a flock or a single goat. His father and his grandfather before him had looked forth from the same door on the same scene, snuffed the same "caller air," mentally shaped the same pretext for yielding to the same spirit of adventure begotten of the peaks and by going forth to battle with the solitude, and hunted patiently, sometimes with success, oftener without, the progenitors of the same quarry. So he prepares himself anew for the wild and perilous tramp. A day—two or three days—may pass without the compassing of a shot, or even hearing the whistle of the sentinel goat as he shrills the alarm far out of range and leads his fellows in twenty minutes to crags the hunter cannot reach in as many hours. Death crouches in the treacherous snow-crust beneath or the poised avalanche above. A false step or an inch's miscalculation of leap may make him a waif for the lämmergeier or land him among the buried villages of the last century. He toils on until success or starvation sends him home. In the former case he out-generals his shy game after a series of manoeuvres to which the deepest stratagems of our Indians are straightforwardness personified. He gets a long shot at a distance that would make the musket or buckshot as useless as a sabre. The certainty may be apparent that the animal, if hit mortally, must fall some hundreds of feet, perhaps into an inaccessible chasm. There is no help for that. Now or never! The short rifle, assisted by a portable rest, is called on for its best. The concentrated energy of the whole chase is thrown into the long and carefully calculated aim. A thin spurt of white smoke jets forth; a sharp report echoes "from peak to peak the rattling crags among;" half a dozen chamois whisk around the next rock-buttress, and "one more unfortunate" tumbles from the verge into vacancy. The labor of days is rewarded. Securing the scanty venison if he can, the hunter is off for his hillside burrow, advertising his approach by an exultant jodel of extra nerve-splitting power.
In Great Britain the rifle, ancient or modern, like, indeed, any other firearm, has yet to establish itself as a democratic "institution." Her forests are not forests in our sense, and her mountain-dwellers know little of the rifle. In the duke of Athol's seventy-mile forest, with scarce a tree save planted larches, the stag roams by thousands, but of course the game-laws interpose, as they did eight hundred years ago, between him and the (biped) hind. He is still the reserved luxury of the Norman. So with the leagues of upland where His Grace of Sutherland has made the Highlander give place to the hart, the "lassie wi' the lint-white locks" to the Cheviot ewe—where, in short, the white Celt has been improved out of existence as remorselessly as the red man in America, and that in favor not of a superior race of men, but of feræ naturæ. Into these and similar districts, at stated seasons, sundry squads of gentlemen are turned loose. They either "pay their shot," as Punch has it, in the shape of rent, or are the guests of the noble proprietors. Their devices for circumventing the antlered monarch of the waste are amply detailed by Scrope, Hawker, Herbert and also by the late Edwin Landseer doing the pictorial department with a success attributable chiefly to his management of landscape effect, for his dogs, deer and other animals from his Æsop's fable-like groups to his four duplicated lions in Trafalgar Square, belong—heretic that we are to say it!—properly to still life, their want of action and verve placing them beneath comparison with the works of either one of a score of Flemish and French painters, from Rubens and Snyders down to Bonheur and Vernet. That his unsold pictures have brought, since his death, something like half a million proves nothing. Time was when the worthless canvases of West and Morland were equally transmutable into gold.
Like other forms of British field-sports, deer-stalking is sufficiently intricate and artificial. It is obviously the occupation of men whose primary object is more to kill time than to kill deer. According to print, from type and plate, the stag, a reduced edition of the American wapiti, is, in the heart of a little kingdom of some hundreds of souls to the square mile, as little accustomed to the sight of man and as hard to approach as he would be on the head-waters of the Yellowstone. If five or six hours' worming, ventre à terre, up the bed of a mountain-torrent, with not even a rowan-bush to aid concealment, succeed in bringing the sports-man within two hundred yards of his unconscious game, it is a good day's performance. How, the dun deer's hide once perforated, the "tail" of game-keepers, beaters and volunteer hangers-on is gathered up, the comforting toothfu' of usquebaugh absorbed by the toilers of the brae, the victim "gralloched" and suspended across the inevitable gray Highland pony that makes such a capital "first light" for the foreground, and the line of triumphant march taken up for hunting-box, clachan or castle, have we not been told to repletion? The tool used on these occasions is up to the latest requirements of modern science. Whitworth and Lancaster, thanks to their projectile's being wedged in so tight as to cause an occasional misunderstanding it and the breech-plug as to which was expected to move, have grown unpopular. The style and the patentee vary every year or two or oftener, breech-loading and the elongated bullet being the only persistent features.
Among the commonalty of Britain, within a very few years past, rifle-clubs and matches have been brought greatly into vogue under government encouragement. Austria, tu infelix this time, having served unwillingly as an experimental target, with the most distinguished and gratifying success to the experimenters, at Solferino and Sadowa, gave a new impetus to the rifle movement in England, as France, a trifle later, did to the Battle-of-Dorking school of prophetic literature. Thus it happens that the rifle is taking its place gradually by the side of fat Durhams, gooseberries, lop eared rabbits and the Derby as a popular sensation. Johnny sends over a "team," evidently in his judgment a whole one, to "shoot the American continent." His next deputation ought to be sent, after vanquishing the "blarsted" Gothamites, to the recesses of the Alleghany, and pitted there against the woodsman with his ancient weapon carrying a round ball of seventy-five to the pound, five feet long and decorated with tin sights, double trigger and mayhap flint-lock. The adventurers would beat in the long run, but they would go home not wholly unlearned. Should they stay to a turkey-shoot, they would see in it the Occidental analogue of their own public matches—more picturesque, if not quite so prim and scientific. Strictly, it presupposes conditions non-existent in England—a community, for instance, first of hunters, and second of hunters with the rifle.
This recreation, primarily belonging to localities where large game, such as deer and wild-turkeys, is found, has spread down to the cities, where it breaks out in a sporadic form about Christmas. But the hills are its home—the foot-hills, notably, of the Appalachian range, the domestic turkey not being very common higher up, nor its wild original ("original," we insist, pace the Agricultural Report ornithologist, who finds an ineffaceable distinction in the fact that the tail-ring of the one is sometimes, and that of the other never, white!) lower down.