HOUGH NOTES OF TRAVEL .AND SPORT. Ill 



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I expected hi tn to be. He was there not twenty yards below me, and 

 our eyes seemed to meet at the same moment ! Off he bolted ; and 

 with as much steadiness as I could I aimed at the vanishing white 

 object, and fired. He did not even swerve, and I quickly fired again 

 but he galloped on round a boulder and out of eight. Mamdu (who 

 was clo^e behind) said he thought the first shot had hit him, and 

 1 had that sort of instinctive feeling 1 the rifleman knows of having 1 

 been on both shots; but in the gloaming one could not be sure, and 

 it was with no little trepidation that I descended to enquire. We 

 soon caught sight of him, standing about 100 yards off at the base 

 of a cliff, partly hidden by a yew-tree ; and sitting down I fired, 

 when he made a rush, and vanished beyond the free. Coming up, 

 after few moments of suspense, Mandu said : '* Got him." And there 

 he lay, quite dead with bullet No. 1 in the middle of his back, No. 2 

 chipping a little bit off his right horn, and No. 3 through his shoul- 

 der and heart. He is a burra wallah to look at, and does not belie 

 his looks, his horns being 46 inches round the curve, 13 inches in 

 girth, and 30^ inches between the tips. A prize, indeed ! We soon 

 had a fire blazing and made ourselves ready for the night. We had 

 no blanket, but it was not cold ; there was a little water in the cha- 

 gul, which, with some scraps of tiffin remaining in the basket, 

 and the invariable pipe, sufficed for dinner. I could not sleep, how- 

 ever, — hating this sort of lodging on the cold ground— and spent 

 the night, as usual on such occasion, in smoking and adding fuel to 

 the fire. The old billy-goat favoured us with a "bouquet de bouc" 

 more powerful than pleasant whenever the zephyr came round from 

 his vicinity • but " bukri bonus est odor qualibet ex re," as Vespasian 

 might have observed had he been present, and I would not object 

 to such a perfume distilled from such a stalk, every day of the year. 

 Yet I must say that I never felt less keen to take a wild animal's 

 life than I did to slay that magnificent old markhor ; he looked so 

 dignified and venerable with his flowing grey beard and noble mien, 

 that I could not help thinking him like one of those reverend 

 patriarchs that Blake had drawn so well in his Book of Job, or 

 Flaxman in his Dante ; but the primaeval savage in me prevailed, 

 and the noble old chap succumbed to Holland and Holland, after 

 escaping in the morning. 



May 10th. — Having had no dinner and no sleep, the climb up was 

 tiresome; but things have an end, and I got in, dined and break- 

 fasted, and went to bed. In the afternoon I put arsenical soap on 



