120 The Wilderness Hunter. 



I greatly feared it would break its horns ; an annoying 

 and oft-recurring incident of white-goat shooting, where 

 the nature of the ground is such that the dead quarry 

 often falls hundreds of feet, its body being torn to ribbons 

 by the sharp crags. However in this case the goat 

 speedily lodged unharmed in a little dwarf evergreen. 



Hardly had I fired my fourth shot when my companion 

 again exclaimed, " Look at the white goats ! look at the 

 white goats ! " Glancing in the direction in which he 

 pointed I speedily made out four more goats standing in 

 a bunch rather less than a hundred yards off, to one side 

 of my former line of fire. They were all looking up at 

 me. They stood on a slab of white rock, with which the 

 color of their fleece harmonized well ; and their black 

 horns, muzzles, eyes, and hoofs looked like dark dots on 

 a light-colored surface, so that it took me more than one 

 glance to determine what they were. White goat invari- 

 ably run up hill when alarmed, their one idea seeming to 

 be to escape danger by getting above it ; for their brute 

 foes are able to overmatch them on anything like level 

 ground, but are helpless against them among the crags. 

 Almost as soon as I saw them these four started up the 

 mountain, nearly in my direction, while I clambered down 

 and across to meet them. They halted at the foot of a 

 cliff, and I at the top, being unable to see them ; but in 

 another moment they came bounding and cantering up 

 the sheer rocks, not moving quickly, but traversing the 

 most seemingly impossible places by main strength and 

 sure-footedness. As they broke by me, some thirty yards 

 off, I fired two shots at the rearmost, an old buck, 



