TYROL AND THE TYROLESE 



fare was waged between keepers and poachers, and 

 many a stalwart fellow has lost his life for the sake 

 of the nimble mountain antelope. Nowadays, 

 though here and there a man is shot, poaching is 

 restrained, and carried on, in a less sanguinary 

 manner ; and if it comes to a struggle, the rifles are 

 generally laid aside, and the contending parties 

 fight the matter out with their bergstocks. 



The ibex, or Steinbock, to give it its German 

 name, is now but a memory of the past, as far as 

 the Tyrol is concerned. Two hundred years ago, 

 however, the mountains that overlook Mayrhofen 

 sheltered almost as many ibex as chamois on their 

 steep slopes. This district was then the property 

 of the Archbishop of Salzburg. It was on account 

 of the number of lives lost in the fights between 

 keepers and poachers that led John Ernest, an 

 Archbishop of a more peaceable but less sport- 

 loving disposition than his predecessors, to give 

 orders, in the early part of the eighteenth century, 

 that the ibex were to be no longer preserved. 



Most of our beaters were, I believe, guilty of an 

 occasional little sporting expedition on their own 

 account. Even Wechselberger, who, in his native 

 village of Mayrhofen, combined the peaceful and 

 law-abiding professions of tailor, hair-dresser, and 

 guide, told me, with a knowing wink, that the 

 gemsbart on his hat had once adorned the back of a 



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