526 Notes on Sport and Travel x 



something 'no canny' about the mountain -side ; 

 some eddy had perhaps reached his delicate nostrils 

 laden with the taint of an intruder. With his head 

 high in the air, and his ears pointed forwards, he 

 stood examining, as wiser brutes than he sometimes 

 do, every point of the compass but the right. One 

 foot was advanced ; one moment more and he would 

 have gone, when crack ! close to my ear, just as I 

 was screwing up my nerves for a long shot, went 

 Joseph's heavy rifle. With a sinking heart I saw 

 the brute take a tremendous bound, all four hoofs 

 together, and then, like a rifle-ball glancing over the 

 bosom of a calm lake, bound after bound carried 

 him away and away over the snow-field and round 

 the corner of our right, before I had recovered my 

 senses sufficiently to take a desperate snap at him. 



What we said, or felt, or how we got over the 

 face of that cliff, I know not. A dim recollection of 

 falling stones and dust showering round us, — pieces 

 of treacherous rock giving way in our hands and 

 under our feet, bruising slides, and one desperate 

 jump over the chasm between the cliff and the snow, 

 — and there we were, both standing pale and 

 breathless, straining our eyes for some scarcely 

 expected trace of blood to give us hope. 



Not a drop tinged the unsullied snow at the 

 place where he had made his first mad bound, nor 

 at the second, nor at the third ; but a few paces 

 farther on one ruby-tinged hole showed where the 

 hot blood had sunk through the melting snow. 



