TUR HUNTING 145 



searching for a bit of flat ground whereon we could 

 erect our tents, and which also presented a few grass 

 spears for the animals, when a great reverberation 

 sounded through the ravine. Another crack, and a 

 bullet ricochetted ominously close to our heads, and 

 struck the cliff face above. 



Kenneth shouted protestingly until the echoes j angled , 

 and from far above came a faint answer. 



There, on the sky-line, peering down at us over the 

 peak of a gaunt ridge, like a row of decapitated heads, 

 were four sportsmen, out, as we afterwards discovered, 

 after tur. 



The line of heads disappeared, and were so long in 

 reappearing we almost forgot them. Trying to light a 

 fire in a spot where trees grow only in little bushes, 

 sparse at that, and the wind blows a hurricane, makes 

 you forget anything, save how to keep the thing going. 



Two Russians rounded a spur of rock, attended by a 

 game-warden and a Lesghian guide, all attired alike 

 in the everlasting tscherkesska, which the Muscovite 

 affects to have found so comfortable. To Kenneth it 

 proved the most impeding and vexatious kit he had ever 

 struggled with, and it took longer to put on, he said, 

 in its various complicated sections, than any other 

 garment yet invented. Having enthusiastically 

 adopted the gear to the extent of leaving his own 

 civilized clothes behind him in Tiflis, he had to dree 

 his weird to its bitter sartorial end. 



The new-comers evinced no surprise at the sight of us, 

 neither did they explain the bombardment. They 

 took it as the most natural thing in the world to find 



