26o CASUALS IN THE CAUCASUS 



In the forests and mountains where we hunted I 

 never heard of or met a single native who had seen a 

 leopard within rifle range. Keebeet, the head forester, 

 had once lured a fine specimen, whose skin adorned a 

 divan in the great room in the castle, to its death 

 by placing poison in a dead chamois. How hungry 

 must that mistaken leopard have been ! For, 

 like the Mahommedan, he is very particular how 

 his food is killed and likes to do his own butcher 

 work. 



If our first day was blank, in so far as sport was 

 concerned, it gave us another interest. That is the 

 wonder of the wild. Its unexpected introductions 

 are never the cut-and-dried affairs of civilization. 



As we breasted a hill which barred our view of the 

 snow-tipped peaks beyond, a tatterdemalion shepherd, 

 one with the rugged landscape, met our gaze. He was 

 tending the straying sheep, sometimes casting little 

 reminding stones, " thus far and no farther " messages, 

 to his flock. 



The old man looked back at us serenely, gravely, 

 with no inquisitiveness, only a simple wonder. 

 He stood with bent shoulders as one who carried a 

 mighty weight, his pose arresting in the simplicity of 

 a patient endurance, an illustrative embodiment of a 

 life of hardship and toil. The poor, weary, sunken 

 eyes, dim now, spoke of the unrewarded years, and 

 from their piteous depths the wraiths of long dead 

 hopes arose, gleaming fitfully. His hands, wonderfully 

 expressive, strong, toil-worn hands, told us more than 

 all, and in the gnarled fingers and knotted veins were 



