216 COLD QUARTERS. 



bullet finished him. He was a fine, dark, shaggy buck 

 with good horns, and about the last animal we might have 

 expected to see on such ground, where his appearance was 

 most unaccountable, for there were no tahr haunts within 

 at least thirty miles of it. Eamzan told me that he re- 

 membered only once before having seen a " kras," as he 

 called him, on the Nouboog hills. This one was evidently 

 a stranger in the land, and might perhaps have been chased 

 from his own rocky fastnesses by wild dogs. It was the 

 rutting season, however, and love is sometimes the cause 

 of strange freaks. After hunting here for a day or two 

 without firing a shot, we moved camp towards the head 

 of the Nouboog glen, whence the shepherds with their 

 flocks had now descended from the higher pasturages. 



The following afternoon, when we were far up on the hill, 

 ragged fragments of mist began to circle and toss wildly 

 about the mountain-tops, and snowflakes soon commenced 

 drifting thickly and rapidly past us ; so we sheltered under 

 the lee of some blocks of rock in a little birch coppice. 

 How we shivered with cold as the bleak chilling blast 

 whistled drearily through the birches and whirled away 

 their withered leaves before it ! For several hours we sat 

 dolefully there, crouching over a little spark of fire, for we 

 dared not light a bigger one lest the smoke should alarm 

 the deer. I had not even the solace of my pipe, which I 

 had stupidly forgotten to bring with me ; so I had recourse 

 to Eamzan's snuff-box as a substitute for a smoke. It was 

 still snowing, and the lessening light warned us that it was 

 time to be moving downwards, when just then our drooping 

 spirits were raised by the welcome voice of a stag on an 

 opposite hillside. The fire, to which we had been gradually 

 adding fuel as we grew colder, was instantly "doused." Ex- 

 ercise and excitement, however, soon warmed us up, and by 

 the time we neared the place where the stag had last been 

 heard, it had almost ceased snowing. But the dusk was 

 fast closing in, and had it not been for the fresh-fallen snow, 



