44 STRANGE COINCIDENCE. 



superstitious idea that the killing of this animal would be 

 attended with bad luck to the slayer. And, strange to say, 

 the experienced and well-known sportsman who shot it, on 

 the same day met' with a serious gun accident. This curious 

 coincidence is no camp-fire yarn, for the sportsman was an 

 old and intimate friend, and I saw him shortly after the 

 accident happened. The gooral is found all over the Hima- 

 layan ranges, from the higher to the lower and outer ones, but 

 seldom below an altitude of 3000 feet, and always on craggy 

 and precipitous ground, which may or may not be more or 

 less clad with forest. 



As the terms lower or outer, middle, and higher or upper, are 

 so frequently used in these pages to distinguish the various 

 mountain-ranges of the great Himalayan chain, when de- 

 scribing the haunts of game, I may mention that the first 

 apply to those rising directly from the plains or from the 

 Terai, the second to those more in the interior of the moun- 

 tains, and the third to the spurs of the snowy range and the 

 precipitous, either open or forest-clad, slopes immediately 

 below it. The " snowy range " needs no definition. But to 

 revert to our pursuit of the game little gooral. 



I had seemingly been but a very short time asleep when 

 my slumbers were rudely disturbed, and I was informed that 

 Baloo Mar was waiting to accompany me up the hill. After 

 the usual cup of tea and a biscuit, we were soon climbing 

 the steep ascent, where our way led up through forest of oak 

 and rhododendron, or over open grassy slopes which were 

 white and crisp with frost. As we neared the summit, just 

 before sunrise, I could not resist the temptation, or perhaps, 

 from having "bellows to mend," I should call it the in- 

 clination, to sit down and cast a look over the succession of 

 mountain-ridges and deep trough-like valleys stretching away 

 far and wide between us and the mighty frozen barriers of 

 the snowy range. Some of the highest pinnacles had already 

 begun to flush up with that exquisitely beautiful but utterly 



