A SHOCKING MISS. 215 



As I stood on a projecting crag, disappointedly gazing 

 down in the direction the surrow had gone, the head and 

 shoulders of another suddenly emerged from behind a rock 

 not twenty yards below me. I was considerably out of 

 breath from climbing, and the space I had almost to balance 

 myself on was so limited and so directly over the animal, 

 that I missed it, or at any rate made a shockingly bad shot. 

 It must, however, have touched the beast somewhere, for I 

 was close enough to hear it give a low kind of grunt, as it 

 dashed off, like a rocket, downwards after its companion. 

 We followed a short way on its bloodless trail, and then 

 feeling much mortified at my muffish performance, made 

 straight for our new camp, which had been pitched on the 

 ridge running along the opposite side of the wide khud, in 

 the dark silent depths of which the surrow had taken refuge. 



After a late breakfast, as I sat deliberating as to whether it 

 would be worth while turning out all our men to search the 

 gorge below, on the faint chance of finding the surrow lying 

 wounded there, one of them came running to tell me he had 

 seen a surrow moving among the rocks and bushes far down 

 on the opposite face of the khud. On taking a look through 

 the glass there, I saw the beast, and, strange to say, not very 

 far from where our two friends of the morning had been lost 

 sight of. We watched it until it moved behind some bushes, 

 and as it did not reappear, we concluded it must have lain 

 down there ; so I at once arranged for attempting a drive, the 

 ground being rather unfavourable for a stalk. Sending some 

 men round behind the ridge above the bit of cover the surrow 

 had entered, I proceeded to take up a position commanding 

 as much of the steep broken ground below it as possible, 

 thinking that the animal would be certain to make for the 

 dense ringals at the bottom of the gorge. At last one of the 

 men appeared on the ridge, and pointing significantly towards 



gorge, as "pakhan" is for a precipice, "khanta" for crags, and "pahar" or 

 " teeba " for a mountain or hill. 



