The Chamois at Home 

 Peter Antony Mattli 



Goschen Alp, Switzerland 



The silence was suddenly interrupted by the rep ort of a gun ; an 

 event unusual enough in these high and lonesome regions to 

 immediately attract our attention and to make us forget our tea, 

 now ready, which we had so fondly anticipated during the last hour 

 of our climb. 



Did he get it? Did he miss his mark? 



The field-glass ! The field-glass, cried Jack and having rescued 

 them from the bottom of my knafsack, he began to examine a 

 rather large incline of rocks and cliffs which formed a part of the 

 opposite moimtainside. For, as he quite aptly remarked; that 

 was the only place where a chamois could make a living; the rest 

 of that mountainside being covered with steep rugged icefields and 

 glaciers which indeed completely surrounded that particular rock 

 formation and seemed to make it absolutely impossible for any- 

 thing but birds to approach it. 



But chamois, as everybody knows, are good climbers and show a 

 curious predilection for even such wild inaccessible regions and the 

 right kind of an Alpine hunter will yet find it possible to get 

 through where other men would declare it impossible. 



Jack located the animal before long in the upper part of the 

 incline just mentioned. Passing horizontally over the narrow 

 brow of a wall which made a sheer drop of some 1 500 feet to the 

 valley below, it evidently intended to reach a chasmlike gulley 

 or split, which somewhat further to the right seoarated that moun- 

 tain in two and dropped from the upper icefield to the valley at an 

 angle of about 80 degrees. 



Jack predicted that the steepness of that chasm together with 

 the wall below and the overhanging glacier above would obHge the 

 chamois to return and run into the himter. 



But that this was not to be the case, became evident before long. 

 Jack was all excitement; he might have made a splendid cheer 

 leader; he yelled at us at every move and jimip of the animal, from 

 the moment it entered that chasm, in a manner worthy of an 

 auctioneer, never for once realizing that we without glasses were 

 absolutely incapable of seeing it, much less to observe its feats. 



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