48 BIG GAME SHOOTING 



CHAPTER III 



MOUNTAIN GAME OF THE CAUCASUS 

 By Clive Phillipps-Wolley 



Wild and beautiful as they are in their way, it is not in the 

 deep mountain gorges at the head of the Kuban, nor in its vast 

 reed beds, neither is it in the rich forests of Circassia, or the 

 dreary steppes of the Mooghan, that the true spirit of the 

 Caucasus dwells, and the finest sport of the country makes 

 slaves of natives and aliens alike. 



Round the Mamisson Pass, in the wild and beetling precipices 

 of Svanetia, wherever nature is most cruel and most forbidding, 

 lives a race of men to whom, not only luxury, but every ordinary 

 comfort of the most primitive forms of civilisation, is unknown. 



Stronger tribes than theirs drove them, in the dark ages, 

 irom the rich plains below into the mist-hidden fastnesses in 

 which they now dwell. 



Their villages are perched at heights var)'ing from 6,000 to 

 9,000 feet ; \Si€\x pastures are such dizzy slopes as lowlanders 

 would hesitate to climb ; their harvests travel down to the 

 villages in rough log toboggans, the impetus afforded them by 

 their own weight and the precipitous nature of their descent 

 ^eing their only motive power ; while the houses in which the 

 natives crouch for shelter from the bitter blast are mere 

 irregular cairns of grey stone, without windows, smoke- 

 blackened, unfurnished, unmorticed even, and lit only by a 

 flarmg pine knot carried uphill from the nearest straggling 

 .group of stunted trees. A Russian writer says of these men 

 that ' as children they learn the lessons of life from the lammer- 



