MOUNTAIN GAME OF THE CAUCASUS 49 



geiers wheeling round their mountain-tops, until robbery and 

 the chase become for them all that makes life worth living.' 



It is to their hunting-grounds that a true sportsman's eyes 

 will always turn from plain or forest ; to the region of desolate 

 ironstone peaks by the snow-line and above it, where, amidst 

 the chaos of an unfinished world, the ttir and the ibex, the 

 chamois and the mountain goat, share the solitudes with the 

 vultures and the Ossetes or Lesghians. 



If the truest sport is that into which most dangers and most 

 hardships enter ; in which the odds are longest in favour of the 

 quarry and against the hunter ; in which the sportsman hunts 

 for the love of the chase alone and not as a pot-hunter, still 

 less for any reward of ' filthy lucre,' then is the ragged Ossete a 

 prince amongst sportsmen. Unless Nature has given a man a 

 good head, the mere sight of the Ossete's hunting-ground is 

 enough to turn him dizzy. 



Starting at midnight from Teeb, or Tlee, or any other of 

 those grim but shattered citadels of the mountain-men in the 

 Valley of the Mamisson, you may climb until the stars fade 

 and the dawn comes, and then, having started at a height close 

 on 9,00c feet above sea-level, you will reach the ragged iron- 

 stone crags amongst which your game lives, just half an hour 

 too late, although since the moment you started you have had 

 but one short breathing space, and have plodded bravely on in 

 the steps of the lean grey hunter who is your guide, by a track 

 which seems to lead as persistently upwards as the flight of a 

 Vvlark. 



It is almost impossible to give any adequate idea of the 

 weird desolation which surrounds the home of the Ossete and 

 the tilr. At Alaghir, a village of the plains, some seventy-three 

 versts from the summit of the Mamisson, there are good houses 

 and orchards and many of the comforts of life. A few miles 

 from Alaghir the road enters a gorge full of the fumes of 

 sulphur, the stream becomes a milky blue, the road grows 

 steeper and steeper, hour after hour vegetation becomes more 

 beggarly, until at last there is no timber on the side of the 



II. E 



