I 



362 REMINISCENCES OF A HUNTSMAN. 



whole stalk, by asking you to kill the liare, rather 

 than attempt the sport of stalking without her blood. 

 The knowledge that such ridiculous superstitions 

 exist makes me loth to trust the conduct of a day's 

 stalk to any man so possessed. Indeed, I think that 

 half the pleasure consists in stalking for a shot your- 

 self. If you are simply to follow the steps of a con- 

 ductor, there is no interest to sustain you against 

 fatifrue, and I feel mvself when so situated walking 

 mechanically, and my mind far away thinking of 

 other matters. I walk, in short, with somebody 

 else's legs, and depend on another man's eyes, and, of 

 course, am proportionately dissatisfied with him if 

 he fails in bringing me up to a deer. What I should 

 like best would be to have a young and zealous boy 

 with me to look out for the deer and show me the 

 ground, and then leave me alone to prosecute the 

 endeavour. Nothing can make me believe that it is 

 not easier for one man to approach a wild deer than 

 for three, accompanied by a brace of greyhounds ; 

 but, on expressing this opinion to Stuart, he replied, 

 " No ; the same thing would conceal us all." So the 

 same cover might in easy hills, when you approached 

 the deer behind a rise of the heather, wind and all 

 things suiting, but not when you had to pass spots 

 in bird's-eye view of the deer, or to mount a sky 

 line, or, what is just as bad, pass the water line along 

 the margin of a lake with the deer in sight above 

 you. The ill luck which usually attends me made 

 itself peculiarly manifest on the day on which I went 

 for a stalk in the wood of Gusa. Having ordered 

 myself to be called between five and six, two gillies 

 rowed me up the lake at dark, before a storm of 

 wind from the cast that, as I steered, made me 



