420 SPORT IN THE HIGHLANDS OF KASHMIR chaiv 



bear stopped to listen, as is the wont of his kind. I 

 saw a mass of black amongst the bushes some lo or 

 12 yards off, and promptly put a .303 bullet into the 

 middle of it. The bear gave a howl and bolted off, and 

 I knew he was hit. I had purposely used the Lee- 

 Metford, because I knew the terrible injury that one of 

 its split bullets does to an animal's interior, and it was 

 impossible in the gloom to do more than make sure of 

 hittine the beast somewhere. But when it came to 

 tracking him in jungle alive with thorns and creepers, I 

 wanted something with more stopping power, so took 

 the Paradox 12 bore from the shikari, and slipping in 

 a couple of ball cartridges, started to follow. Abdulla 

 came immediately after, carrying the .303, and the chota 

 shikari behind him. 



There was plenty of blood, and there was no difficulty 

 in seeing which way the bear had gone, but the stuff he 

 had gone through was so tangled, that we had consider- 

 able difficulty in forcing a path for ourselves. The 

 bushes had mostly thick branches, which would not bend 

 near the ground, and we often had to lie down flat, and 

 crawl through as best we could. It was possible to see 

 some 3 or 4 yards ahead, so if he had charged, I should 

 have had the time he would take to cover that distance, 

 to get my gun up, and this should have been enough. 

 We went on like this, till it became too dark to see the 

 blood properly in the deep shade we had to work in, and 

 we gave it up for the night. 



Next morning we took up the track where we had 

 dropped it the previous evening, and for a time had no 

 difficulty in following the trail. But the blood was 



