34 BIG GAME SHOOTING 



a point higher up and on the opposite side to that from which 

 the shot had come, and, returning by a line parallel to the 

 trail, had lain in hiding opposite to the ambush of the hunter. 



Only once in eighteen years' wanderings have I seen any- 

 thing to match this in cunning, and as it was in the same 

 neighbourhood, I may be allowed to allude to it here. 



In the Red Forest, near Ekaterinodar, the wood is cut up 

 into square versts, divided by rides. The snow had fallen, 

 and in one of these squares old Colonel Rubashevsky, the 

 forester, showed me where a pack of wolves had surrounded 

 a small band of roe deer, having taken up positions along the 

 four sides of the square, from which, on some preconcerted 

 signal, they appeared to have converged simultaneously upon the 

 centre where the deer lay. They had surprised in this manner 

 four or five roe deer, whose remains we found. But to return 

 to the boar. If anyone should care to hunt this beast specially, 

 the best plan to ensure success is to sit up for him at night when 

 the pears round some Cossack settlement are fresh fallen, or 

 else to hunt him with a small pack of hounds. Half a dozen 

 curs will suffice, and with these, in the chestnut forests on the 

 Black Sea, or in the lovely pheasant-haunted woods near 

 Lenkoran, very good sport may be obtained, for not only will 

 the boar, shifting rapidly from holt to holt in an almost 

 impervious tangle of thorns, tax the endurance of the hunter 

 to the utmost, but should that hunter be tempted to take a 

 snap shot at the black quarters and crisply curling tail of 

 which he gets a glimpse as it vanishes into dense covert, it is a 

 thousand to ten that the next thing which he sees will be 

 the other end of the gallant beast coming straight for him 

 at something less than a hundred miles an hour. There is 

 no beast alive for whose uncalculating courage I have so much 

 admiration as I have for the boar's. I have seen him scatter 

 a pack of hounds nearly as big as mastiffs (they were mongrel 

 harlequins) and go straight for the hunter. I have seen a sow 

 with her back broken trying to worry with her teeth a hound 

 nearly as big as herself, and fighting till death stiffened her 



