THE CAUCASUS 35 



muscles, and I have also seen an old boar, with a bullet in 

 his neck, trying for my wind like a pointer trying for birds, 

 and as angry as a drunken Irishman who can find no one 

 to fight with. Luckily, he gave me a broadside shot at him 

 before he had discovered my whereabouts. 



As to a locality suited for hunting boar, it is hard to choose 

 in the Caucasus. Wild swine swarm on the coast of the Caspian ; 

 they are the road-makers and chief denizens of the kamish 

 jungles on the Kuban ; they abound in all the scrub oak dis- 

 tricts among the foot-hills, but perhaps they are most numerous 

 where Circe tended her herds of old, on the wooded slopes 

 near the Phasis, between Sukhoum and Poti. Like most 

 beasts, they are more or less nocturnal in their habits, coming 

 out to feed on the peasants' crops, wild fruit, oak-mast, chest- 

 nuts, or the roots of the common bracken at dusk, and retiring 

 during the day to the densest thorn thickets, where neither sun 

 nor man can molest them, and where the thick black mud is 

 most moist and dank. 



A smoothbore (No. 12), with a round bullet in it, is 

 the handiest weapon for shooting wild boar over hounds, as 

 with it you can make better practice snap shooting in the 

 dense jungle than you could possibly hope to make with a 

 rifle. 1 



But the kamish beds and the foot-hills hold nobler beasts 

 of chase even than the wild boar. Besides the tracks of the 

 roe and the wild swine, the hunter's eye will be gladdened now 

 and again by the big track of the ollen, although the proper 

 habitat of this noble beast is in the foot-hills and the lower 

 ridges of the main chain. 



The ollen is the red deer of the Caucasus, arid is found 

 from the Red Forest (' Krasnoe Lais '), near Ekaterinodar on 

 the Kuban, to the snows on the mountains of Daghestan. 

 Naturalists may be able to detect some points of difference 

 between this deer and the red deer of Europe and the wapiti of 



1 This \\ as written before the author had had experience of the Paradox, 

 the best of all weapons for bush shooting. C. P.-W. 



]) 2 



