42 BIG GAME SHOOTING 



minds one rather of the Syrian bear than of any other variety 

 of the tribe. 



Unfortunately, I have never killed one of these bears myself. 

 Every man who has shot bears anywhere knows that it is a 

 good deal a matter of chance whether you meet one or not, and 

 with this particular kind of bear chance has been against me ; 

 but I have found their tracks above the snow-line ; and I have 

 had exactly the same story repeated to me year after year in dif- 

 ferent villages by the natives. On the Balkar pastures in 1888 

 the herdsmen told me that they had suffered very severe loss 

 from this beast's depredations, and sold me a fresh skin of a 

 bear of this kind which they had slain on one of the high passes 

 between Svanetia and Balkaria, after putting eleven bullets 

 into him. I have seen some dozens of skins, among them 

 those of bears in every stage from cubhood to toothless old 

 age, and in all the marking was like the marking of the skin 

 I bought in Balkaria, a coat of silvery grey with a broad pure 

 white collar round the neck. 



The coats of bears, I know, vary enormously. I have in my 

 own library at this moment skins of ,the same variety which 

 differ in hue, from a brown which is nearly black to a pale 

 straw' colour ; but amongst them all the Caucasian mountain 

 bear's skin looks distinct. The native hunters all believe as 

 firmly in the existence of two distinct varieties of bear in their 

 mountains as Western trappers believe in the grizzly as distinct 

 from the black bear ; and I agree with and believe in the 

 hunters. 



In a Western camp the tales told at night are invariably 

 of the ' grizzly.' He is the devil of the mountains. In the 

 Caucasus and in Russia it is otherwise. 



The Russian peasant makes Mishka (a pet name for the 

 bear) the comic character of his stories. The ' bogey ' of the 

 woods on the Black Sea coast is the ' barse,' of whom all sorts 

 of terrible yarns are spun. Most of them, I fear, are lies. In 

 nine cases out of ten the barse is merely a lynx, of which 

 there are very many all along the coast, and in the foot-hills 



