44 BIG GAME SHOOTING 



Everything on the southern slope of the Caucasus warns you 

 that you have left Europe behind you. It is not only the 

 jackals' chorus at sundown, or the antelopes' white sterns bob- 

 bing away over the skyline, but now and again a report comes 

 in that somewhere down by the Caspian a man has killed or 

 been killed by the tiger. 



I have even seen the tracks of ' Master Stripes ' myself, and 

 sat up for nights over what a native said was his ' kill,' not very 

 far from Lenkoran. 



Still tigers are too scarce to take rank amongst the great 

 game of the Caucasus. 



IV. PLAINS OF THE CAUCASUS 



I have said that the Caucasus is divided by nature into 

 several distinct districts : the plains of the North, the deep 

 forests of the Black Sea coast, the great wild region at the top 

 of the ' divide,' and the arid eastern steppes, deserts such as 

 Karias and the. Mooghan. 



Each district has its typical game. On the barren lands 

 outside Tiflis, where nothing will flourish without irrigation, 

 except perhaps brigandage, and on the great wastes through 

 which the Kur and the Araxes run, there is a short period, 

 between the stormy misery of winter and the parching heat of 

 summer, when the steppe is green with grass and dotted with 

 the flocks of the nomad Tartars. 



Later on the sun burns up everything ; the Tartars move off 

 to some upland pastures, and the natives of the steppes have 

 the steppes all to themselves. These natives are the wolf, the 

 wild dog, and two kinds of antelope, not to mention the turatch, 

 a sand grouse as fleet-footed as an old cock pheasant and as hard 

 to flush as a French partridge. The two antelopes are Gazella gut- 

 turosa and Antilope saiga, of which the former is by far the most 

 plentiful ; indeed, in stating that A. saiga is found at all in the 

 Caucasus, I am relying upon the authority of a Russian author 

 (Kolenati), upon whose authority, too, I have enumerated the 



