50 BIG GAME SHOOTING 



gorge, only half of which gets the light of the sun at any one 

 time ; the features of man and of nature are pinched as if by 

 the cold and misery ; everything is hard and grey, and the 

 chill of the glaciers seems to have got hold of the very heart of 

 life. 



In old days the Caucasian mountaineer had two pursuits 

 open to him brigandage and the chase. The shattered keeps, 

 which no one has troubled to repair, tell the story of the first 

 of these. 



Russian cannon has knocked the eyries of the mountaineers 

 to pieces, and cut short their career as warriors. It is for sport 

 alone that the best of them still live, and their one sport is the 

 chase of mountain game. 



With a skin of sour milk over his shoulder, and a few thin 

 cakes in his bashlik (hood), the Ossete will disappear for days 

 and days among the crags which overhang his miserable home. 

 To him the ironstone rocks are as familiar as Piccadilly to a 

 Londoner, and wherever dark or the mountain mists may catch 

 him, he knows of some lair under a boulder where he and his 

 predecessors have passed many a night before. After two or three 

 days of lonely hunting, the man comes back, if empty-handed, 

 uncomplaining ; if successful, just as silent and undemonstrative 

 as the stones he lies down amongst. By a custom of his country, 

 the very game he kills is not his own, but must be given to his 

 fellows, his own share being but the massive horns, which he 

 hides away among the blackened rafters of his hovel, or hangs 

 on a post before the door of his tiny church. 



There are, as far as I know, four varieties of mountain game 

 between the Black Sea and the Caspian, but the country has 

 been but very superficially explored by sportsmen, and the 

 reports of naturalists who base their theories upon the stories 

 of the natives are not worth much. 



On the lower ridges, and on the high grassy shoulders of 

 Svanetia, and elsewhere, chamois abound, identical in all 

 respects with the common chamois of Switzerland and the 

 Tyrol. Being less hunted than the European variety, the 



