54 BIG GAME SHOOTING 



are as fond of it as the men. Wherever there is such a spring 

 or lick, the tur will, if possible, come down to it at least once 

 in every twenty-four hours, and the shepherds, knowing this, 

 lie in wait for their coming. All day long, at any rate during 

 the warm months of the year (June, July, and August), the tur 

 keep well up in the crags above the snow-line, where neither 

 man nor insects nor the broiling heat of a Caucasian sun can 

 annoy them. But as night begins to approach, the listening 

 hunter will hear the rattling of stones upon the moraines 

 above the glacier. The tur are coming down to the little 

 patches of upland pasture to feed. By-and-bye he may catch 

 sight of them as one by one they come slowly on to a knife- 

 like ridge of rock looking down upon the patch of sweet grass 

 below. But they are in no hurry, and the probability is 

 that they will stand there like statues, gazing into the gulf 

 below, for what seems to the watcher to be half a day, and 

 really is half an hour, while the chill mist wraps him round, 

 numbing him with cold and gradually hiding his game from his 

 sight. Later on, if he has crawled up to his eyrie opposite the 

 bitter-water spring, where he has just room to curl himself up 

 on a ledge overhanging a hideously dark profound, he may 

 watch the moon sail up over the peaks, and towards morning 

 he may hear again that rattling of falling stones displaced by 

 unseen feet. Peer as he will into the silvery mists on the 

 other side of the ravine, he can see nothing ; but the falling 

 stones continue to set his heart beating, and at last he hears 

 that shrill bleat from which the tur gets its local name, djik-vee. 

 Straining his eyes to the utmost as cry after cry comes from the 

 ' lick,' he at last makes out shadowy forms moving like flies 

 across the face of the sheer rock opposite, and, praying to his 

 patron saint, he startles the solemn night with the sharp ring 

 of his rifle. In nine cases out of ten, if he kills anything it will 

 be a ewe or a young ram at best ; for, though the young rams 

 and the ewes go in large herds, the old beasts keep themselves 

 apart, retiring, so say the natives, to inaccessible fastnesses 

 above the snow-line, and not coming down until later on in the 



