SUBALPINE REGIONS 171 



There was, however, a distinctly marked path where the 

 sheep and goat caravans sometimes came in the cold 

 weather, and the caves were blackened with the smoke 

 of their camp fires. There was a kind of balsam — 

 Balsamia impatiens — which grew about these camps 

 and level places where the sheep halted. It was 7 or 

 8 feet high and concealed everything, and the path 

 was quite grown over. The seeds appear like good- 

 sized grain. When the pods are touched they fly open 

 (hence the name impatiens). The natives eat the seeds 

 sometimes, and they have an intoxicating effect. These 

 patches are a favourite haunt of bears, and they also 

 become shockingly intoxicated, and lose their accustomed 

 caution, which usually makes them conceal themselves 

 on the approach of men. In groping one's way through 

 these fields of high balsam it was necessary to go with 

 observation. On one occasion the khansamah Sirdar Khan, 

 a plains Mussulman, who had an instinctive dread of all 

 wild animals and of everything in the hills, was mooning 

 along through the balsam, having got on a wrong track, 

 he himself being a bit under the influence of bhang (wild 

 hemp) smoked in excess. Suddenly he found himself 

 nearly in the arms of a huge black bear. Bruin, however, 

 was quite half seas over and too far gone to hurt anything, 

 and the khansamah escaped only scared. 



In one day's march I had six shots at bears and bagged 

 four. The others rolled themselves into the long herbage, 

 and disappeared head over heels down the khud and were 

 lost. The skins of these bears were not much good, as 

 they were changing their coats and very ragged.* There 



* The big black bear of the Himalayas is wrongly called Ursus 

 Tibetanus^ as it frequents the Indian side of the hills. It is called by 

 the natives 'balu,' or 'reetch.' Its thigh-bones are like man's, and it 

 can stand upright. The hair is very black and shiny, and it has the 

 white horseshoe mark on the chest. 



