HUNTING WITH DOGS. 145 



CHAPTER VIII. 



HUNTING WITH DOGS. 



Ilefilting Our mongrels Shipping our spoils Visitors Stepan's 

 yarns The hedgehog Legend of the bracken The Etixine in a 

 fury Trebogging Traces of Tscherkess villages Enormous 

 boar* Their feeding grounds Lose a bear Impenetrable 

 thickets hiding the proximity of big game A rare day's sport 

 Shooting in the moonlight An expedition Fever Precau- 

 tions against it Unsuccessful sport and hard fare. 



AFTER our twenty-four hours of unsuccessful 

 labour recorded in my last chapter, we were too 

 tired and too tattered to take the field again next 

 day. So we spent it in drying our clothes, mend- 

 ing and washing them, constructing fresh mo- 

 cassins from the hide of one of our boars, and 

 generally preparing for a campaign of another 

 kind against our enemies the bears and boars. 



In this campaign we were to be assisted by a 

 canine force, consisting of three mangy curs 

 belonging to Stepan, and one utterly useless beast, 

 the property of the neighbouring Cossack station. 

 Stepan's trio were, in their way, the three ugliest 

 half-starved mongrels that ever were possessed 

 with the pluck of a gamecock and the unreason- 

 ing devotion that never shows itself in anything 



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