HUNTING WITH DOGS. 151 



Rushing pell-mell to the scene of action, you expect 

 to have face and hands lacerated as you go and 

 take it with equanimity, content if only you can 

 force a way at all. But having forced a way, it is 

 annoying to have your feet slip upon those dry 

 hillsides, and, perfectly helpless, feel yourself and 

 rifle rapidly gliding downhill away from the point 

 towards which, at so much personal inconvenience, 

 you have been struggling. It was better fun to 

 see Stepan, as he strove to descend a ravine, slide 

 helplessly down, sixty miles an hour, to a pool at 

 the bottom, into which he unceremoniously plopped, 

 pursued at once by Zizda, who followed his master 

 on his haunches, looking the picture of imbecile 

 misery. But for bipeds and even ordinary quad- 

 rupeds there is some excuse, seeing that Bruin 

 himself often comes to grief in these places. Wit- 

 ness the numerous slides on these banks, looking 

 as if Bruin had been diverting himself and his 

 family by the innocent amusement of trebogging. 



Throughout the forest where we were hunting 

 to-day, we found every here and there the traces 

 of Tscherkess villages, whose occupants have fled, 

 some long ago in the old war time, and some only 

 last spring, to join the Turks in their war against 

 Russia. Even in the case of these latter no sign 

 of a house remained, only a piece of ground more 

 level than that which surrounded it, overgrown with 

 a dense jungle of briar ; here and there a piece of 



