160 HUNTING WITH DOGS. 



spent nearly all the day in getting to our ground, 

 and, on arriving, found not only no vestige of the 

 hut which we had been told existed there, but no 

 chestnut forests either. Add to this that, though 

 the scenery was even finer than at Golovinsky, the 

 herbage grew more rankly luxuriant every hundred 

 yards as we rode up the glen the mist, which rose 

 in a white wall round us, drenching us to the skin 

 before we had been in it a quarter of an hour and it 

 will not appear so strange that, having toiled all 

 day to get there, I gave the order at once for a 

 counter-march, considering that to pass one night 

 in this den of fever would be certainly dangerous, 

 and possibly fatal to some of us. 



I was not far wrong, as events proved, for next 

 day, although I had beaten such a hasty retreat, 

 Stepan and the Cossack were both down with the 

 fever, and I had an attack of intense lassitude and 

 headache, which, if yielded to, would probably 

 have resulted in the same. Stepan told me the 

 weather was becoming dangerously feverish, an 

 east wind having set in, which is always the har- 

 binger cf ill to the Tscherkess on the Black Sea 

 coast. Fever never comes, they say, when the 

 wind is from off the sea ; but when it comes from 

 behind the hills, then it is that the fever seizes its 

 wretched victims. 



As we climbed over the hills or up the water- 

 courses to-day, t^he cold wind that was blowing 



