A WILD SERENADE. 277 



with drum accompaniment, thereby keeping poor Bruin 

 a prisoner until it becomes light enough in the morning to 

 make him pay the penalty of his misdemeanours. We heard 

 them thus "treeing" a bear before daybreak one morning, 

 but the performance was too far away for me to go and 

 witness it. 



The last of the sheep had been driven down from the 

 higher pasturages on the hills towards the head of the 

 Xouboog glen, and the shooting-grounds in that direction 

 had all been vacated by their former occupants. Thither, 

 therefore, we now turned our steps. Our little camp was 

 pitched in a sheltered nook on the border of an extensive, 

 undulating, grassy plateau surrounded with dense pine woods. 

 As the place was about 10,000 feet high, the cold at night 

 was quite keen enough to make a huge fire of pine-logs and 

 a glass of " hot with " very enjoyable. In the morning I had 

 to break the ice in my metal wash-basin, and the grass was 

 all glittering with a thick coating of hoar-frost as we left the 

 camp. That day we prospected the open hill-tops away up 

 towards the Wurdwan range. Fresh evidences of deer were 

 numerous, though we neither saw nor heard anything except 

 some fine coveys of chuckor partridges. After nightfall a 

 stag on an adjacent wooded eminence serenaded me with his 

 stirring music whilst I sat in my tent at dinner. Another, 

 or perhaps the same one, disturbed me at night as he 

 awakened the multiplying echoes in the surrounding forest 

 by roaring within what seemed, in the still frosty air, to be 

 only a few hundred yards off my tent almost tempting me 

 to rise from my warm blankets and look after him. He had 

 evidently come to visit one of the several trags on the plateau 

 where we had noticed many fresh marks in the mud. The 

 moonlight, however, was not as yet sufficiently bright for 

 chancing a shot there at night; but all this augured well \i 

 in the neighbourhood. 



The following afternoon, when we were far up on the hill, 



