226 THROUGH THE HEART OF PATAGONIA 



worthy of his attention, for they give as excellent sport as any big 

 game in the world. A point which must tell greatly in their 

 favour in the eyes of some people is the fact that the pursuit of 

 them is a pleasure by no means unattended by danger. 



The first day on which I attempted to find wild cattle we 

 sighted two herds, one about half way up the hillside and the 

 other higher, almost upon the snow-line. We had gone out rather 

 with the idea of prospecting, having but little hope of being so 

 lucky as to get a shot. Mr. Cattle, Burbury, and myself made up 

 the party, and while Cattle hid in the direction towards which 

 the herd might be expected to break, Burbury and I undertook 

 the stalk. We separated, and I finally got within two hundred 

 yards of a dun-coloured bull ; but his position was so bad that it 

 seemed a pity to shoot. The herd ultimately moved into a strip 

 of forest high on the shoulder of the mountain, and we failed to 

 locate it again. 



Upon this followed a period when the memory of the shot I 

 might have taken rankled as a thorn in the flesh. The difficulty 

 of finding a herd was very great. We went out several days in 

 succession and failed to catch sight of a single horn. For twelve 

 days we searched from dawn to dark and found nothing. Yet 

 these days, which resulted in a total bag of two huemules, were- 

 inhnitely more sporting than were those in the neighbourhood of 

 the River de los Antiguos, where a large number of animals might 

 have been secured. On four occasions fresh tracks were found, 

 and in that keen invigorating air the hunting of such a quarry was 

 a sport for the gods. 



There is a picturesque sentence in one of Mr. Kipling's writings, 

 in which he speaks of a life " spent on blue water in the morning 

 of the world." Each savage of us has, I suppose, some such 

 ideal existence, and if that be so, mine would be passed in hunting- 

 some great horned quarry upon frozen hills in a land where no 

 wind too strong should blow, and where the views of water and of 

 peaks should be in all shades of separate and glorious blue. 

 What a splendid place such a happy hunting-ground would be ! 

 Quite different to the happy hunting-grounds of the North 

 American Indian, the Tehuelche or the Eskimo — the latter, bv- 



