30 Sport and Life in the Further Himalaya 



employed on duty in the best shooting-grounds 

 in the Further Himalaya, and had shot many ibex, 

 and good heads among them too, but not the 

 enormous one with fifty-inch horns that figured 

 in my day-dreams. 



Our summer camp had been pitched near the 

 head of the lovely Harpai glen, about the place 

 where the junipers begin to grow scarce and 

 the valley spreads into open stretches, in the 

 soft bottoms of which grass, mosses, and flowers 

 grew deep. A charming camp it was. One could 

 look across fifty miles of pine-clothed valleys 

 and ridges to where the great white cone of 

 Dobani rose beyond the Gilgit spur, and by 

 climbing up to the pass at the head of the 

 valley one could see half a dozen or more peaks 

 of over 24,000 feet cleaving the sky, and among 

 them the giant crest of Nanga Parbat. 



Ibex and markhor were, of course, our main 

 interest, and though the cares of a district pre- 

 vented my being always on the wander, it was rare 

 that we had not news of the existence somewhere 

 in the neighbourhood, of a mighty old buck of one 

 or other of the wild goats. Indeed, the story of 

 that summer camp is, in the main, the history of 

 attempts to compass the death of two remarkably 

 fine beasts one a markhor and the other an ibex. 

 It is with the latter that this story deals. 



