326 Sport and Life in the Further Himalaya 



and the bag is totted up one stag and three 

 bears dead and one wounded. Before the next 

 beat the latter has to be seen to. 



Tracking a wounded bear begins by being thrill- 

 ingly exciting, and generally ends by being dull 

 to the point of boredom. The sportsman, usually 

 on all-fours, crawls along the path the bear has 

 made for himself in the dense cover of birch, 

 hazel, alder, and willow. Now he is worming 

 down a burn, now making his painful way through 

 a thicket of briar. The air is close with the dank, 

 bitter smell of moss and leaves. Extreme caution 

 marks the beginning of the chase, the imagination 

 depicting an angry bear at every turn, but as the 

 search is prolonged and nothing happens, the 

 sportsman gets very brave indeed. As to the 

 actual denoument, the chances are that if the bear 

 is not found very near he will not be found at 

 all. The writer looks back on a certain occasion 

 when he tracked a wounded bear in the aforesaid 

 manner as one of the most dangerous in his life 

 not on account of the bear, for we lost him, but 

 because my shikari had, as I discovered on reach- 

 ing the open, been crawling behind me with my 

 second rifle loaded and off safety. The sportsman, 

 on the other hand, may come on the bear wounded, 

 and in such circumstances it is well to have some 

 one with him. Once, when I was out with a well- 



