88 SPORT AND TRAVEL 



again with eight compatriots, and we all of us, 

 Mr. J., the Doctor and I, with Mustapha, Moussa, 

 and eight beaters made an early start for the moun- 

 tain, I, at any rate, fully expecting that we should 

 find the wounded goat without much difficulty. We 

 naturally thought that, from the point where we had 

 last seen him, the wounded animal would have con- 

 tinued his flight along the mountain-side, keeping the 

 same general direction he had previously held, espe- 

 cially as only a couple of hundred yards in front there 

 was a thickly wooded ravine for which the Doctor and 

 Mustapha thought he would be almost certain to 

 make. The whole morning we beat this ravine, and 

 then went on along the mountain-side until we had got 

 so far that I felt sure that no animal of any size could 

 have come that distance with a broken hind leg. I 

 then suggested to the Doctor that immediately after 

 we had last seen it, the wounded goat might have 

 doubled back and gone away in exactly the opposite 

 direction to that we had expected it to take ; and we 

 thereupon retraced our steps and returned to our 

 starting-point. It was, however, already late in the 

 afternoon ; and the beaters, who, I thought, had been 

 working very badly all day, worked worse than ever, 

 and we eventually returned to camp without the goat. 

 Although much disheartened, I by no means despaired 

 of yet recovering the goat, for from my long experi- 

 ence of such matters I knew that with a broken hind 

 leg he could hardly have got to more than a mile 



