198 SPORT AND TRAVEL 



tically to necessitate our looking carefully where we 

 walked lest we stumble over them, a statement 

 which I took with several grains of salt, as one does 

 the enthusiasm of every Kashmiri shikari, it was 

 not until the evening of the second day, after we had 

 unsuccessfully honked nine different nullahs, and I 

 was beginning to consider bear-beating a snare and 

 a delusion, that our first sport came. 



The bear appeared on the scene of action so sud- 

 denly as completely to take my breath away. The 

 beaters had been moving listlessly up a cleft, thickly 

 wooded both with trees and underbrush ; this was 

 to be the last honk of the day, and two days' un- 

 successful searching had so plainly reacted on the 

 spirits of the men as to change the dervish battle- 

 shout into the mournful muttering of an Arab fu- 

 neral procession. The line of beaters had almost 

 reached me, my shikari with a last disgusted look 

 had turned to go, when, all at once, the beaters who 

 had been posted on the side of the nullah above 

 where I was standing set up a tremendous shouting : 

 " Bhalu, Sahib ! bhalu ! " (Bear, Sahib, bear !) 



Now it is one thing to have a bear driven up to 

 you from below, with plenty of warning that he is 

 coming and time to choose an advantageous spot 

 from which to shoot ; it is quite another thing to find 

 suddenly that the bear has somehow got above you, 



