A RAMBLE ROUND SIMLA,. 3865 
upright crest, and his compact thickset body, and strong, short 
legs, evidently adapted for digging, is obviously as nearly related 
to the Peacocks as he is to the Pheasants ; while you have only to 
look at the tail of the Kalij to see his relationship to the next sub- 
family at the other end of the scale, viz., the Galline—comprising 
the Jungle Fowls, Fire-backs, &c. All four birds seem distinctly 
to prefer shade to sun and damp to dryness. The neighbourhood 
of running water seems almost an essential with all of them. In 
short, such as the fern is in its choice of locality, so is the 
Pheasant; the two are evidently firm friends. As with trout and 
many other fish you are pretty sure to take day after day behind 
the same stone or in the same eddy, so it was I found, not always 
for any apparent reason, with these Pheasants. There were 
certain spots, for instance, on the road from Narcanda to Bhagi 
(which, by the way, passes through one of the grandest pieces of 
forest scenery I suppose to be seen on any roadside in the world, 
where the deodars must some of them be quite 200 feet high, 
with their dark sombre green veiled in many cases from top to 
bottom in the flame-coloured leaves of the Virginia creeper). 
There were certain spots on this road where, in my visit of three 
years ago, I was sure day after day to find a bird or two, in spite 
of the fate that had overtaken their predecessors at the same 
Spot, it might be only the previous day. On visiting the same 
locality last November, there, in the very same spots, I nearly 
always found birds. The Monal, the Koklass, and the Kalij 
seem to spread themselves pretty indiscriminately over the area 
where the conditions they require are to be found. It is curiously 
otherwise with the Cheer. One little valley may hold Cheer, and 
a dozen all round, where apparently the conditions are precisely 
the same, may not hold a single one. I have heard of residents 
of Simla shooting regularly for years together all round the 
neighbourhood, and never so much as seeing a single Cheer, and 
then subsequently coming on them by chance one day in some 
place not previously shot over, though perhaps quite close to 
Simla, and always thereafter finding them in the same place year 
after year. I was fortunate enough on this last visit to Simla to 
be shown one of these haunts of the Cheer, from which three 
specimens I have were secured. The ground corresponded very 
accurately with the description of the favourite locality of the 
Cheer given by Messrs. Hume and Marshall in their well-known 
