QUAINT BEASTS AND QUEER HABITS, 205: 
lying on the opposite side of the valley came into the field. I watched him for a 
bit without any great interest ; for, though a good buck, I had shot several as 
big, until he did a thing I have never seen done by any other animal. Some 
fifty yards from him in the shade of ansoverhanging rock, lay a bank of snow 
some three feet thick which had melted as far as the rays of the sun could reach 
it and then presented an upright frozen face with an upper edge of almost solid 
ice, the product of the hard night frosts. The goral rose and walked over to this 
bank of snow ; then, having evidently become uncomfortably warm through 
lying in the sun, he proceeded to chew off great lumps from its solid edge, swallow- 
ing large quantities and leaving wide gaps in its continuity. This he continued 
to do for some ten minutes, showing more than a schoolboy’s capacity for ices, 
and almost giving me a sympathetic pain in ‘ Little Mary.’ 
The victim of the most wonderful tragedy of wild life that I have ever wit- 
nessed was another wild goat ; anibexto wit. A herd was traversing a perilous 
face of rock by means of a slight fault across its slippery surface. Amongst the 
herd were several young ones, and, as one of these crossed behind its mother, 
down out of the sky swept two great Lammergeiers, eight and half feet from 
wing-tip to wing-tip, and so beat and buffeted the poor little kid that it finally 
fell half senseless, and was whirled to destruction on the crags below ; its 
murderers sailing down to feast on the carcase. I have seen a good deal of the 
Lammergeier in different countries, and never observed a like incident or 
indeed heard of their killing anything bigger than a new-born lamb. 
As a laughter-provoking nature comedy, it is hard to beat a hungry wolf 
stalking marmots. He will spend an hour creeping nearer to a marmot who 
pretends not to see him, but sits solemnly like a fat little alderman, on top of the 
low mound of earth at the entrance to his burrow, in seeming blissful ignorance 
ef peril. Then, just before the wolf arrives within springing distance, the 
marmot whips round, whistles shrilly and dives into his home, while the wolf 
bruises his nose on the doorstep in a wild and futile rush. Then the marmot 
pops up at another exit a few yards away and challenges the wolf with another 
whistle, the result again being a profitless attempt by the wolf to secure the 
fat and tempting meal. More members of the marmot colony now appear on the 
thresholds of their burrows and whistle derisively on every side of the marauder, 
who, after one or two more vain efforts to secure a dinner retires in inipotent rage- 
from the unequal contest ; usually to lie sulking on the hill-side overlooking the 
colony in the hope of cutting off a member of it who may, later on, venture too 
far from home on a grass-gathering expedition. 
Twice I have watched this comedy through my telescope, till my sides ached. 
with laughing, and my Tibetan companions (unable to see the cause of my mirth). 
suspected me of being suddenly smitten with madness. On the first occasion 
I rang down the curtain by slaying the would-be slayer ; on the second he was. 
warned by a wandering back-eddy of wind and made off in safety. 
Unfortunately for the game, wolves have greatly increased in numbers in 
Ladakh of late years, and the unusually deep snow in the Rupshu district during: 
the winter of 1910-11 gave them an advantage over their quarry which enabled 
them almost to annihilate the Tibetan gazelle in some places, and everywhere 
greatly reduce their numbers and those of the great Tibetan Sheep Ovis ammon. 
For the hard, sharpedged feet of the sheep and gazelle made them sink deeply 
into the snow while the splayed-out pads of the wolves kept them from going 
far below the surface. The Ovis ammon owing to their greater size and height 
off the ground were not nearly so heavily handicapped as the gazelle by the 
eighteen inches of snow which lay everywhere, and so did not suffer nearly as. 
heavily, while the kiang were hardly affected at all. 
In August 1911, I was travelling up the left bank of the Indus close to where 
it first enters Kashmir territory and flows placid and gentle beside wide flats of 
short turf. As I walked about half a mile ahead of my baggage yaks, I spotted 
