CHEER PHEASANT 53 



together with his friend Wilson have given very excellent accounts of this species based 

 on many years' knowledge as sportsmen, and from such a point of view the details leave 

 little to be desired. 



" The Cheer is extremely locally distributed, and seems to me very capricious in its 

 choice of habitations : on one side of a river you meet with plenty in suitable spots ; on 

 the other side you may search fifty square miles of most likely-looking country and 

 never see one. 



*' From six to seven thousand feet is the elevation at which, in October, they are most 

 common, but in winter and spring they go lower, and some even breed lower, and in 

 summer they may be met with up to at least ten thousand feet (I myself killed a pair of 

 old ones late in June at fully this elevation), and probably higher. Of course they are 

 birds of the outer or wooded hills, and once you cross a high snowy ridge that effect- 

 ually arrests the clouds of the monsoon, into dry, more or less treeless regions, like 

 Lahoul, Spiti and Ladakh, you lose the Cheer and all the pheasants but the snow cocks. 

 They are all more or less birds of the forest, and all belong to the zone of abundant 

 rainfall. 



"The best places in which to find Cheer are the Dangs or precipitous places, so 

 common in many parts of the interior ; not vast bare cliffs, but a whole congeries of 

 little cliffs one above the other, each perhaps from fifteen to thirty feet high, broken up 

 by ledges, on which a man could barely walk, but thickly set with grass and bushes, and 

 out of which grow up stunted trees, and from which hang down curious skeins of grey 

 roots and mighty garlands of creepers. 



" If the hill above be thinly wooded, and on some plateau below there are a good 

 number of millet and princes'-feather fields, you are, in a Cheer district, next to certain 

 in the autumn to find a covey on the upper ledges of such a spot about ten o'clock in the 

 morning. 



''Then what a morning's sport you may have. You get on some knoll or spur com- 

 manding the lower portions of such a series of clifflets, where you will be clear of the 

 stones that the dogs and men inevitably dislodge. The dogs are put in at the very top, 

 a few of the men climbing with them on such ledges as are accessible ; the stones rattle 

 down fast, a pahari slips, shouts, and saves himself by clinging to a branch ; all the dogs 

 bark, every man looking on shouts out a different piece of advice if the slip was serious, 

 or a separate gibe, if it was trivial, for the benefit of the slipper ; all this comes down to 

 you three or four hundred feet below, a confused babel; you scream out 'silence,' then 

 a sharp yelp, a volley of screeching chuckles, you see a dark object shoot out from the 

 face of the upper cliffs, a moment, and it suddenly contracts in size, and the next hurtles 

 by you, like a falling thunderbolt, and if you do 7iot miss it, it is quite certain that it is 

 not the first time you have shot Cheer. 



" But whether hit or missed, there is no time to inquire now ; good men are below to 

 mark every bird that comes down, dead or alive, half-and-half. 



" Another and another of these animated projectiles pass you in their downward rush, 

 some out of shot, some so close that it is impossible to fire, and very often three, four, 

 five in such rapid succession that even with two doubles, in the old muzzle-loading times, 

 it was impossible to fire quick enough. 



" Twelve or more perhaps have been counted, the dogs and men have worked down to 



