22 



FOREST AND STREAM. 



[Aug. 1 1889. 



SHOOTING ON MOUNT OLYMPUS. 



BROUSSA, Asia Minor, Nov. 25, 1888.— Almost up to 

 the day of my departure from home I was debating 

 with myself whether to take rifle, rod and gun along 

 with me, or devote myself in my travels wholly to the 

 haunts of men. I meant to stay abroad two years, going 

 through to Eastern Europe and on to Egypt, and it was 

 dimly borne in upon me that my enjoyment of foreign 

 cities would have an added zest if I could strike out of 

 the regular routine of foreign travel occasionally and 

 dropping down on some remote country place, devote a 

 few days or a week to those sports in which, whether 

 because of the sports, or the charms of the surroundings, 

 I have spent perhaps the pleasantest days of my life. 

 My hesitation was due to more causes than one. Firstly, 

 I was in doubt whether in the over-populated countries 

 of the Old World there was anv fur. fin or feather left 

 worth going after; secondly, if I took my gunss, I must 

 take all needed supply of ammunition along with me, 

 for the probabilities were that I should find no cartridges 

 to lit my weapons on the continent of Europe; and the 

 possession of a few hundred cartridges mi°#it expose me to 

 grave suspicion and possible detention. Finally, I deter- 

 mined to confine my ammunition at starting to fifty 

 metallic shells for my Winchester (loaded),asmanyemptv 

 metallic shells for my 12-bore, a bullet mould for each, 

 for I have great faith in the efficacv of a smooth-bore for 

 big game at close quarters, and then it is so light and 

 comes so readily to the shoulder ! To this I added one 

 canister of powder and half a bag each of Nos. 4 and 6 

 shot, with caps and recapping apparatus, so that I might 

 be prepared whenever opportunity or in c Una I ion for sport 

 might overtake me. 



For fishing I brought two split-bamboo rods, light and 

 heavy, with two spare tips for each, and plenty of tackle; 

 and up to a week ago these last were the only portion of 

 my outfit which had afforded me any amusement. I 

 have had some very pleasant days' fishing in Germany, 

 and might have had some shooting had it been later in 

 the season: but I went on to Vienna — lustiges Wien— at 

 the beginning of September, and spent six weeks there 

 without the least desire to tear myself away from its 

 charms. But even gay Vienna paled at last before the 

 enchantment of distant lands, and by the middle of Octo- 

 ber I was gliding down the beautiful blue Danube on my 

 way to the city of the Golden Horn, of dome and spire 

 and minaret, the Constantinople of the Christian, the 

 famous Istamboul of Moslem story. And now Constan- 

 tinople, too, has been left behind, and presents to my 

 mind nothing but a confused picture, in which the 

 bright eyes of Greek and Armenian and Frankish women 

 gleam sparkling through the shadows of the Christian 

 quarter of the city. 



Such pictures are not wanting here in this famous old 

 city of Broussa, the old-time capital of the Moslem inva- 

 der; but here nature triumphs, and always will triumph. 

 Tn Constantinople the city is everything, the distant 

 mountains and the Bosphorus are but accessories; but in 

 Broussa the works of man pale before the grandeur of 

 Olympia, before the calm sublimity of its snow-capped 

 peaks rising above the rich, many-hued foliage of its for- 

 ests; the autumn tints of its oak and beech and walnut 

 and chestnut contrasting with the dark foliage of the 

 pines above, and the pale olivaceous green patches of an 

 intermediate belt, in which the boxwood tree grows in 

 clusters or intermingles itself with the other hardwood 

 trees, looking like olive groves in the distance. 



Turning seaward, the eye from the city's elevation 

 wanders away out over the broad expanse of the deep 

 blue sea of Marmora, watches the ceaseless flow of its 

 heaving, rolling waves, and insensibly comes round to 

 the soft curved line where its waves lave the feet of the 

 mountain below us and far away on either hand, and rests 

 on the broad plain cultivated or dotted with fig trees and 

 mulberries almost down to the water's edge. 



The plain below the city and between it and the sea is 

 largely devoted to agriculture, and the harvest being 

 long past the fields are now for the most part bare, but 

 the presence of innumerable groves of the China mul- 

 berry, grown by every peasant for silk worm culture, re- 

 lieves the monotony; while from the level of the city up- 

 ward the whole country is laid out in olive and fig and 

 mulberry groves and vineyards, and divided by ravines, 

 whose clear sparkling streams roll unimpeded down to 

 and through the streets of the city to the sea. How de- 

 liciously cool are the streams of Broussa on a hot day! 

 Fresh from the snows of old Olympus and flowing 

 through shady forest and grove nearly their whole 

 course. There is no need for ice-water in Broussa. 



And yet it is a weary and a rugged course that these 

 streams have wandered over on their way downward 

 from the snowy crests above. One would hardly believe 

 it sitting here at the window and looking up, but I know 

 it. There was evidence of it in every aching bone of my 

 body this morning, evidence of it in my thorough appre- 

 ciation of rest, for I only returned last night from a 

 week's outing among the secret defiles of its higher 

 ranees, touching the snow line which from here I see so 

 plainly. 



Looking up, it appears to be but a pleasant half -day's 

 climb to the snow line, and as to elevation, it is only ten 

 thousand feet or say two miles high, and yet it has been 

 a weary week's journey to climb to the snow line and 

 back again. Why, it took a day and a half to walk 

 down, and although I rode in the last six or eight miles 

 of the journey last evening, I never felt so stiff in my 

 life after a march as I did this morning. I took a cup of 

 coffee in bed at eight o'clock, and lay lazily dreaming 

 until eleven, before I got up to breakfast. Again I lay 

 down for a couple of hours, before I summoned energy 

 to go to the vapor bath, that luxurious institution in 

 which one is exposed to the exhalations of nature's own 

 vapors as they rise upward from the cavernous recesses 

 of the earth through the floor of the building. I went 

 through the vapors, my thews and sinews were kneaded, 

 every kink and twist taken out of them, and then as I 

 leaned back in my couch, lazily inhaled the smoke of my 

 narghile and supped my fragrant mocha, I felt myself 

 already in elysium, and" courcl not help the spontaneous 

 exclamation, "Bismillah, God is great !" 



When I sat down last evening to the long-neglected 

 duty of penning a letter to Forest and Stream, I was 



animated by a sense of duty to my brother sportsmen 

 at home, to give them the benefit of my experience, and 

 be as it were a light to the path of those who wish to 

 follow in my footsteps. ■ I planned in mv mind to give 

 an account of flies cast upon the sparkling waters of 

 rippling German streams, winding up with an account 

 of my week's outing on the heights of my neighbor old 

 Olympus, but there go more words to the telling of a 

 story than I had any idea of, and looking back I see now 

 that I ought to have told about the fishing bv the way 

 before I said anything about Broussa, and the classic 

 mountain which looks down upon it, and now it appears 

 to me that I missed the thread in telling my story and 

 that it would be to violate every canon of the story tel- 

 lers not to go back and pick it up. I have come down 

 from the heights of Mount Olympus to the haunts of 

 men, and your readers having been advised of the fact, 

 are immediately interested in knowing what I did there. 

 As to my experiences with the rod in the streams of the 

 German fatherland months ago, they will perhaps be 

 ready to listen to the narrative of them some other time, 

 but for the moment their ears are not attuned to it 

 They are listening for the echoes of my rifle among the 

 cavernous recesses of Mount Olympus, and they shall not 

 be disappointed but let us go back and begin at the be- 

 ginning, for "order is Heaven's first law." 



Already while I was in Constantinople, through my 

 Greek servant Timayanes, whom I had engaged as body 

 guard, and who expressed himself ready and able to cook 

 if required, I had begun to make inquiries about the pros- 

 pects of shooting in the mountains. Plenty of quail and 

 sober-colored brown pheasants were being brought into 

 the market, but mountaineers who brought them in all 

 agieed in the statement that there was nothing to shoot 

 within three days' march of Istamboul, and that the 

 upper tiers of forest which sheltered wolves and wild 

 boar and occasional bear, were more accessible from 

 Broussa. Arrived in Broussa I was delighted to find the 

 statement corroborated, not merelv by heresay evidence 

 but on the day after my arrival Timayanes brought me 

 a man who lived in one of the highest villages up the 

 mountain side, and who reported stags and boars and 

 wolves in the forest, which were frequently killed when 

 a leading village headsman of those parts, one Ahmed 

 Khan, turned up with men and dogs for a grand battue; 

 he added further that of his own knowledge there were 

 wild goats among the rocks on the grassland above the 

 forest, and ptarmigans under the snow line, but nothing 

 to compensate one for the rough climb, excepting brown 

 bears, which it was better for the solitary sportsman to 

 leave unmolested. This was on Saturday, and having 

 got precise instructions as to the route to Ahmed Khan's 

 village, I had a letter written to him to the effect that I 

 proposed being at his place on Monday evening and hoped 

 that he would arrange a battue for Tuesday, and that he 

 might charge me with a day's rations for any number of 

 men and dogs employed in beating, not exceeding fifty 

 of each. On Sunday, shortly after middav, Ahmed 

 Khan's messenger arrived with a very courteous and sat- 

 isfactory reply, and instructions to wait and guide me up 

 the following day, and all necessary preparations being 

 made and a lot of cartridges, both ball and shot, filled 

 for the smoothbore, it was arranged to start at 9 o'clock 

 the following morning and make a leisurelv journey. 



We were in the saddle about half -past' eight, Agina, 

 the guide, accompanying us on foot. Our road ran ob- 

 liquely across the hill behind the city for a mile, and 

 then descended into a ravine over whose bouldery bed 

 ran a clear stream which looked very promising for 

 fish. The whole country is laid out in vineyards and 

 groves and gardens, the fig trees covering the rocky sides 

 of the ravine. Crossing this we began a tolerably stiff 

 ascent, after two miles of which we again got a view of 

 the sea of Marmora, with Broussa some two thousand 

 feet below us. Climbing on until we had reached an ele- 

 vation of three thousand feet, we passed over the brow 

 of the hill and began to descend. For two miles we 

 went steadily downward before we touched a stream at 

 an elevation of not more than a thousand feet above sea 

 level. From this point out the ascent was gentle but 

 steady, and by noon the groves and vineyards of the 

 lower slopes were left behind. The hillsides were ter- 

 raced for cornfields, and higher up was the woodland, 

 large areas of which had been laid bare, and were evi- 

 dently being still laid bare, for droves of donkeys and 

 mules were continually passing us with their loads of 

 firewood for the city. 



At 1 o'clock we stopped at a mountain stream for 

 luncheon, after which we again pushed onward and 

 upward through the timber land, sometimes sunk in the 

 deep recesses of the forest, at others getting a command- 

 ing view of the sea, and arrived at Ahmed Khan's village 

 toward four in the afternoon after a march which I esti- 

 mate from fifteen to twenty miles, and there was Broussa 

 nestling at our feet barely four miles as the crow flies, 

 and looking not more than two miles off. 



Ahmed Khan was a fine looking old fellow, and received 

 me very courteously, making numerous inquiries through 

 my dragoman about my health, country and friends, and 

 I having been previously instructed by the daughters of 

 the hotel keeper at Broussa, who, by the way, is a Ger- 

 man, made a series of similar polite inquiries in return. 

 Then I turned the conversation to the battue, and was 

 informed that all had been arranged, that five village head- 

 men would turn out to-morrow, with as many guns and 

 irobably seventy or eighty followers and dogs. We are 

 lere, said Ahmed Khan, just at the upper limit of the 

 range of both deer and bear, and below the region of the 

 timber antelope (which latter, he explained to me, was a 

 larger animal than the wild goat of the rocky cliffs above 

 the timber), and the battue will cover a range stretching 

 from the level of the village to about 1,500 feet below. 

 The bears, too, my informant said, came down from the 

 mountains at this season every evening, but for the most 

 part return to the upper ranges in the morning. 



My Winchester was produced and an effort made to 

 explain its capabilities. I don't know with what success, 

 but they all said Allah Akbash most emphatically, which 

 means God is great, and this I understood as a polite way 

 of suggesting that miracles were nothing to God, but 

 that to fire a dozen times without reloading was some- 

 thing outside of human experience. The barrel was too 

 short, too, for his approval, being some nine inches shorter 

 than his flintlock, and he asked how far it would kill in 

 a tone that implied that it might do for close quarters. 

 Looking across the ravine at a big white rock, that I 

 judged to be 400yds. distance, I challenged him to a trial 



of skill; but he said he had never tried shooting at that 

 distance, which must be at least 600 paces. But he was 

 anxious to see me try, and as there was still half an hour 

 of daylight remaining, two villagers were sent across 

 with instructions to go above and some fifty paces to the 

 left of the mark and watch results. 



They looked very small in the fading daylight, as they 

 crawled up the hillside more than a quarter of an hour 

 later, for the ravine was deep, and recollecting how apt 

 one is to underestimate distance in mountain country, 

 and attaching weight to the opinion of mv host, 1 put up 

 the 500-yard sight and aimed for the top'of the rock. I 

 sighted first in the middle and was slowly rising the 

 muzzle when one of the two men shouted to announce 

 they were in position. As I pulled the trigger I thought 

 I saw something move on the top of the rock and come 

 into my line of vision, and as the two men at once set up 

 a continuous yelling, I reported that I had seen something 

 move on the top of the rock, and had fired at it, but did 

 not know whether I had hit it or not, and that indeed at 

 that distance I could not say whether it was a deer or a 

 bear. 



It was quite dusk when the men returned, and reported 

 that as soon as they got into position and shouted a bear 

 rushed out and made straight for the top of the rock, and 

 at once rolled over and down its face before the report of 

 the rifle reached them. Following in its wake they found 

 blood, and one of them brought a small stone, the other 

 a leaf, each with a drop of blood on it. I need hardly 

 tell you what a sensation I created nor the amusement 

 with which I listened to the exclamation, "Bismillah! 

 Allah Akbar!" 



My supper soon arrived, and consisted of a pilaff, or 

 great dish or rather tray, of boiled rice, moistened with 

 butter and rendered savory with raisins, pistachios and 

 cardamoms, and crowning this a hindquarter of kid. 

 This was followed by figs and raisins for dessert, after 

 which the attendant brought narghiles and coffee, my 

 host and his villagers returned to the Serai, as the build- 

 ing is called which in every considerable village is 

 allotted to travelers, and the evening w^as passed not so 

 much in conversation as in looking at each other, and 

 giving vent to occasional exclamations of a pious nature, 

 such as "Bismillah! Allah Akbar! Allah hu!" etc., etc. 



Ahmed Khan withdrew early— about half-past 8— the 

 villagers followed immediately, and Timayanes at once 

 set about preparing my bed. As I seated myself at the 

 edge of it finishing my last pipe, the evening prayer fell 

 upon my ear, and as it ceased the whole villaged repeated 

 the concluding sentence, "La Allah il Allah, Mahomed 

 Rasool Allah"— There is no God but Allah, and Man ;> rued 

 is the prophet of God. a. 



[TO BE CONTINUED. | 



CAMPING OUT. 



IN CAPE BRETON. 



TTERE on the waters of the fair Bras d'Or 



± I glide along through an enchanting scene. 

 Where nought is heard, save unseen birds that pour 



Their songs through halls of forest decked in green, 

 And voices of clear waters that have been 



Wooed from their woodland dwellings into reBt. 

 Afar the quick-winged eagle glides between 



Vast raountaiu gulches to its young and nest; 



•Silence and shadows fall, and day dies in the west. 



The glassy mirror of the lake assumes 



A color borrowed from no earthly hue; 

 The air around is laden with perfumes 



Of drowsy flowers impatient to renew 

 Their dewy sleep; the robin sings adieu, 



And wings its flight to where its nestlings are; 

 Each passing moment charms the more the view. 



Till comes on twilight's breast her single star, 



And night floats slowly in the varied scene to mar. 



But only for awhile, for lo, the change— 



The wondrous change from dark to mellow light! 

 The moon appears, and o'er the woodland range 



Ascending, steeps its sides in glory. Bright 

 The waters gleam beneath, and lonely night 



Has cleared her brow of sorrow. Growing still, 

 The giver of this fair, enchanting sight 



Develops to the eye o'er yonder hill 



A flock of wild birds flying. From the mountain rill, 



A distance off, come murmurs crystal clear; 



The sad owl starts the echoes from the brake, 

 Complaining to the moon; while, dra wing near, 



A zephyr murmuring, bids the tall trees shake 

 In ecstacy of motion till they take 



Its wandering spirit in their outstretched palms 

 And charm it into music. Now awake 



The drowsy forests sweet melodious psalms, 



Born of the wind that comes from meadowlands and 

 farms, 



Where yellow buttercups and daisies lie 

 In dewy sleep beneath the glow worm's light 



And starry beauty of the summer sky. 

 But when the moon in clouds withdraws from sight, 



And all the fairy scene has vanished quite, 

 Comes gentle sleep with many a lullaby 



And pleasant dream, until Aurora bright 

 Spreads all her wealth of loveliness on high, 

 And pours the linnet forth its early melody. 



Now push from off the beach the light canoe, 

 The tapering rod and choicest flies prepare. 



And where the river joins the waters blue 

 Of the deep lake, all rippling, cast with care 



To lure the wily sea trout sporting there! 

 Now beautifully dance the flies, and lo! 



A moment more he leaps into the air. 

 And then with sudden plunge doth downward go 

 Till, spent, his spotted sides upon the surface glow. 



When, tiring of the angler's theme, at last 



You long, in autumn, after noble fare. 

 You soon can quit the lakes for forests vast 



Where towering Smoky penetrates the air 

 A thousand feet from ocean. Here the bear 



Dwells in his hermitage of rocks and wood, 

 The swift-limbed caribou darts forward where 



Long level tracts of meadow yield him food, 



Hemmed in on every side by mountain solitude. 



