THE GUN AT HOME AND ABROAD 
You do not require to be a naturalist to enjoy noting the wild animal and 
plant life that surrounds you and to observe life’s struggle with environ- 
ment; or a historian to repeople in your imagination the stony plains and 
hills with some of those whose wars and struggles have made Persia’s 
stormy history. Over the plain you are spying for gazelle once moved, like 
a tide of human migration, the legions, it may be, of the Macedonian 
Alexander; amongst the beetling crags that throw their shadow athwart 
the level were once hidden the secret lairs of the assassins; near by those 
distant mounds the plain was once dotted with the camp of the great 
Nadir Shah. Few are the places in this land that, in one’s imagination at 
least, are not historic. 
The best district for urial in Persia — and probably in Asia — is the 
hill country that lies south-east of the Caspian, where the Elburz chain 
is split up into a number of small spurs and subsidiary ranges, the Kopet 
Dagh and others. It is impossible to imagine a greater contrast than this 
country presents to the plains and desolate hills of the Persian plateau. 
Streams of water, their banks often fringed with dense reed brakes, mean- 
der gently towards the sea; while from grassy savannahs, grazed over 
by the flocks of Turkoman nomads, hills rise with gently rounded outlines, 
presenting a wonderfully beautiful landscape of woods and grassy braes. 
The sheep are found in the open ground, which from a distance looks 
almost down-like, albeit covered with long waving grass. On these hills 
I have had four stalks in a day after different herds. Once I saw a mixed 
herd of at least three hundred sheep that raised a cloud of dust like an 
army as they swept across a dry ravine, and immediately after I found 
a herd of forty hoary old rams. The illustration shows the head of a 
ram that was picked up on this ground, which with 45| inches of massive 
horn constitutes a world’s record. The difficulty here lies, not in getting 
a shot, but in deciding what head is good enough to shoot. It is impossible 
to make a long stay in the country, difficult indeed to get there at all, and a 
compromise has to be made between shooting whatever you first see and 
losing good chances through too much ambition. One must always remem- 
ber with the unsophisticated shikaris of Persia that it is meat they are out 
for, not horns. They are quite incapable of judging the size of a head, so 
the sportsman has to do this for himself. As a working rule I would say, 
shoot any ram whose horns show the smallest commencement of a second 
turn. Again, after a herd has been spotted, the shikari’s idea is to get to 
a point whence you can get a shot at a ram, not the ram, a spot whence 
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