THE GUN AT HOME AND ABROAD 
ridge in the dark, and just as dawn was breaking, his roars, on the other 
side of the valley, warned us of his presence. As it gradually grew lighter 
I made out his dark form and those of three or four hinds. My hunter, 
unknown to me, intended no assault on him at that time of day, and 
it was not until we had wasted three-quarters of an hour that I realized 
this. We attempted a stalk, but the mist came down, and though I heard 
the stag roaring in the timber below me it was quite impossible to 
approach him. 
A few days later towards dusk we found a nice ten -pointer, but he was 
in a very bad position for a stalk and escaped unharmed. The following 
morning we started early, and about three o’clock heard a stag roar. This, 
we eventually discovered, was the same ten -pointer we had already tried 
for. He was in a nasty place, a gorge whose sides were covered with pines 
and rhododendrons. We watched him for over an hour as the hinds worked 
slowly up to the top of the ridge where we lay. To make a long story short 
I got a shot as it began to get dark, missed him, but placed matters on a 
more satisfactory footing with a second bullet. His horns measured 
41 1 inches in length, 34f inches wide inside, with a beam of 5f inches. 
Similar measurements for a very graceful eleven -pointer, showing the 
typical wapiti top as described by Mr Lydekker, shot by Mr Fenwick 
Owen, are: 43£ inches, 38£ inches, 5| inches. These animals are so 
remorselessly hunted by the natives that a sportsman is lucky to kill 
one at all with anything like a good head. Indeed, one of the most 
annoying contretemps which the foreigner may have to face when 
engaged in their pursuit is the banging of native guns, or the disappear- 
ance of his quarry owing to the intervention at a critical moment of some 
native “out for blood.” 
The Sambhur (C. unicolor dejeani ; native name, Hei lu-tsze) is said to 
be found in Szechuan, though so far as I know this variety has been 
named only on the authority of the horns in the Paris Museum, and has 
never been killed by a European. Major M ’Neill saw a hind and calf west 
of Tachienlu, and in any case it is rare. They exist in Yunnan, and most 
of those sambhur horns which are seen in the medicine shops (though 
Major M’Neill in the “Journal” of the Society for the Preservation of the 
Wild Fauna of the Empire (1909) writes: “I never saw a single head 
near Tachienlu which I would swear to as being pure sambhur ”) come 
from this province. 
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