THE GUN AT HOME AND ABROAD 
both Cossack and Mongolian, no one seemed to have heard of tiger except 
as an animal to be found far away to the east. At last, at a small riverside 
village about 150 miles from Khabarovsk, two claws, taken from a beast 
reported to have been killed the previous winter in a range of hills not very 
far to the south, were brought to me for sale. 
At Khabarovsk, of course, plenty of information was forthcoming, and 
many tales were floating about of the depredations of these animals during 
the winter in close proximity to, and even in one case within, the town 
itself. The Governor -General was most obliging, sending for one of the 
best-known hunters of the neighbourhood, and from him I gathered that 
though tiger were fairly plentiful between Khabarovsk and Vladivostok, 
the best ground was reported to be in the neighbourhood of Irma, a small 
town on the railway where the river of that name runs into the Ussuri, 
a little more than half-way to Vladivostok. Here what were described by 
my French-speaking interpreter as “raisins ” grow in great abundance, 
and wild pig, being very partial to them, gather in large numbers to feed 
on them towards the end of the summer, only dispersing when the first 
snows remind them that they must be seeking warmer quarters for the 
winter in the south. It is this gathering that attracts tiger, the long- 
haired variety being as partial to pig as his cousin further south, and in a 
good “raisin” year the number of tiger skins brought into market far 
exceeds the average. 
Pursuing my investigations at Irma I learnt that a number of skins 
were undoubtedly brought in every winter, but it was believed that in most 
cases their wearers had been accounted for by poison. One, however, I 
heard of as having been shot in November, 1898, by two half-caste brothers, 
well known, even as far south as Vladivostok, as daring and successful tiger 
hunters. Though they were away hunting the local deer (Pekin sika, I think) 
for their still immature horns, so highly prized by the Chinese for their 
supposed medicinal virtues, a Government official, who knew them well, 
told me they had followed three tigers, one of which was the biggest mortal 
man ever looked upon, for nineteen days, tracking them in the snow, day 
in and day out, bivouacking most nights on the trail and covering an 
incredible extent of ground, till they finally ran them down in some moun- 
tains some seventy -five versts away and shot two, including the big one. 
This latter they brought in, frozen stiff as he fell, on a sleigh, and eventually 
took it in that condition to Vladivostok, where it was purchased by an 
English firm of general merchants for three hundred roubles. Before the 
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