THE GUN AT HOME AND ABROAD 
beats were explained, and the means of getting to them. In the evening, 
after dinner, the head forester, a Bohemian named Winter, is called in and 
gives a general report of the whole forest, and he is followed by a proces- 
sion of wild and odoriferous Galicians, who in turn enter the room with a 
low obeisance, and after kissing the Prince’s hand and those of many of 
the guests with whom they have stalked in former years, proceed to give 
a report somewhat as follows: 
“ The season is late, honoured Prince, and the stags are not calling 
much by day as yet. The old eighteen -pointer that has been for ten years 
up on the heights below the frontier moans a little at daybreak, but will 
not roar in this warm weather; he moves but little and has three hinds 
with him. I have seen him once in his bath (cupola), where he goes 
sometimes at seven in the morning. His horns are very large (veliki-veliki), 
and he is very cunning. He keeps to the thick forest, and if it will please 
his excellency to give me orders to cut a small path across his daily travel 
I think we will kill him some day. Along the hill by the beech grove ( buko - 
vina) another big stag is calling all day. He is answered by another stag 
that has six hinds that lives on the slope of fir trees opposite. But the 
place is noisy with sticks and leaves, and he moves not from there, so we 
cannot approach. Sometimes a small stag comes over the hill from Blazow 
and makes all cry, and there is the big fourteen -pointer that stays ever 
on the hill at the bottom of the Polanka. He whom we have hunted so 
many times and cannot see, he calls not except at night and lives amongst 
the raspberries. Two large bears are coming every evening to the dead 
horse which your Highness desired me to shoot and lay amongst the 
rocks at the side of Fededzyl, and another bear lives at the end of the 
beat by the high mountain. 
“ I have killed three wolves in the winter with the traps. All is quite 
so . . . (tack) ” — and with another low bow he disappears amidst an atmos- 
phere of Hungarian tobacco and wood smoke. 
It is all very mediaeval and charming, but the subservience of the 
peasantry is not degrading or cringing. On the contrary, their humble 
attitude of mind is born of respect and affection for their master, just as 
their courtesy to any stranger is natural and unassumed. 
On September 17 we all left for our various beats. After going for an 
hour in the train I find my hunter, Ivan Mocherna, with the horses and seven 
other followers awaiting my arrival at the station of Wononienka. I rode 
one horse and my baggage was placed on the other, and with the men carry- 
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