THE GUN AT HOME AND ABROAD 
camp and hunted at daybreak above the valley of Warochta, where another 
great stag lives; but he, too, valued his skin too much either to call or 
to visit the open raspberry slopes, which we searched industriously when 
it was light enough to see. We had, it is true, one moment of intense 
excitement. The gillie was watching down the hill to our left, when by 
his gesticulations we observed that he had seen something. As I approached 
him he put his hands to his head and outstretched his fingers, indicating 
noble antlers with vast numbers of points. I seized my glass and saw 
nothing but a fine roebuck passing rapidly through the tall raspberries 
on the slopes below. It was only a glimpse, and then he vanished. At the 
same moment the crunching of sticks was distinctly to be heard in the 
woods behind us, showing that some deer at least had been approaching 
the forest edge and had got our wind. Subsequent examination proved 
these to be a hind and a calf. Roe are fairly numerous and very large in 
the Carpathians. Their skulls show them to be finer animals than those 
in Germany, Moravia, or Silesia, and the horns are strong and well de- 
veloped, but not quite so fine as those frequenting the open plains of Lower 
Hungary, where they grow to a great size. A young two-year-old buck, 
shot by Prince Lowenstein at Tartarow, weighed 72 lb. clean, so that 
adults, of which no weights seem to have been taken, must be far beyond 
the average of Continental roe. I came across another splendid buck about 
ten days after this, and would have shot him had I not been following a 
calling stag at the moment, which I feared to alarm. 
A subject of never -failing interest in the Carpathian forests is the num- 
ber of small birds. For the most part they are the sambas our English 
ones, but are altogether larger and more brilliantly coloured. Here the 
robin and the hedge accentor and the common wren are natives of the 
forest solitudes, and were pleased to see a man, as if to show that his 
presence was once a natural adjunct to their surroundings. They seem 
to have little fear of human beings, and sing close at hand or hop around 
at lunch -time in the hope of picking up some crumbs. Almost the only 
warbler left at this season is the chiff-chaff, which on fine days sings 
almost as clearly as in the English spring. It imparts a certain air of 
hope into life just as it does at home. Crowds of thrushes, blackbirds, ring 
ousels and fieldfares pass all day in the course of their autumnal migra- 
tion; and as you sit on some forest point it is not long before large flocks 
of coal, marsh, crested and longtailed tits, the last-named with a large 
bill and a white head like the Scandinavian form, come tripping by with 
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