248 
WILD NORWAY. 
But never another sight did I get. There was the same 
single crash, as before, and the bull dashed headlong 
down those broken rocks, strewn with fallen trunks, 
studded with boulders and thickly-growing pines— 
vanishing in silence and strides six yards long ! 
The day was ours, but the spoils were denied us. 
By all the rules of hunting-craft and fair play, we had 
won. The grandest of elks had lost his coronet k> 
superior intelligence, and his head should now hang in 
my hall with the rest. There remained, you suggest, 
the chance of a miss ? Aha ! but a holy calm possesses 
one in these final, crucial moments, and a combination 
of confidence and common sense serve to steel nerves 
when the labour of days and weeks depends, for realiza¬ 
tion, on keeping, for less than thirty seconds, a cool head 
and a steady hand. Here a double run of bad luck, that 
would outwit an archangel, deprived us of a hard-earned 
trophy, and human craft came in a bad second. 
As a climax to the disasters of the day, we now 
mistook our bearings, under a false impression that the 
wind had changed, and for an hour walked in the wrong 
direction. The compass, in the hurry of an early start, 
had been forgotten. But nature came to aid where 
forethought had failed. The ant-hills of the forest are 
her compasses, being invariably placed due south of the 
tree that protects them. An ant-hill having corrected 
our error, after three more hours’ toilsome tramp through 
dark forest and pouring rain, we reached the hut, dead¬ 
beat, at ten o’clock. 
A fortnight later, I had another interview. Bengt 
and I, by an extra early start, reached the summit of 
Roeberg-scar (Gibraltar aforesaid), eight miles distant. 
