SPORT
IN THE
CRIMEA AND CAUCASUS

LONDON: PRINTED BY
SPOTTISWOODE AND CO., NEW-STREET SQUARE
AND PARLIAMENT STREET

SPORT IN THE CRIMEA AND CAUCASUS

BY
CLIVE PHILLIPPS-WOLLEY, F.R.G.S.
LATE BRITISH VICE-CONSUL AT KERTCH

LONDON
RICHARD BENTLEY & SON, NEW BURLINGTON STREET
Publishers in Ordinary to Her Majesty the Queen
1881

All rights reserved

CONTENTS.

A verst is equal to three-quarters of an English mile.

SPORT IN THE CRIMEA AND THE CAUCASUS.

CHAPTER I.
SPORT IN THE CRIMEA.

Outfit—The droshky—A merry party—The Straits of Kertch—The steppe—Wild-fowl—Crops—The Malos—The ‘Starrie Metchat’—Game—Tscherkess greyhounds—Stalking bustards—A picnic—Night on the steppe.

Scarcely a week’s journey from London, with delicious climates and any quantity of game, it always seemed a marvel to me how few English sportsmen ever found their way to the Crimea or Caucasus. It is now something more than five years ago since I first made myself acquainted with the breezy rosemary-clad steppes of the former, or the low wooded hills on the Black Sea coast of the latter. For nearly three years resident at Kertch, I had ample opportunity of testing all the pleasures of the steppe, and a better shooting-ground for the wild-fowler or man who likes a lot of hard work, with a plentiful and varied bag at the end of his day, could nowhere be found. Of course the sportsman in the Crimea must rough it to a certain extent, but his roughing it, if he only has a civil tongue and cheery manner, will be a good deal of the ‘beer and beefsteak’ order. The Russians are hospitable to all men, especially to the sportsman; and the peasants, even the Tartars, are cordial good fellows if taken the right way.

On the steppes you need rarely want for a roof overhead, if you prefer stuffiness, smoke, and domestic insects to wild ones, with dew and the night air. If you can put up with sour cream (very good food when you are used to it), black bread, an arboose, fresh or half-pickled, with a bumper of fearful unsweetened gin (vodka) to digest the foregoing, you need never suffer hunger long. But for the most part sportsmen take their food with them. Perhaps if my readers will let me, it would be better to take them at once on to the steppe, and tell them all this en route.

Imagine then that for the last two days you have been hard at work out of office hours loading cartridges with every variety of shot, from the small bullets used for the bustard down to the dust-shot for the quail. Here, in Kertch, take a victim’s advice: make your own cartridges, don’t buy them. The month is July; the first of July, with an intensely blue sky, far away above you, giving you an idea of distance and immensity that you could never conceive in England, where the clouds always look as if they would knock your hat off. I should have said the sky will be blue by-and-by, for at present it is too dark to see, and we are carefully tucked away in bed; the impedimenta of the coming journey—cold meats, flasks of shooting powder, and jumping powder; bread, guns, and a huge string of unsavoury onions—all on the floor beside us. Ding, ding, ding! as if the door-bell were in a fit, then a crash and silence. No one ever rang a door-bell as a Russian droshky-driver rings it. He likes the muscular exertion, he loves the noise, and doesn’t in the least mind being sworn at if, as in the present instance, he breaks the bell-wire. A year in Russia has hardened us to all this, so merely speculating as to whether our landlord will pay more for broken bell-wires this half than last, we bundle out of bed and submit meekly to the reproaches of our friends outside on the cart. They, poor fellows, have had half an hour’s less sleep than we have, and it’s only 4 a.m. now, so any little hastiness of speech may be forgiven them.

But on such a morning as this, and on such a conveyance as our droshky, no one could remain sleepy or sulky long. The brisk bright air makes the blood race through your veins, and the terrible bumpings of the droshky on the uneven track, or half-paved streets, keep you fully employed in striving to avoid a spill or a fractured limb. Anything more frightful to a novice in Russia than the droshky I cannot conceive. This instrument of torture is a combination of untrimmed logs and ropes and wheels, with cruelly insinuating iron bands, merciless knots, and ubiquitous splinters. Manage your seat how you will, you are bound to keep bumping up and down, and at each descent you land on something more painful than that you have encountered before.

In spite of all this, as the droshky leaves the town, the old German jäger breaks out into a hunting ditty, and, truth to tell, until the wind is fairly jogged out of us we are a very noisy party. Then we try to light our cigarettes and pipes, and if we are lucky, only have the hot ashes jerked on to our next neighbour’s knee. Gradually the dawning light increases, the clouds of pearly grey are reddening, and the long undulating swell of the steppeland slowly unfolds itself around us. On our left are the Straits of Kertch, the sea looking still and hazy, with some half-dozen English steamers lording it amongst the mosquito fleet of fruiterers and lighters which fills the bay. All round us are chains of those small hills, whose dome-like tops proclaim them tumuli of kings and chiefs who went to rest ages ago, when the town behind us was still a mighty city, rejoicing in the name of Panticapæum.

Once clear of the ranges of tumuli or kourgans, as they call them here, there is nothing but steppe. On all points, except the seaside of the view, a treeless prairie; no hills, no houses, scarcely even a bush to break the monotony of bare or weed-grown waste. On the right of the post-road by which we are travelling (a mere beaten track and really no road at all) run the lines of the Indo-European Telegraph Company, their neat slim posts of iron contrasting not unfavourably with the crooked, misshapen posts which support the Russian lines on our left. Unimportant as these might appear elsewhere, they are important objects here, where they are the only landmarks to man, and the only substitute for trees to the fowl of the air.

All along the road on either side of us the wires are now becoming lined with kestrels, just up evidently, and looking as though they were giving themselves a shake, and rubbing their eyes preparatory to a day’s sport amongst the beetles and field-mice that swarm on the steppe. The number of kestrels round Kertch is something astonishing, and I almost think that with the other hawks, the blue hen harrier, kites and crows, they would almost outnumber the sparrows of the town. Now, too, our lovely summer visitants, the golden-throated bee-eaters, begin to shoot and poise swallow-like over the heads of the tall yellow hollyhock growing in wild profusion over the plain; hoopoes, with broad crests erect, peck and strut bantam-like by the roadside, while every now and again the magnificent azure wings of the ‘roller’ glitter in the morning sun among the flowers.

The ‘bleak steppeland’ is what you always hear of, and shudder as you hear, dread Siberian visions being conjured up at the mere name. But who that has seen the steppes in the later days of spring, or in the glow of midsummer, would apply such an epithet to lands that in their season are as richly clad in flowers as any prairie of the West? Long strips of wild tulip, Nature’s cloth of gold, blue cornflower, crow’s-foot and bird’s-eye, the canary-coloured hollyhock and crimson wild pea, all vie in compensating the steppeland for her chill snow-shroud in the months that are gone and to come.

Rich as the land is, the crops by the roadside are few and paltry, the chief being rye, maize, millet, and sunflowers. The sunflowers are cultivated for their seed, which is either used for making oil, or more generally is sold in a dry state as ‘cernitchkies.’ ‘Cernitchkies’ furnish the Malo Russ, male and female, with one of their most favourite means of wasting time. Go where you will, at any time, in Kertch, you will find people cracking these sunflower seeds, and trying to make two bites of the kernel. At every street corner you find a stall where they are sold, and you rarely come in without finding one of the little grey shards clinging to your dress, spat upon you by some careless passer-by, or sent adrift from some balcony overhead.

Beside these crops, you come across long strips of water melons, the principal food of the Malo Russ in the summer, and one of the chief sources of the Asiatic cholera sometimes so prevalent here. But for the most part the land is untilled—left to its wild-flowers and weeds.

The peasant of the Crimea makes but a sorry agriculturist. The Malo Russ is a lazy, good-natured ne’er-do-weel; his days being more than half ‘prasniks’ (saints’ days), he devotes the holy half to getting drunk on vodka, the other half to recovering from the effects of the day before. One day you may see him in long boots and a red shirt, with his arms round another big-bearded moujik’s neck in the drinking den, or husband and wife, on the broad of their backs, dead drunk, on the highway. The day after you’ll find him in a moralizing mood, seated on his doorstep, smoking the eternal papiros, or nibbling sunflower seeds.

Russians have told me that there are more holy days than calendar days in the year. To be holy a day need not be a saint’s day—a birthday in the Emperor’s family is quite enough to make a ‘prasnik.’ Of the actual Church fêtes there are 128.

The best agriculturists here are the German colonists, whose neat homesteads remind one for the moment of lands nearer home. Even the Tartars are better than the Malo Russ, but they have lately been leaving the Crimea in large numbers to escape the compulsory military service which Russia seeks to impose upon them. Everywhere the army seems to be the worst enemy of the State.

At last our ride comes to an end, and there is a general stretching of limbs and buckling on of shot-belts and powder-flasks, for with many muzzle-loaders are still the fashion here. The place at which we have stopped is the ‘Starrie Metchat,’ or old church, a Tartar ruin near a well, embosomed in rosemary-covered hills. Near this well we pitch our tents, and then we each go off on a beat of our own. Here there is room enough for all, and as some excellent Russian sportsmen have a careless way of shooting through their friends’ legs at a bolting hare, perhaps solitude has its peculiar advantages.

As you breast the first hill the sweet-scented covert comes nearly up to your waist, and right and left of you huge grasshoppers jump away or into your face with a vicious snap that is at first enough to upset the best regulated nerves. But see, your dog is pointing, and as you near him a large covey of grey birds, larger than our grouse, get up with whistling wings, and with smooth undulating flight skim round the corner of the next hill. You get one long shot and bag your bird perhaps. The dog moves uncertainly forward, and then stands again. Go up to him; wherever strepita (lesser bustard) have been you are sure to find a hare or two close by. Time after time have I found this, although I cannot account for the fact in any way. The hares here are larger than our English hares, and in winter turn almost white, the skins in autumn having sometimes most beautiful shades of silver and rose upon them. The largest hare I ever remember to have seen weighed nearly thirteen pounds—it was an old buck—while in England a hare of eight pounds is exceptionally large.

The dogs used in the Crimea for coursing are called Tscherkess greyhounds; they stand considerably higher at the shoulder than our own dogs, are broken-haired, with a much longer coat than our staghound, and a feathered stern. I am told that on the flat the English greyhound beats them for a short distance; but that in the hills, or with a strong old hare well on her legs before them, the Crimean dogs have it all their own way. I never had the good fortune to see the two breeds tried together. In fact, what coursing I did see was utterly spoilt by the Russian habit of cutting off the hare, and shooting her under the dog’s nose. This is, of course, utterly alien to our notions of sport—but so are most of their sporting habits. They never shoot flying if they can get a chance sitting. Bears and boars and such large game they shoot from platforms in trees at night; and I never saw a horse jump in all my three years in Southern Russia. Of course, what applies to the Crimea and the Caucasus may not apply to other parts of Russia.

As long as we keep in the rosemary, hares, quails, and strepita are all we are likely to meet with, except that in the valley and on the less sunny hillsides the dogs ever and anon flush large owls, that sail away hardly as bewildered as they are generally supposed to be by the sunlight. Overhead kites and harriers swim about in the clear sky, keeping a keen look-out for winged quails or wounded hares. But as we get to the top of the next rising ground we see in the plain far away at our feet a long line of what might well be grey-coated infantry. A closer inspection, or a previous acquaintance with the objects before us, will enable us to make them out to be bustards feeding line upon line in a flock—or herd, to speak correctly—of several hundreds. Most of them are busy with their heads on the ground, gleaning what they can from an old maize field; but here and there, at a slight distance from the rest, stands a sentry that the most wary stalker cannot baffle, or the most alluring grain tempt from his ceaseless watch. Knowing that we are already seen, and being perfectly well aware that by ordinary stalking on these open plains we could never get nearer than three hundred yards from the herd before the old sentinel sets them all in motion with his shrill call, we retrace our steps, and get our comrades together. Then the horses are put to, and all with our guns in readiness we drive towards the point at which the bustards were seen. When within sight of them we make arrangements among ourselves, and then the droshky is driven quietly past the bustards some five hundred yards from them. All their heads are up, and the whole of the herd of two hundred is watching us intently; but they know something of the range of a gun, and feel safe enough to stay yet awhile. Watch hard as you may, grey birds, you didn’t notice that one of the occupants of the droshky has just rolled off, gun in hand, and is now lying flat buried in a deliciously fragrant bed of rosemary. One by one, as the droshky circles round the watchful birds, the occupants drop off and lie still, until at last we have a cordon of sportsmen drawn right round the herd, and only the yemstchik remains on the droshky. Slowly, so as not to frighten them, he narrows his circle, while each hidden gunner keeps his eye anxiously on his movements.

At last, having stretched their necks to the very utmost limit and twisted them into gyrations that would surprise a corkscrew, the bustards think they have had enough of it, and there is a slow flapping of wings, and hoisting of the heavy bodies into air. Slowly, with a grand solemn flight, wonderfully in keeping with the wild majesty of the boundless plains on which they live, they sail away towards the hills. Suddenly the leaders stop with a jerk, and try too late to change their direction. From the covert beneath the sportsman starts to his feet, two bright flashes are seen, two reports follow, one huge bird collapses at once and another lowers for a moment, and then goes feebly on to fall at the first discharge of the next hidden gun. Right and left the remainder fly, rising somewhat as they do so, but still not high enough to take them out of danger, and when at last they have passed the fatal circle, five fine birds reward our stratagem.

One of us has to face a storm of chaff hard for a disappointed sportsman to bear, for in his excitement he had neglected to change his cartridges; and although standing within short pistol-shot of a passing monster, the quail-shot produces nothing more than a shower of feathers, enough almost to stuff a bolster with.

By thus surrounding them, and by shooting them occasionally from a cart, a few of these magnificent birds (larger than a turkey and finer eating) are killed from time to time throughout summer and autumn. A few too are sometimes picked up by the gunner in the early summer whilst still young, as they hide separately or in small coveys in the deep undergrowth. But the only time when any quantity are exposed in the bazaar for sale is in the depths of winter. Then when a snowstorm has caught the birds hiding in the valleys, and clogged their wings with snow, which a bitter wind still more surely binds about them, these poor denizens of the desert are surrounded and driven like a flock of sheep into the Tartar villages, where they are butchered, and thence sent in cartloads into Kertch, to be sold at a rouble and a half (3s. 6d.) apiece.

After slaying the bustards, having done enough for glory, we have time to remember a thirst that would empty a samovar and an appetite that would astonish a negro. Gladly we hurry back to our little tent in a cleft at the foot of the hills, and while one unpacks the cold meats, dried sturgeon and caviare, another gets water for that tea without which our repast would be poor indeed to a Russian. Being born and bred Englishmen, two of us might well have been expected to prefer our native beer to tea, but it is wonderful how fond men get of the delicious tea brewed in Russia, with its slip of lemon in it to add piquancy to the flavour. For my own part, after really severe exertion I am most thoroughly convinced it is by far the best restorative you can take, and one which I should prefer to any other liquid whatever. Try as you will you can neither get nor make such tea in England, and once away from Russia, you must be content to leave the blessings of tea, ‘swejie ikra’ (fresh caviare), and the soothing papiros (cigarette) behind you; for numerous as tobacconists are in England, I know none where really good cigarette tobacco can be bought, such as you smoke in the Crimea.

Meanwhile, as we are still here, let us lie on our backs and enjoy the delicious weed, watching the yemstchik arrange that wonderful puzzle of old cord which constitutes the harness of a troika. At last the horses are ready, and depositing ourselves and game on the jolting vehicle, we let our legs swing over the side, and if used to the motion manage to get a great deal of pleasure out of the drive home.

As the evening closes in over these wild waste lands, a stillness and peace seem to come with it of which one has no knowledge in the towns. The piping of the quails, the long soft wail of the coolik (curlew), and even the notes of the German hunting horn on the other droshky far in front, all seem to make fitting music for the hour and scene; and as the stars begin to shine out from a sky of infinite depth and metallic blueness, the oojai domoi (home already) is spoken not without an accent of regret, though limbs are tired and steppe roads rough.

CHAPTER II.
CRASNOI LAIS.

A frozen sea—Swarms of wild-fowl—The Indo-European telegraph—Sledging on the Azov—A desolate scene—Taman—Journey inland—Tumerūk—Hotels—A dangerous sleep—Foxes—Wolves—A hasty retreat—Ekaterinodar—Supper in the forest of Crasnoi Lais—An exciting night’s sport—Driving the forest—Cossack beaters—Wild deer—Other game—The bag—Rations of vodka—A Cossack orgy—Vulpine sagacity—Wolf stories—Return to Kertch.

It was in February of 1876 that I first made acquaintance with the Caucasus. Once or twice before then it is true that I had crossed over to Taman and had a day’s pheasant-shooting on the reedy shores of the Kuban. As we poled our flat-bottomed boat along its sluggish waters, I had a glimpse every now and again of the track of boar or cazeole (roe), that made me long for a chance of a longer stay on its banks. But it was not until the February of 1876 that my wish was granted. For weeks we had had all business stopped by the frost. The whole of the Azov was frozen as hard as the high-road, and it was only beyond the forts and well into the Black Sea that any open water could be found. Here the wild-fowl swarmed. Along the edge of the ice, where the open water began, lines of cormorants stood solemn and patient, fringing the ice with a black border of upright forms for miles. Beyond these in the open water were myriads of crested duck (anas fuligula), golden-eye pochards, scaups, and whistlers. Here and there in bevies, with hoods extended, the great grebes sailed about, while great northern divers and rosy-breasted mergansers all added their quota to the beauty of the scene. More beautiful than all others, groups of smews, with their plumage of delicately pencilled snow, ducked and curtsied on the swelling wave, while overhead the pintail whistled by, the large fish-hawks poised in air, and the gulls laughed and chattered perpetually.

For the last few weeks most of my time had been spent among the wild-fowl or skating with the fair ladies of Kertch on the rink by the jetty. But one fine morning the lines of the Indo-European Telegraph Company between Taman and Ekaterinodar were good enough to break down, and my friend the chief of the Kertch station was ordered to make an inspection of them along their whole length from one point to another. It seemed to him a long and wearisome journey to make by himself, so that like a good man and considerate, he asked me to share his sledge with him. Always glad to give me a chance of enjoying myself in my own way, my kind old chief readily agreed to the arrangement, and within an hour from the time when K. first proposed the trip, he and I were hard at work in the bazaar purchasing stores for the journey. There is of course a post-road from Taman to Ekaterinodar, but badly indeed will those fare who trust to the resources of a Russian post station for their bodily comfort. This we well knew, and in consequence a large stock of German sausages, caviare, vodka, and other portable eatables and drinkables were stowed away in the body of our sledge.

For many days previous to the time of which I write, the over-sea route from Yenikale to Taman had been open to carts and sledges, while vans, laden with corn, had been continually crossing with only an aggregate of two accidents in the last four days. It was then with but few misgivings that we embarked in our sledge with a really good ‘troika’ (team of three) in front, coached by the noisiest rascal of a yemstchik that ever swore at horses. Our road for the first twenty-two versts lay over the bosom of the Azov, and as we passed through regular streets of mosquito shipping, and now and then under the hull of some big steamer caught in the ice, the sensation was strangely novel. For the first ten versts the road was good, the pace exhilarating, and buried in our warm rugs we hugged to ourselves the conviction that we were in for a really good thing. After this, however, we got to piled and broken ice, where the accidents of the last four days had occurred, and where our driver averred a current existed. Here my friend got nervous, and insisted on walking at a fair distance from the sledge, which proceeded meanwhile at a foot’s pace. This in the increasing frost mist was not so cheerful, but the current was soon cleared, and in another half hour we landed safe and sound at that miserable little town of Taman.

The only living things we had passed on our way were several wretched assemblies of pale-looking gulls, literally frozen out, poor fellows, and a few huge eagles, squatting on the ice, their plumes all ruffled up, suffering probably as much from a surfeit of wounded ducks as from cold. The whole scene as we crossed was as desolate as the mind can well imagine; Kertch behind us, white with snow, clustering round the hill of Mithridates, a mere skeleton of her former glory in the days of Greek and Persian; Taman, once too a prosperous city, now a few hovels buried in a snowdrift; Yenikale perhaps more dead than either; and all round the long low hills, the rounded tumuli of dead kings; the tall bare masts of the belated ships; a frozen sea beneath and a freezing sky above.

Once in Taman we gave our driver a good tip (‘na tchai’) for the tea as they call it, and betook ourselves to a friend’s house for a few minutes’ rest before our next start. Why a yemstchik’s fee, which is invariably spent in nips of vodka (unsweetened gin) should be called tea-money, has always appeared to me an unanswerable enigma. Taman hardly deserves a description, even from so humble a pen as mine. It has a jetty and a telegraph station; is the post from which a few cattle are shipped to Kertch, and to which a few travellers to the Caucasus come from the same place. Once it was a large and flourishing city, twin sister to Panticapæum (Kertch) on the other side of the straits; now it is a collection of miserable hovels, surrounded by mud knee-deep in winter and storms of dust in summer, with an odour of fish and the vodka shop in all seasons. There are near to Taman some large oil-works, from which naphtha is said to be extracted in large quantities. It may be so, but I hear that their original owner is bankrupt, and he was a Russian; so that as the present proprietors are Americans, and as such less likely to be able to protect themselves from local frauds, I should not feel inclined to invest my bottom dollar in the Taman Oil Company.

Such a wretched place did we find Taman, that we were glad to leave it and commence our journey inland at once. In describing a journey the traveller as a rule looks to the scenery to supply at least a very large portion of his description; what then shall the luckless traveller do, who has literally no scenery to describe? The road is a beaten track by the telegraph posts, with, every sixteen or twenty versts, a white house with a straw yard and some sheds at the back, and a black and white post with a bell roofed in on the top of it in the front. This is the post station. The country surrounding it is apparently waste, and, except for a few flocks of sheep, an old hooded crow or two, and maybe a bustard, quite untenanted by living things. Always the snow beneath and the jingling bells in front, and this with no incident to rouse one, naturally ends in sleep.

Towards evening we came in sight of a larger group of buildings than any we had hitherto seen, and this we found was Tumerūk, our resting-place for the night. As far as we could see it was a larger town than Taman, with the inevitable green-domed church, a good spacious bazaar, barracks I think, and a neat little club-house. We were told that Tumerūk derived its wealth from the sturgeon fishery carried on to a very great extent in its neighbourhood. We were also told there were two good hotels in the place, and set off in high spirits to search for them, a comfortable bed to follow a good supper of sturgeon and caviare being things as welcome as they were unexpected. We searched diligently and found the first hotel, a moujik’s drinking den or ‘cabak.’ There was a table with a man under it, and many more nearly ready to follow his peaceful example, but no beds and no supper. At last we found the grand hotel, a gaunt white house near the bazaar. With doubting hearts (for the place looked deserted) we beat at the little door, but got no response. After nearly ten minutes spent in mutilating our knuckles and damaging the door, a fellow in shirt and slippers turned up, looking as astonished as his besotted face would allow him to. The ‘cazain’ (master) was away, he said, and spite of his boasting anent the capabilities of his house, we soon found there was no food in it but black bread—no servant but himself. But he managed to find us a room in fair repair, with a couple of the usual wooden bedsteads in it, and this we took. To our horror we found the stoves had not been lighted for a month, and were out of order, so that the cold indoors was greater than that without. Still it was too late to seek a lodging elsewhere, so we had some of our own stores cooked, a dram of Tumerūk vodka from the cabak, a small charcoal stove put in the middle of the room, and then rolling ourselves in every fragment of clothing we could find, and almost regretting that we had ever left our comfortable quarters in Kertch, we proceeded to reap the reward of our long drive in a deep and dreamless sleep.

Towards morning I half awoke with an idea that the house was attacked, so violent was the noise that aroused me, and at once jumped up to see what was happening. But the moment I was out of bed a strange giddiness seized me, and turning round I fell, and remember no more until I found a friendly telegraphist endeavouring to rouse me with libations of cold water freely applied. Gradually I came round, but with such an intense headache and utter inability to use my own limbs, that I had rather have remained insensible. I was utterly unable to help in rousing my poor friend K., and as my senses came back to me I became seriously alarmed lest our morning callers should have been too late to save him.

The truth was, something was wrong with the charcoal stove. Every aperture through which ventilation could be effected had, Russian fashion, been hermetically sealed for the winter, and my friend and I had had the narrowest escape from asphyxiation possible. After immense efforts we brought him round, but in spite of the bracing cold and the rapid driving, we both suffered from racking headaches and extreme lassitude for the rest of the day.

The travelling during this second day was of a more interesting nature; the country being covered in many places for miles with jungles of a tall reed called ‘kamish,’ in which pheasants are said to abound, and boars and roe to occur not infrequently. After getting out of the reedy land we came to a tract of another nature, bare and rock-strewn; and here, within half a mile of the station at which we slept, I was surprised to see numbers of foxes hunting about in the snow for food. I should think that at one time a score must have been in sight simultaneously. As soon as we had taken in our rugs and ordered the samovar, I took my rifle, as it was not yet dusk, and tried to stalk one of these little red rovers, without the least compunction, as foxhounds are probably a blessing of civilisation with which these barren lands will never be acquainted. But though I stalked a good deal and shot once or twice, I did no good until I got to a frozen lake, some three-quarters of a mile from the station. Here I wounded a fox and followed him for some distance over the ice, and in doing so came across the remains of some large animal lately torn to pieces by brutes of prey.

Having given up my fox, I was meditating what manner of beasts these might be, when my answer came in a long, weird howl. No need to tell any one what that sound is. Instinct teaches every man to recognise the wolf’s howl, and once heard it is not easily forgotten. The first howl was followed by another and another, and though I have no wish to pose as a coward, I frankly admit I wished I was anywhere but three-quarters of a mile from a house, and all the distance two feet deep in snow, which would not bear my weight on the surface. The wind, luckily, was from them to me, so that, though I walked back at my best pace, plunging frantically into deep drifts every few yards, from which I was spurred on by ever-recurring wolf music, I saw nothing, though I heard a good deal of my grim serenaders. It was a retreat, I admit, undignified, if you will; but if the wind had been in another quarter it might have been worse. Over our tea that night the station-master spun many a long yarn of the doings of the wolves, highly coloured perhaps, but true in part, I believe. Next morning their tracks were numerous by the post-road, and they must evidently have been about in some force.

After another day’s journey, passing through a few Cossack villages, with their green-domed churches and walled enclosures, we at last came in sight of our journey’s end, Ekaterinodar. This is the first town of any size on this side the Caucasus, and at first sight even this is more forest than town. The trees have just been sufficiently removed to make room for the houses, but wherever no house actually stands the forest has not been interfered with. The effect was extremely pretty, now that the snow had loaded every tree with its white plumes and given the streets a hard white covering; but in summer, when the acacias (which predominate here) are in blossom, Ekaterinodar must be as lovely as it is malarious. In summer and early autumn fever rages here, and even now every man and woman that we pass in the streets has a yellow wizen face that tells of the ravages of this Asiatic curse. Here at last everything is genuinely Asiatic except the buildings. The grotesque combinations of top hat and long boots are not seen here. The denizens of the streets are tall Cossacks with high sheepskin hats, with a crown all scarlet cloth and gold braid; short broad-shouldered Tartars, in loose blue garments, belted at the waist with bright-coloured shawls; women in short petticoats and high boots with bashliks over their heads. The shops are most of them open magazines, with no glass front, but instead an awning in front of them, and inside a broad counter, on which the proprietor sits cross-legged with cigarette or long pipe in mouth. The wares for sale consist chiefly of pelts brought in by the Tscherkesses from the neighbourhood; and here, in the examination of them, my friend and I spent no small time, as a great deal of the natural history of the country may be gleaned from these middlemen, and many a good guide and hunter be secured from among their clients.

I shall pass over the two days we spent here as shortly as possible. My friend had his work to do, and my own time was filled up by chatting with the officers who frequented the hotel at which we were staying. It was whilst thus engaged that we first heard of the existence of a large royal forest of some twenty-nine square versts in extent, which lay only some fifteen versts out of our course on the return journey. To make up our minds to visit it, having secured letters of introduction to the royal forester (Col. R.), was the work of five minutes, and next morning saw us with a friend in our sledge, who knew the colonel, dashing with buoyant spirits over the glittering snow. When the long line of darkly-wooded country first caught our eyes clean cut against the frosty blue sky, the stars were already in the heavens, and an occasional bark told us the foxes were all abroad, busy in their nocturnal forays.

After a drive of half-an-hour through dim forest rides, a fire glimmered ruddily through the trees, and the deep baying of hounds told us we had almost arrived. The forester’s house was a small four-roomed cottage, with a wattle enclosure round it, while outside the enclosure a few huts and a huge bonfire betokened the presence of the score of Cossacks who formed his staff. Throwing open his door, our host rushed out to meet us, a little wiry man, with a ruddy complexion, bright merry eye, huge grizzled moustache, and the most cordial manners possible. Once inside the cottage, the samovar was soon steaming comfortably, and a supper of caviare and roebuck broth, with the meat to follow, was discussed with an appetite which even the schnapps could not increase. Then bed was proposed, and my friend being a German, and of a certain age, readily fell in with the proposition. Not so the writer. To sit still or go to bed, now when all the longings of one’s life were almost granted, hearing the veteran sportsman before me discoursing calmly of the boars that had broken into his enclosure the night before, or the stag which he had shot a few nights before that, was too much for my boyish impatience; and my kind old host, seeing it, was as pleased at my keenness as amused at my impatience. Going out, he found one of the Cossacks was just preparing for a night hunt, and returning asked me if I would care to accompany him. Of course I jumped at the offer, and was starting forthwith. But my host called me back, and making me leave my own useless garments behind me, dressed me in a huge pair of felt boots of his own and his fur-lined, much-braided forester’s coat. Thus attired, I must have been too much of an attraction for my lazy friend, who shook himself together, and being similarly clad resolved to follow me.

The Cossack who was to be our chaperone was a sturdy, ill-favoured fellow, in the wildest combination of sheepskins conceivable, but he seemed to know his work, and was none the worse for being silent. As we passed down the long forest aisles, our footsteps, thanks to the felt shoes and the snow, were soundless even in that still night. Half an hour’s tramp through a perfect fairy land of frozen oaks, with a carpet of snow at their feet, on which our guide silently pointed out many a fresh track, and then we paused. One of us was to stay here; I stayed, my friend took a position a quarter of a mile further on, the Cossack being at the same distance beyond him. My own post was at the foot of an enormous oak, and here I crouched, my long felt boots deep sunk in the snow, my back against the tree, and my rifle across my knees.

Now it was that I learnt how necessary it is to wear the clothing of the country. Sitting thus with my feet in the snow in tight leather boots, I must have either kept up the circulation by moving my feet occasionally, which would have been fatal to my chance of sport, or I must have had my feet frost-bitten. As it was, in my loose boots of felt, my feet were almost too hot, and of course the rest of my body kept about the same temperature as my feet.

Once my companions had taken up their posts the whole forest was still as death for some minutes. The stillness indeed was so great as to be oppressive, and the occasional sounds—an owl’s weird hoot, the howl of a wolf, or the stealthy spring of an old grey hare—only heightened the effect by contrast. On every side I could look down long vistas of frozen hazels with tall oaks rising above them, through whose quaintly twisting limbs the intense metallic light of the winter moon gleamed down on the sparkling snow, or catching the icicles that hung in huge clusters from them drew from them all manner of pale prismatic colours. Every now and again a dark shadow glided over the snow, and a sound like a devil’s low chuckling laugh told one that the substance of that shadow was the great eagle owl, whose strong silent pinions were creeping, a very shadow of death, over some doomed hare. At one time a company of wolves seemed to have gathered round, for as soon as a long vibrating howl had moaned itself into silence on one side, another took up the strain and startled the forest on the other. All round us this music was kept up, but not a single wolf showed himself either to my companions or myself. Suddenly there was a loud report as if an enormous piece of artillery had been fired, and as the echoes thundered through the forest, the whole seemed to wake at once to a fiendish riot of strange sound. Every prowling beast and weird night-bird screamed in concert, and then all was silence again. This was caused by the cracking of the ice on the Kuban some miles off.

After an hour of intense enjoyment of this kind, I was roused by a distant crashing, as though a regiment was noisily breaking its way through the undergrowth. On and on it came, growing ever louder as it drew near, until the noise in that silent place seemed worthy of a herd of elephants. It came straight towards where I lay, and my heart beat so loudly with excitement that I really believed for the moment that the approaching beasts must hear it as I did; and in my anxiety I even pressed my breast with my hands in an unreasoning hope of silencing it. The noise was now so close that it seemed impossible but that I must see the cause of it, when suddenly another sound caught my ear. A slow scraping sound, painfully distinct for a minute, while the other sound ceased; then a rasping sound and a crash as of some heavy body falling, followed by a thundering rush, a glimpse of four splendid deer, magnified by the moonlight, bounding across one of the hazel vistas some four hundred yards off, a sharp, clear whistle, and then as the sound of the flying deer died away, the tramp of approaching footsteps, and all was over. The Cossack arrived first, and behind him my German jäger, woefully crestfallen, as well he might have been could he have known what black wrath filled his companion’s heart. The deer had been coming straight to me when my friend, alarmed by the tremendous noise they made amongst the frozen branches, had attempted to swarm the oak under which he had been placed. For a time he got on very well, and then losing his hold on the slippery trunk, he came down on his back with a crash that unluckily frightened our game more than it hurt him.

So ended our first night’s sport; but though we bagged nothing, no real sportsman I think would allow that a night spent amid such glorious surroundings, listening to the voices of Nature in one of her wildest moods, was a night wasted. At any rate when we got home my rest was the sweeter for my toil.

The day following this eventful night was spent in preparations for the grand drive fixed for the morrow; but though there was much to be done, our kind host arranged to give us some shooting in the afternoon of this day also. Lunch over, we took the hounds out—dark brown dogs with tan chests and points, looking as if they had a large cross of the bloodhound. The modus operandi of the day’s sport was simple in the extreme. The whole forest was divided into sections, each containing one square verst. Round one of these the guns were placed, and then the forester and his dogs went into the thick of it, and in a few minutes the woods were full of deep-toned music. The dogs seemed to me to hunt everything they came across, from a stag to a running cock pheasant, and the business of the gunner was to kill and, if possible, to bag the game before the dogs did. There was a great deal of excitement, men shouting, dogs baying, guns firing, and hares scuttling to the right and left of you, while through all, with a beautiful pertinacity which hardly allowed him time to fire a shot, the veteran forester tootled away on his horn. This would have augured badly for our sport on the morrow but that the forest was immense, and we were only in an outlying bit of it, from which we probably drove some game towards our next day’s ground. Although the snow was covered with tracks, we saw nothing but hares, of which we bagged about twenty.

The morning of Thursday broke as brilliantly as its predecessors, and the sun seemed if possible to glare with a harder light on the frozen snow. Outside our door the forester was apparently on the point of knocking down three or four Cossacks almost as excited as himself. His voice rose to a scream, his arms kept swinging about; even I knew enough Russian to hear that he was swearing awfully, and I had my fears lest something had happened to mar our day’s sport. However, he finally calmed down, and presently I heard him calling a huge-bearded ruffian a little dove (golubchik), whom he had addressed as the son of the most immoral of the canine race not five minutes before. He was merely explaining some of the minor details in the business of the coming day, he told me afterwards.

About 7.30 a Cossack colonel, with a hundred of his men, turned up. This was the local Nimrod, and these the beaters he brought with him; and a wilder lot to look at, a more thirsty lot to refresh, a noisier, more frolicsome lot altogether, you could not find even at Donnybrook fair. With the colonel came another Russian and a couple of young Frenchmen, and this made up our party.

A huge sledge was in attendance for the sportsmen, and another for the game. The beaters were sent on, and some of the more reliable entrusted with a third sledge laden with eatables and a cask of goodly dimensions. As the last Cossack disappeared down the forest drive, we turned back into the cottage, lighted our cigarettes, and having collected our ammunition, took our places on the sledge waiting for us, and drove merrily to the meet. On our way the overhanging branches caught us now and again, sweeping one of our number into the snow, amid peals of laughter from all but the victim.

Arrived at the rendezvous, strict silence was enjoined, the guns were posted, each a hundred yards or so from the other, along one side of the division, with orders on no account to leave those posts until told to do so. Meanwhile the Cossack colonel had taken his hundred men to the opposite side of the section, and all being in readiness, we heard his horn signal ‘forward,’ and then all was silent as the grave. Every eye was strained on the bushes and thick covert in front, every ear intently listening for the patter of feet or the sound of breaking brushwood. But as yet no sound: even the Cossacks were too distant to be heard as yet. Did some one move along the line? No, every soul is still as we are. Again the crash; the sound that set our hearts beating a few nights ago, but now far less startling in the daylight than it was then in the shadows and stillness of night.

Here they come trooping towards our line, four does and a tall stag in front, half trotting, half walking, tossing their dainty heads up and down as they approach. They advance straight towards the oak at which I saw my German friend posted, and I reluctantly hold my hand that he may make the best of his chance. Nearer and nearer they come, and yet no shot breaks the stillness, though they are almost past him. Suddenly they throw up their heads, and with a rush are lost in the forest beyond, without a shot having been fired at them. My friend had of course broken the rules, left his own tree, and gone off to one which seemed to him to have greater attractions. Thus the deer had for the second time passed him unfired at.

Soon the shots began to ring out, at first only a dropping fire, though towards the end of the drive the firing was so frequent as almost to resemble file-firing. After the red deer a wild cat came towards me, moving softly over the snow; and as my eye followed him I became aware of some dozen grey forms that had risen suddenly ghost-like all round me: one old hare sitting absolutely under my tree and gazing apparently rigidly into my face. There she sat, listening to the shots, without stirring for some five minutes, until in the open between two great oaks a fine red fox came trotting stealthily towards us, his broad heavy brush spread, and seeming to trail on the snow behind him, which threw his whole graceful, undulating form out in bold relief. It seemed against one’s English nature to shoot him, but it had to be done, and a charge of heavy shot rolled him over on the snow. It seemed like shooting a friend.

By this time the cries of the beaters had drawn very near, some of their forms even showing from time to time in open places. Three quick springs and an abrupt pause in the bushes in front of me now arrested my attention, but thinking after a time that it was only another hare, I singled out one of these long-eared gentry, and rolled him over. As I did so two roebucks broke covert, and galloped rapidly past our Russian friend on the left, who, making a neat right and left, laid them both on the path.

This was the shot of the day. A bugle now sounded a warning to turn our backs to the beaters and only shoot as the game passed us, thus avoiding the chance of bagging a beater. The hares came thick and fast, and as they cantered steadily away, a large number of them were bagged. When we came out on to the path there were four roes, a red deer, of which I had caught a passing glimpse as she crashed along the line, my fox, and thirty-seven hares. My fox I say, but I was doomed to find myself mistaken. It seems after he had been to all intents and purposes killed, he had crawled along the line and lain down to die in front of the Cossack colonel. This worthy gave him the coup de grâce, and claimed him in consequence. The red deer too, whose throat a Cossack’s bullet had cut as neatly as if it had been done with a knife, staggered on towards the colonel, and here, as its knees trembled preparatory to lurching forward in death, that gallant officer put a charge of small shot in its haunch, spoilt the venison, and secured another easy prey. The rule of the chase is here opposed to the English rule, and, I think, to common sense. With us the man who inflicts the first wound, with the Russians he who deals the last, obtains the quarry.

After two more beats, in which more game of the same kind was bagged, we repaired to the sledges at the cross rides for refreshment. I was much amused by the doling out of the vodka to the Cossacks. The cask was mounted on the sledge and there tapped, the forester, with three or four to help him, forming the Cossacks in line, and giving each man his nip in rotation, which he pitched straight down his throat in true Russian style, without ever giving the liquid time to wet the sides in passing. As the men went down after taking their nip, I noticed they coolly fell in again at the other end, and in time got another turn. One enormously tall fellow in a white sheepskin hat, which must have been double the height and circumference of an English ‘topper,’ with a crown of green cloth, got three drams in this way. But his hat and his height betrayed him, and put an end to the affair.

During the rest of the drives the sport varied very little; first came the wolves, slinking out almost before the beaters had entered the other side of the covert, then the deer, wild cats, and foxes in regular succession, and last of all the roes and hares. If there had been boars or bears I believe they would probably have followed the wolves and preceded the deer. But there were none seen all day.

When the game was counted out at evening the bag was one red deer, nine roe, two wild cats (splendid yellow tabbies, half as large again as a large domestic mouser), three foxes, two skunks, much prized for their pelts, and 175 hares, and this divided amongst some twenty guns, of whom two-thirds acted only as scarecrows to the game. The sport was good and wild enough in itself, but poor and without charm as compared to the still hunt of the night before.

Arrived at the forester’s house, the hares were given as wages to the beaters, who exchanged their skins for vodka from some neighbouring drinking shop, and made a vast stew of the carcases. With an enormous bonfire blazing, they made themselves merry on this rough fare until late into the night, dancing wild, graceful flings and reels, and singing national songs, in which a tone of melancholy and depression seemed to run through the warlike character of a border ballad.

The whole scene was one which Turner’s pencil might have gloried in, but no pen could do justice to the wild figures in their ragged sheepskins and mountainous hats of many-coloured wool, lit up by the long red flames, and backed by the hoary forest heavy with its months of snow.

In the morning before leaving Crasnoi Lais we saw a very curious instance of the sagacity of wolves. A herd of roebuck had settled down in fancied security in a hollow in the midst of one of the forest sections. A pack of wolves had discovered them there, and when we came in the morning the forester showed us plainly by their spoor their method of attack. At every few hundred yards round the entire circumference of the ‘quartal’ a wolf had entered it, and the whole pack gradually converging towards the centre had surrounded and killed three of the roes, which in rushing from one wolf must have dashed right into the jaws of another. My friend told me that he himself had been witness of another instance of the wolf’s cunning whilst driving on the post-road in winter. A cow and her calf were feeding by the road side, and two wolves were endeavouring to carry off the calf. One of them kept frolicking about in front of the cow, rolling on the ground or snapping at her nose, to distract her attention, the calf meanwhile getting under her mother in rear. Here the second wolf attacked her, and seemed in a fair way to accomplish his object when my friend drove by.

The natives have many wonderful tales to tell of wolves, of which perhaps the most incredible is that if, when you are pursued by a pack, you have the presence of mind to squat down on your haunches, the wolves will come and surround you in a similar attitude, and after some time spent in contemplation will slowly retire, leaving you unmolested. I can only say that the man who had faith enough to put this to the proof would deserve to live to tell the tale. It is in spring, when the she-wolf is followed by a party of her grim suitors, that the Tscherkesses and Cossacks most dread this animal, and then they say they are extremely dangerous, and that if you are unlucky enough to wound the lady, nothing but their death will release you from the attacks of her enraged suite.

Having bid a hearty adieu to our host, and taking a couple of roebuck with us to testify of our prowess to envious friends at Kertch, we got under weigh next morning on our return journey. On our way I wounded an old wolf which I saw slinking round some kamish (reed) beds by the roadside; but though I followed him far into the reeds I never bagged him, and could by no means get another fair shot at him with my rifle.

Three days’ fast travelling saw us back at Kertch, the heroes of the hour; for though Ekaterinodar with its forest is so near, the Russian sportsman is of so unenterprising a nature that none of our comrades knew it except by report. The comforts of our English consulate were none the less appreciated after the cold bare rooms of a Russian post station in the Caucasus, and we both agreed that though such sport was glorious, a comfortable home to return to was a blessing mightily to be desired.

CHAPTER III.
ODESSA AND MISKITCHEE.

Mountaineers and Shikarees—Outfit—Journey from London to Odessa—Snipe-shooting on the Dnieper—A drunken yemstchik—A collision—Prince Vorontzoff—Aloupka—Yalta—Livadia and Orianda—Miskitchee lake—A Tartar butcher—Native hovels—A shooting party on the lake—A dreary bivouac.

It was not until the August of 1878, three years after the events recorded in my last chapter, that a passage in a recently published book on the Caucasus drew my attention again to my old hunting grounds. It was Mr. Freshfield in this work (‘The Frosty Caucasus’) who wrote that in all his travels in the Caucasian mountains he had seen little more game than a couple of tame bears in a Tscherkess village.

This struck me as strange, and as I was at that time meditating a sporting tour in some as yet unchosen locality, I decided to go to the Caucasus for myself, and test its capacities to the utmost of my ability as hunting ground for large game. Since my return from Asia I have seen Devouasseux, Mr. Freshfield’s guide, who tells me that the author was too intent on his favourite pursuit of mountain-climbing to have much time for looking for game. And indeed the book itself leads one to infer this. The climbing of almost impracticable mountains and the pursuit of great game could not be combined by any one. To achieve success in either pursuit is enough for most men.

After passing a week in preparing my outfit, which was by no means a formidable one, I was ready to start. An ‘express rifle,’ a double-barrel smoothbore (C. F. No. 12), fitted with metal cartridge-cases, which when inserted converted the gun into a muzzle-loader, a suit of moleskin, one of Rouch’s photographic apparatuses, and a pair of Dean’s field boots, were the chief items in my outfit. The first three articles are indispensable, the other two absolutely useless, as I was unable to work the one, and had but little occasion to test the other. Besides, I believe Mr. Dean’s boots are not much good without the dubbin supplied with them, and this my servant promptly lost. No doubt properly used with this, they are as excellent as their many advocates believe them to be.

The most difficult thing to get was a really good map of the Caucasus, containing the names of the principal small streams and villages. This I afterwards secured in Russia under the name of ‘Map of the Caucasian Isthmus,’ by Professor Dr. Karl Koch (‘Karte von dem Kaukasischen Isthmus,’ Berlin, 1850). In this map most of the important villages are marked, and the names are sufficiently like those given them by their inhabitants to enable a stranger to recognise them.

The journey from St. Katherine’s Docks to Odessa, viâ Vienna, has nothing in it worthy of record. Most men who travel nowadays have seen as much of it as they care to. For my own part, having made the journey several times, I think the things that have made most impression on my mind are the gradual improvement in the railway carriages, from the time you leave our English abominations until the time you find yourself surrounded with at least all the necessary conveniences of life on the last stage to Odessa; the gradual diminution in pace, until some little distance from your journey’s end it amounts to little more than a crawl; the sudden clearing and brightening of the atmosphere once you have crossed the channel; the predominance of blue in all the dresses of the French peasant; the absence of fences to make a run interesting, if runs took place in this land of vulpecides; the disappearance of the rook, and the appearance of his grey-backed congener the hooded crow in his place; the multitude of magpies, and the loquaciousness of one’s travelling companions. I am afraid my readers, if I have any, will at once put me down as unobservant, but it may only be that first impressions are lost if the same journey is often repeated.

Arrived at Odessa, my old chief and kind friend, Mr. George Stanley, Her Majesty’s Consul-General there, received me with great kindness, and to him and Mr. Mitchell I am indebted for much valuable information and many acts of attention. During the few days I stayed at Odessa I had one very excellent day’s snipe-shooting with Mr. Stanley on the Dnieper, during which we bagged fifty-six snipe in an hour between us. Of these, I am in honesty bound to admit, that Mr. Stanley, whose hand had not forgotten the cunning acquired in Egypt, bagged by far the larger share.

On our way home we had a specimen of the driving of Russian yemstchiks, which would have considerably lowered them probably in the esteem of their ardent admirer Sir Robert Peel. Our fellow seemed a little the worse for vodka, and as soon as we got away from the house at which we had been staying, we had proof that his looks did not belie him. The bracing air roused his spirits; his horses were ‘little doves’ and ‘sons of dogs’ in the same breath, his whip whirled about, and tossing their heads in the air, the team (in which there were two young ones) took the bit in their teeth, and went away straight across the steppe, over gullies, with a bump that would have smashed any springs had there been any, down slopes at a rate that took your breath away, and all the while the yemstchik laughing and swearing, and not minding one bit. Two of his crimson velvet cushions dropped off into darkness behind him, and this probably sobered him. At last we got on to the track, and though the pace was still violent, we were comparatively safe here. Once we collided with a droshky, the driver of which was unusually moderate in his oaths at the accident, and passed on quickly and disappeared. We discovered afterwards that a valuable piece of the harness of our own troika had been lost, carried away by the droshky in the collision probably, seeing which the droshky man had held his tongue, and made off with his prize.

But our troubles were not yet over. As we neared Odessa there was a sharp turn in the track. As we turned I saw our danger, but there was no time to avert it; and in the twinkling of an eye we charged a telegraph post. The tall thin post passing between our off leader and the shaft horse, cut clean through every atom of harness, and set the young one free. For a moment he stood stunned and trembling, and then with a snort betook himself off into the darkness as fast as legs could carry him. This finally restored our driver to a state of most solemn sobriety, and for the rest of our journey we were conveyed at a safe and moderate pace by the remaining two horses. The fellow was lucky enough to recover his horse next day, but not without considerable trouble and expense. I believe he and two or three hired comrades spent the night on the steppe looking for the stray horse.

After this I bade adieu to my kind friends in Odessa, receiving as a last kindness from Mr. Stanley an introduction to Prince Vorontzoff, who, luckily for me, happened to be travelling by the boat in which I had embarked. This introduction stood me in good stead, as his Highness, who speaks English like an Englishman, gave me letters of introduction at Tiflis, by exhibiting the address and external signature of which I was able to allay the suspicions of the Cossacks on the Black Sea, and otherwise help myself. I owe Prince Vorontzoff many thanks for his ready kindness to a stranger, and repeat them with the same sincerity with which I tendered them when he left the boat for his lovely place at Aloupka.

Aloupka is to my mind the finest castle in Russia, in the most picturesque position. It is a strange mixture of the half fortress, half castle, of early feudal times, Moorish magnificence, Russian luxury, and English comfort. In the distance it looks massive and glorious, with magnificent timber, gardens, and vineyards stretching down to the sea at its feet, the grey summit of Aië Petri towering over it from behind, and away to the right the Bear Mountain, couched with his head on his paws, looking ever seaward.

Yalta itself is the Eden of Russia perhaps, but it is an Eden in which most of the inhabitants are invalids, all the hotels infamously exorbitant in their charges; and life, unless one is addicted to the process of the grape cure, excessively monotonous. The palace of Livadia is beautiful, but would, I think, scarcely please ordinary English taste as much as the magnificent foliage (artificially arranged) at Orianda (the Grand Duke Constantine’s seat), or the stately beauty of Aloupka. The mountains round Yalta and as far as Theodosia are extremely fine, and I know of few things more beautiful than some of the views to be obtained from their pine-clad sides. I believe a few roe and chamois are to be found on them, but these are at least partially preserved.

Arrived at Kertch I was at home again, and soon in my old room at the consulate. A right merry time we had of it, and, as was natural, devoted a couple of days to our old friend Miskitchee, the lake that ‘best of all lakes the fowler loves,’ on these Crimean steppes.

Miskitchee is the Tartar name for a village some sixty versts from Kertch: the lake, which adjoins the village, shares with the latter its name. The lake is a piece of shallow water some two miles long by half a mile broad, and nowhere deeper than up to a man’s waist. It is for the most part covered with the high reed called here ‘kamish,’ and on the mud banks round its edges and in the little lagoons within the reeds myriads of wild-fowl play by day, and chatter and feed all night. Here have I had many a good day’s wild-fowling, passed many a merry night, and had at least one adventure, which, as far as I remember, was somewhat in this wise: I had been staying at the house of the chief farmer in the village, a Greek or Armenian—I forget which—for some few days, on a shooting expedition. One morning, about six o’clock, I was tramping over some damp steppeland, where pools were frequent, and snipe should have been more so, but were not. After an hour spent in looking for something to shoot, I had almost resolved to be off again to my favourite lake, when I heard a voice calling to me in Russian. Looking up I saw a Tartar, rather a smart one too, in a fawn-coloured robe and the inevitable sheepskin hat, standing upright in a big flat cart, with a troika of capital horses before him. On coming closer I found he was inviting me to take a seat in his cart, assuring me that he, too, was a sportsman, and had to drive over a part of the steppe that morning where game abounded. Having no gun with him, he would show me where sport might be had if I liked. However, roubles in those days were rare with me, and I feared that if I accepted the lift I should have to pay a considerable fare, so I declined as graciously as possible. My friend persisted, and at last I told him frankly that if he gave me a passage to these happy hunting grounds of which he spoke it would have to be a free one, and include a return before nightfall. He consented at once, so without more ado I got into his cart, and drove off with him.

After a verst or two I began to find my friend was no ‘blagueur,’ for in a very short time we had bagged several hares and a few quail. His sight was the most marvellous I ever met with. Standing up in his cart, as he drove rapidly over the uplands, he would from time to time pull up suddenly, exclaiming, ‘Vot zeits!’—Lo, a hare! at the same time pointing to some distant object on the ploughed land or prairie. It was no good my looking, for I could discern nothing, so that I had to dismount and simply trudge for one or two hundred yards in the direction he indicated, until sure enough, from under my very feet, the hare started, until then utterly undiscernible to me.

And now the object of his morning drive was revealed to me. On a hillside near us was a mighty flock of sheep, tended by a few ragged Tartar lads and one grey-headed shepherd, with the usual retinue of huge mongrel sheepdogs—brutes who go for you on every opportunity. Hailing the old shepherd, a bargain was soon struck, and we dismounted to choose our sheep. My friend plunged in among them, and after regarding many with the eye of a profound connoisseur, chose four. To choose them was easy, to secure them seemed less so. Kicking off his shoes and rolling up his long loose sleeves, the purchaser tried to approach his purchase. The more he advanced the more rapidly the sheep retired, trying in vain to lose himself amongst his comrades or substitute another in his place. But the Tartar was not to be done, and in a quarter of an hour three were secured, caught by the hind leg, jerked over on their back, all four legs tied together, and bundled into the cart. Ambitious of imitating my friend, I too took off my boots, and made frantic efforts to collar an innocent-looking beast. After an enormous waste of time I did get hold of a leg of mutton, though not, I believe, the right one. The jerk was neatly given, but alas! not by the right creature. In a moment I was sprawling, and in another the whole flock was romping over my breathless body. How I extricated myself I know not, but when I did I sat me down, feeling sheepish in more ways than one, and resumed my boots a wiser, though a sadder man.

Having got our whole cargo on board, we set off for the nearest Tartar village, killing on the way another hare. By the way, whenever I killed anything, my guide insisted on cutting its throat and breaking its legs, a superstitious observance, I have since heard, common to all Mahometans. Arrived at the village, an old man (the moollah I think he was) climbed to the top of a low hovel in the middle of the straggling main street (if streets there are in Tartar ‘aouls’), and shouted himself hoarse in the Tartar tongue. What he said I knew not then, but from subsequent events I believe it was to the effect that the good butcher, Lotso, had brought with him five fat sheep, all or any of which he was prepared then and there to convert into mutton, if sufficient customers were forthcoming. Any one who wanted mutton, to raise his hand. After a great deal of talking all by himself, the moollah came down from his perch, and a crowd forming round him, a tremendous row ensued. It looked like being a free fight, but it was soon over, and perhaps the Tartar housekeepers may take to themselves the credit of settling on the joint for the day sooner than their English representatives at home.

The purchases being settled, a sheep was selected from the cart, and carried to a stone trench hard-by, its throat cut, and the whole operation of skinning and dismembering completed in a very few minutes. Meanwhile a number of gaunt curs, drawn by the smell of blood, had crowded round, and so hardy were they that it was all a dozen Tartars could do, whirling their knouts round the butcher as the whips do when the huntsman is breaking up his fox, to keep the brutes at bay. Then the meat was parcelled out, the money paid, cash down, the entrails, tied up in the skin (butcher’s perquisites), thrown back into the cart, and after a drink of sour cream at the dirty brown hands of a Tartar princess, we were on our way for the next village, to repeat the same process.

And now all our sheep having been slaughtered and sold, the gloaming came on, and with it a hunger on my part that made me anxious to get back to my quarters at the friendly Armenian’s. Turning to the Tartar, I suggested our return, when he coolly informed me that I had better make up my mind to pass the night at his house at J——, naming a village of some half-dozen houses, at which an execrable murder had occurred some months previously. It may have been the memory of this, or it may have been his ghastly handiness with the butcher’s knife, or perhaps the thought of my cosy quarters at Miskitchee, that made me resolve that go to that place I would not. Accordingly I reminded him of his promise. All the satisfaction I could get was that if I wanted to go back I must walk. Did I know in which direction Miskitchee lay? Yes, out yonder, over that low line of hills. A grim laugh, and the assurance that Miskitchee was in an exactly opposite direction, increased my suspicions of my quondam friend, as I knew by certain landmarks that he must be lying. A moment’s consideration showed me that a walk at this hour, even supposing I did not lose my way, would end probably in a night on the steppe, at the mercy of this man or any other who chose to stalk me, and surprise me in the dark or in my sleep, to say nothing of the absolute necessity in case of my leaving the cart of abandoning my game. So I changed my tactics. He had no fire-arms, and sat on the edge of the cart. I had my gun, and sat behind in the body of it. Mustering what little Russian I knew, I let him understand that I held him to his promise; that I had heard of J—— and its evil reputation, and didn’t mean to go there; that I knew the track now on our right was the home track; and that, if he refused to take it, I would blow him off his cart with a charge of No. 5. This was a rough argument, and he seemed nonplussed. He tried to argue me into going another way; he tried to laugh me out of my suspicions—he even began to bully. I simply watched him, repeated my proposals, and sat still. Meanwhile the horses were pulled up. Then my friend tried to slip off his seat, and so get out of his awkward position in front of my gun’s muzzle. I cocked my gun with a click, and brought it in a line with his back. There was a moment’s hesitation, and then with a curse he took the right road at a sulky pace.

All that drive I never took my eyes off him, and never let go my gun. Gradually he seemed to become better tempered, and when we got within half a mile of Miskitchee he turned and spoke to me, to assure me that further than that nothing would induce him to drive me.

Satisfied now that I could get home in safety, I got down, taking a couple of hares and some birds with me, leaving the rest for the Tartar, and walked off to Miskitchee, thankful to have got off so well. On my way back I thought I had probably been over suspicious, and made a fool of myself. However, on my arrival, I found I had been searched for all day, and great anxiety had been felt for me. It seems my butcher was of more professions than one, being indeed the most notorious horse-stealer on these steppes. He had camped near the village the night before, and made several inquiries about me, having seen me returning from shooting that night. He had also expressed great admiration for my gun, a rather handsome breech-loader. This, together with the fact that the butcher, one of my host’s best horses, and myself had all disappeared simultaneously next morning, accounted for the anxiety felt, as well as for the butcher’s objection to return to the village that night.

Such was one of the memories Miskitchee called up in my mind. But on this my last visit I saw little to remind me of my adventure. The Armenian had, I believe, gone, and the whole village looked asleep in the sunshine as we passed it by: a straggling group of one-storied hovels, with the sunlight glinting on rows of yellow gourds on the thatch; a dark, good-looking Tartar girl in a scarlet cap and many ringlets, much bespangled with small gilt coins, standing in a doorway, round which there was some sort of an enclosure. At another cottage door, with his legs in the mud of the main street and his quarters on the somewhat drier mud of his dining-room floor, lounged, cigarette in mouth, a pink-shirted Russian moujik. Inside the hovel, if we had had time to look, we should probably have seen a heap of bedclothes between the roof and the top of the oven; this would be the baboushka’s (grandmother’s) bed. A wooden bedstead with more disarranged clothes on the floor; here the rest of the family, mother and father and brats, all sleep; a filthy, open fire-place, in one corner; a ragged woman, of ape-like propensities, combing a dirty child in another; and on the floor two more half-naked brats, fighting over the family loaf of black bread, from which they are in vain endeavouring to hammer a morsel with the back of an axe. From a blackened greasy beam overhead, adorned with a few strings of onions and withered apples, a dim light shines down upon the whole, proceeding from a tin of mutton fat, which makes the whole interior as unsavoury as it is ugly.

Gladly, then, we left the village behind us, and drawing up our droshkies under the lee of a high natural embankment beside the lake, prepared to pass the night there. A hole was dug in the earth and a subterranean fire made to cook over. Our bourkas stretched over the droshky made a kind of refuge between the wheels, into which we could crawl and sleep in case of rain.

These and other little preparations having been at least started, we began our shooting. Two guns went round the lake, one on either side; one worthy sportsman might have been seen arraying himself in Mr. Cording’s famous hose; another, simpler and perhaps wiser, divesting himself of all the trammels which civilisation has thrown round the lower limbs of bipeds. The wading party, Cording’s follower, and ‘the unadorned,’ made through the shallow lake for the reed beds in the centre; here carefully concealed to reap the benefit of the stalking party on either shore. The fifth gunner, a tall thin German from Riga, the very best of good fellows, with the longest of legs, had taken to himself a large biscuit-tin, the which he had deposited on a small sand-bank in the middle of the lake. Seated on this, in his trim attire, which no campaigning could ever make less natty, with long limbs overspreading all the surrounding country, our friend B. awaited the dodgy duck. The men in the reeds had the best of it, though the shooting was hardest there, and as we had no retrievers we never got a quarter of the birds we killed. The isolated gentleman on the biscuit-tin got a few long shots, and as his birds all fell in open water, got most of what he killed. But, alas, when he attempted to rise to gather his birds, he was distinctly seen to stick. Vain were his efforts to rise erect. The misguided biscuit-tin had sunk into the treacherous mud bank, slowly but surely; the part next upon it had followed, and the pride of Kertch had apparently taken root in the wastes of Miskitchee. However, fate was kind, and by the united efforts of his friends he was rescued from his ignominious position.

The shore shooters came back tired but happy, though their bag of one cormorant, several red-legged gulls, and a large variety of waders, with a few duck, was rather ornamental than useful. The man of the biscuit-tin and ‘the unadorned’ contributed some mallards, teal, and a couple of pintail, with a few snipe; and after counting out the bag, all drew round the fire to imbibe the cheering ‘tchai’ (tea). But why this gap? Our friend in waders is still absent, and yell loud as we like we get no response from the little reedy island in which he was last seen. For half an hour we waited, and then we heard a gun fired right in the middle of the swamp. Again we shouted and fired, and this time got an answer, but it was not until the sky grew dark and the smoke from our fire could be plainly seen against it, that our friend found his way out of the maze of reeds in which he had been wandering round and round for nearly a couple of hours.

After our pipes had been lighted, the rain came down in torrents, forcing us all to creep under the droshky, and a very close fit we found it. However, by curling B.’s legs three or four times round his waist, we did manage it, and lay there smoking and listening to the old German jäger’s ghost stories, culled from the forests of Germany and the plains of Asia, until far into the night. And never had a teller of weird legends fitter accompaniments than the million voices of the lake at our feet and the ceaseless pelting and buffeting of the storm without.

One more shot at the duck in the morning, and then we turned homewards. My time I felt was getting short, and it was high time that I sailed for the Black Sea coast, although I was nothing loth to have delayed these two weeks, feeling that now I was tolerably certain to escape the Circassian fever which is so prevalent in early autumn.

CHAPTER IV.
THE RED FOREST AND BLACK SEA COAST.

Journey to Taman—Downpour on the steppe—Tscherkess bourkas—Long-tailed horses—Absence of cultivation—The Moujiks—Causes of political discontent in Russia—Veneration for the Czar—Cheapening supplies—A Russian writer on Englishwomen—Post stations—A terrible tragedy—Hotels—Ekaterinodar—The fair—Russian tea—Russian police—Bivouacking with Cossack foresters—Exciting sport—Shooting a white boar—Sad disappointment—Pheasant-shooting—A Cossack colonel—An execrable journey—Caucasian women—Great consumption of supplies—In a Cossack saddle—Mineral springs—A scorching bath—Lotus-eaters—Incidents of the road—An insolent Tartar—Parting.

On Saturday, October 7, I left Kertch for Ekaterinodar, intending to have a week’s sport at my old quarters in the Crasnoi Lais (Red Forest), having written to that effect to Colonel R., the forester, about a week before. My impedimenta were a portmanteau, my gun and rifle, together with a pointer (Calypso), which I had purchased from an old shooting companion at Kertch. My intention was to have some shooting in the Suran district, where bears are said to be plentiful, to stay a few days at Vladikavkas, thence to pass on to Tiflis, and from Tiflis across the little known Mooghan Steppe to the Caspian. But it is hardly worth while to mention my plans, as they nearly all suffered change, and it would have been better for me if they all had.

At Taman, whilst the horses were being harnessed, I was kindly entertained by the chief of the Russian Telegraph station, from whom I gained a good deal of general information. I may say once for all, that wherever I went I met with the kindest attention from the employés of the Telegraph Companies, whether Russian or Indo-European, and I heartily commend to their kindness any one who may be inclined to follow on my steps. But the jingling bells, whose ceaseless monotony was to be my only music through many a day to come, warn me to drink up my coffee, light a pipe for the journey, and be off.

The country round Taman had improved somewhat since I saw it last. People used to declare nothing would grow there; but now that some Greeks have settled round the town, fine onions and other garden produce are daily sent in, grown within a mile of the bazaar.

Once well out on the steppe, in a flat open cart, with no shelter of any kind and retreat impossible, down came the pitiless rain. No fitful April shower, but a good conscientious downpour, large drops and plenty of them, for the rest of the afternoon. Here, then, was my first omission in fitting out for an expedition. An umbrella would have looked ridiculous, and been for various reasons useless; but the umbrella of the country, the Tscherkess bourka, should have been among the first of my purchases.

This bourka, without which no one thinks of travelling in this country, is a large piece of felt, of a good quality, extremely light for its size, and really waterproof. It fastens round the wearer’s neck, and hangs like a bell-shaped tent from his shoulders to his knees. Bourkas vary in texture and quality, as well as price; some being white, others black; some as rough as a Skye terrier, others almost as smooth as a greyhound. The best are black and almost smooth, and cost as much as thirty or forty roubles (four or five pounds). After his kinjal and his horse, I almost think a bourka is the Cossack’s most valuable possession; and rolled in these things, I have seen the hardy fellows sleeping placidly on a wet truss of hay in the midst of a perfect November deluge.

After going for a verst or so, my yemstchik came to his first halt. The horses here wear their tails, like the ladies’ trains at home, preposterously long; and a dozen times in our drive of twenty versts, had we to pull up whilst the driver wrung out the mud from one of these sweeping appendages, and tied it up into a less comely but more convenient bob. Without this the horses could not have done the distance at all. As for myself, I was speedily sodden through, while my face was like that of a plaster cast with its eyes bunged up.

It is a pitiful thing to see all this useful land untilled, and all the peasantry and the country itself so poor. My friend the Russian telegraph clerk told me a few more reasons besides the perpetual ‘prasnik’ for the want of agricultural energy and success in the Caucasus. The very abundance of land is an evil to the short-sighted Russian peasant. Here in the Caucasus I am told every ‘soul’ (the Russian phrase for every male subject) is allowed sixteen dissatines (acres) free of charge, and he may choose his land pretty well where he likes. The result is, the moujik argues with himself pretty much after this fashion: ‘In this particular spot where my cottage is, my corn won’t grow well, elsewhere it would grow better, and in a third place another crop would find a fitter soil.’ So on this principle of not trusting all his ventures to one bottom, he takes a few dissatines here and another few ten versts off, and still more beyond. In this way he wastes an infinite amount of time in making perhaps a threshing floor at each different farm, or in conveying the crop from one farm to another to be threshed. Add to this that water has often to be fetched from afar, that his tools are of the rudest, and that his men are, even if all were workers even in the English sense, far too small for the acreage, and you have some reasons for the want of that agricultural wealth which Russia ought to possess. It seems the greater pity, since the moujik is such a frugal, hard-living man, and barring vodka and ‘prasniks’ might do wonders. He can turn his hand to anything, is always cheerful, and almost his only glaring vice is drunkenness. A peasant family here, I am assured, will live in what is to them comfort, food and clothes and all included, for from eighteen to twenty roubles a head, i.e. from 2l. to 2l. 5.s., per annum. But then we must bear in mind that meat is a thing a Russian peasant rarely eats. In spring black bread and an onion; in summer black bread and arboose (water-melon); in winter black bread and cabbage soup, with a dry fish now and again as a bonne bouche, suffice for his simple wants. Then, too, his liquor is infinitely cheaper than that of our beer-drinking peasantry. For three copecks (about a penny) he can get nearly half an English tumbler of the abominable neat rye spirit, in which he delights, and some of them will even drink spirits of wine and petroleum, which, I presume, is even cheaper than vodka.

The proprietor of the oil-wells at Tcheerilek, Mr. Peters—since, I regret to say, dead—has himself told me that some men working on his estate thought as little of tossing off a ‘stakan’ (small tumbler) of petroleum as I would of drinking the like quantity of Bass. In addition to these things, the moujik’s clothes are as simple and inexpensive as his diet: in winter a toga of sheepskin, with the woolly side in, a scarf round his waist and sheepskin hat on his head, a pair of long boots that cost him more than all the rest of his outfit, but are unrivalled for their long wearing qualities; in summer a calico shirt; and summer and winter you may see his wife and brats going about, in snow or sunshine, with nothing but a single linen garment between them and the weather. His winter outfit is perhaps a trifle costly, as compared to the rest of his expenditure, but then it is wonderful how long one suit of clothes will last a moujik; and like a wise man he always prefers old clothes to new, so long as they will hold together.

With such a thrifty peasantry, and so much valuable land, surely better results might be obtained.

I believe that the whole of the misery of Russia, her political discontent, her Nihilism, and the foul crimes of which it has been the cause, are due, not to the autocratic form of government under which she exists, and to which, in spite of the outcry of the few, the majority of Russians are firmly wedded, but to the utter want of religious training amongst all classes, and to that widespread corruption in the official world, from which all who come in contact with it suffer continually. Were there less compulsory military service, more religious training, greater encouragement given to agriculture, and more inducements held out to foreigners to settle in the waste places of Russia’s vast empire, so that by their example they might teach her own people how to make the best of the natural advantages they enjoy, there might then be a chance of happiness and prosperity for Russia and her people.

There is in every Russian moujik an inherent love of the Czar, a personal loyalty to him, which deifies and renders its object infallible in the eyes of his subjects, and this takes much to eradicate. Could this feeling be fostered rather than destroyed by the injustices of petty provincial officials, who to the peasant are the only direct representatives of the supreme power, regicide and revolution would be things unknown.

The only complaint I ever heard from peasant lips in Russia of the Great White Czar was, he is too far off, he is deaf, our voices cannot reach him through the crowd of rascals who hedge him in.

To-day I myself was destined to dine on peasants’ fare; and though the bread was black and damp, it was wholesome, and hunger gave the meal the only sauce it needed. My night was passed on a wooden sofa at Tumerūk, with my pointer for a pillow, a style of repose that at least ensured early rising.

At 5 a.m. I was in the market chaffering with the peasant women for supplies for the journey. Ikra (fresh caviare) was nearly two shillings a pound, and fresh butter tenpence. It is one of the unpleasant characteristics of the Russian tradesman that you must always bargain with him for the merest trifle. It is only fair to say for him that it is the fault rather of his customers than himself; for in Kertch, where we were known, the tradesmen, knowing that the English residents did not care to haggle about a bargain, would ask the price they meant to accept in the first instance, instead of adding on an extra charge to be gradually taken off to please the customer.

Whilst waiting in the post-station for my horses to be put to, I chanced on the following passage in a Russian book of travels, by one Ivan Goutcharoff, which I have taken the liberty of translating for the benefit of my readers. Speaking of his sojourn in England, he says: ‘I did not make the acquaintance of any families, so that I only saw the women in the churches, shops, opera-boxes, streets, &c., so that I can only say (and that to prevent your being offended at me for neglecting this subject) that they are very beautiful, well built, and of a wondrous complexion, though they eat much meat and sweets and drink strong wine. Yet in other nations you will not find so much beauty as among the masses in England. Don’t judge of English beauty (as Russians too often do) by the red-haired gentlemen and dames who come out from England under the name of skippers, machinists, tutors, and governesses, above all governesses. That would be a grand mistake. Beautiful women don’t leave England for this. Beauty is capital. Women as a race are worth nothing in England if they have not some special talent. One foreign language or accomplishment for children is no great thing, so it only remains to go to Russia. The greater part of Englishwomen are tall, well built, rather proud and calm; according to many even cold. The colour of their hair is of never-ending variety.’ Such appears to be the judgment of one who evidently believed himself a connoisseur, and had had, moreover, an opportunity of studying the far-famed Circassian belles in their own land.

These Russian post-stations grow worse and worse; what may be the acme of evil at which I shall arrive before I reach the Caspian, I dare not fancy. They are bare of all save a wooden couch; no carpets, no provisions, no anything, except the thirstiest of what Mark Twain calls ‘seaside chamois.’ We passed to-day a Cossack village on the border of a large lake surrounded by ‘kamish’ jungles, said to be the scene of a strange tragedy in the Russo-Tscherkess war. ‘A band of Tscherkess warriors here met a party of Cossacks, who utterly routed them, and the wretched natives took refuge in the depths of the ‘kamish’ jungles. Here they stayed till nightfall, when the myriads of venomous mosquitoes, which make their home amongst these reeds, drove them out, preferring death at the hands of the Cossacks to slow torture from their insect foes.’ This is only a tradition, my authority my yemstchik; but from what I have seen of these pests myself, I have little doubt of its truth.

The cold is getting quite severe already; all the quail have gone, and last night there was a full orchestra of wolves outside the post-station. At the end of three days we pulled up at the St. Petersburg Hotel, Ekaterinodar, and if anything can be worse than post-travelling in Russia, it would be the disappointment you suffer in the so-called hotel accommodation. One of a long corridor in the stable-yard, with only too ample ventilation, my room stands a whited sepulchre, with an iron bedstead, a wooden table, a mattress, sheet, and dirty cushion, no washing utensils of any kind, no bedclothes, a wicker chair, a broken bottle half full of doubtful water, and bare boards beneath. Such is the lodging. For attendance, one dirty little boy about twelve, and a pigmy for his age, waits apparently on every one in the house. The cooking, though not first-rate, is the hotel’s greatest attraction. Some one talks about man’s heartiest welcome being at an inn. If he had ever tried a Russian inn, he would have reconsidered that statement. Most of the guests at the table-d’hôte are officers, from which one would infer that regimental messes are not in vogue in Russia.

In the morning after my arrival at Ekaterinodar I was up betimes, and, with a friend whose acquaintance I had made on my first visit, proceeded to the fair outside the town to purchase the indispensable bourka. Thanks to his exertions, I was, in little more than an hour, the possessor of a good bourka, sheepskin shouba and cap, all purchased for about 4l. Attired in the costume of the country, and speaking the language fluently, if not well, I am less likely to attract the attention of the natives, who, I am told, being for the most part Mussulmen, are bitterly set against the English just now, ascribing, as they do, the misfortunes of the Turkish Empire to our cold friendship, for which they have, I fear, a harder name.

Ekaterinodar must be a prospering town, for I am told that seven years ago there were only five stone houses in the place, and now there are upwards of a thousand. The old houses were built of reeds washed over with a kind of cement. The fever, too, I am told, is on the wane, and, indeed, it had need to be, for some few years ago there was no worse fever den in the Caucasus. But now as the cart-tracks through the town begin to look a little like streets (though still of the roughest), with every here and there in the most fashionable quarters a hundred yards of uneven pavement, and, by the help of constant pruning and uprooting, the houses begin to peep less blindly through the trees, while a tolerably vigorous town government prevents the deposit of filth in the public thoroughfares, the back of the fever has been broken.

The wonderful richness of the soil is sufficiently shown by a statement made to me by a settler here to-day: ‘If I don’t clear my garden three times a year from new growths, I should be unable to force a way through it at the end of a twelvemonth.’ It was in his garden that I saw this afternoon some of the largest gourds I ever set eyes on, some weighing over eighty pounds, while he assured me that they sometimes reached as much as 120 or 130 pounds. The people here make a substance called cassia of them, on which they live, and with which they feed their pigs.

Trade seemed to be very brisk in the town. The fair was crowded, the shops full, and the streets alive with conveyances of every description. The number of military stationed here appears considerable, and the barracks are fairly imposing edifices.

Ekaterinodar boasts of two cathedrals, of which the old one, now in disuse, is to my mind the finest. At night I visited the fair again, and a very lively scene I found it. Out in the open stood numerous little tables, at which nips of vodka and other liqueurs were dispensed, for the most part by German Jews, to little crowds of half-drunk Cossacks. Close by, through the open doorway of a tent, you caught the glare of a huge fire and your nostrils a savoury smell of roasting mutton. Feeling hungry, I entered at one of these open doors, and found myself in a Kalmuck refreshment booth, with two or three dead sheep hanging round the tent-pole and a big semi-subterranean fire at the farther end. Here several wild-looking Tartars were devilling little knobs of mutton on a skewer; and purchasing two or three of these skewers, with their savoury burden on them all hissing from the coals, we made the best meal I have yet partaken of in the Caucasus. To wash this down we ordered Kalmuck tea, evidently quite the thing to drink here. The tea is pressed in huge cake-like bricks, and is apparently of no very high quality. A square of this is hacked off, boiled down in a pot, and the tea served up in one soup-bowl between two, with a spoon apiece. It is correct to add to it milk, huge lumps of butter, and pepper and salt to taste, when it resembles soup a good deal more than tea.

It was not until 3 p.m. next day (Thursday) that I managed to get my ‘podorojna’ (travelling ticket) and other things in order. At that hour it was really too late to start on my long drive to the Red Forest, but I was so sick of delays that I determined to get as far as I could that night, and trust to luck for the rest. My yemstchik, who had only a misty notion of the whereabouts of our journey’s end, was a most melancholy fellow, and regaled me for the first hour or more with stories of horrible murders and atrocities which had lately taken place in or near Ekaterinodar, and would have made the fortune of ‘Lloyd’s Weekly.’ They spoke little for the efficiency of the police in the Caucasus; but then a more miserable lot than the Russian police generally, I never saw. They are the smallest and worst men (physically) in the army, and, as such, are drafted into the police force. They wear a sword which they use to protect themselves against dogs, attacking small curs with this formidable weapon with the greatest ferocity. I speak here of what I have seen. If they have a chance they are, I am assured by Russians, more likely to assist thieves than to hinder them, and the following true story, which came under the knowledge of a British Consul, may serve to illustrate their ordinary conduct when applied to as protectors of person or property:—

‘A certain lady, resident in the Crimea, but not a native, found her silver forks rapidly disappearing in a manner difficult to explain. These forks were twelve in number, and marked with a crest or monogram. One only remained at last, and in despair she searched the box of a Russian servant in her employ, whom she had reason to suspect of dishonesty. Here she found the eleven missing forks, and, without disturbing them, sent for the police, made them search the servant’s box, and thus the culprit was taken red-handed. The servant was removed to prison, so were the forks. Time passed, nothing was done. At last, tired of waiting, the lady applied to know what was to be done in the matter, and how soon; at least, she pleaded, the forks might now be returned to her. The answer was, that it was necessary that the police should have the other fork in order that they might identify the eleven as her property. In a weak moment she sent her twelfth fork to them. The set was complete. In a short time the servant was released, and in spite of all her expostulations this luckless lady never saw her forks again.’ This occurred in the Crimea; the Caucasus is, I believe, under military law, yet before I had passed my six months in the country, I was destined to become so familiar with stories of murders and atrocities committed here from day to day, as to think little of them.

Meanwhile, thinking and chatting of these things, we had found our way by 10 p.m. to the forester’s cottage. A huge fire was blazing outside, at which half a dozen grim-looking Cossacks were smoking and toasting their toes. Inside the cottage the cigarettes had gone out, and puffing a last long whiff of smoke through his nostrils, the head-forester had betaken himself to dreamland. The Cossacks told us he had guests to-night, and had not expected me. Remembering that a man roused from his first sleep is not always in his sweetest mood, I determined not to disturb mine host, but instead took my place amongst the Cossack guards by the fire, and in spite of their looks of wonder and ridicule, prepared to be comfortable in my own way. After some delay a kettle was produced, and taking some tea from my game sack, I soon brewed the odorous beverage, by sharing which with my rough companions I gained considerably in their good graces. The night was fearfully cold, and the stories the Cossacks told almost unintelligible to me, owing to the patois in which they told them, so that my pipe once out I was ready to turn in. One thing I ought to say for these men, uncouth as they appeared. When I knelt for a few minutes before turning in, every one of them rose, left the vicinity of the fire, and remained respectfully standing until I was on my legs again; and I may add, that wherever I have met Cossacks I have found the same outward respect at any rate for religious observances, and it is my firm belief, that though prone to many vices, they have more faith and a greater respect for the nobler qualities of humanity, than most of their more enlightened fellow-countrymen.

I slept that night in my bourka on the droshky, and when I woke, the bourka, which was black the night before, was silvery with rime, while my moustache was quite hard frozen. The forester’s cheery greeting, and the hot breakfast that followed it, were welcome things indeed after my hard night’s rest; and on inspection I found that I had as usual dropped on my legs at the Red Forest. The guest spoken of by the Cossacks was a certain Colonel H., a German, who had come a long way for a few days’ sport with my old friend, and great were to be the drives in his honour.

Our first day was very unproductive, however; for though we got some red deer on foot in front of the sleuth-hounds, we never saw them. The second day was as bad, until the afternoon, when, on our way back, we heard in another quarter of the forest a furious crashing, accompanied by short fierce snortings. Old R.’s little wiry figure actually stiffened with excitement, and his eyes became more prominent even than their wont, as he gripped my arm till it ached. ‘Kabân!’ (boar) was all he seemed able to get out, and, indeed, I was little less excited myself. Motioning to the German to guard the corner of the quartal where the rides crossed, he stole stealthily along a ride towards the sounds, stopping every now and then to listen, but never letting go my unfortunate arm. The sound was close to us, and now even my untrained ears told me that the sound was much like that of pigs in deadly strife. All at once my vivacious little friend dropped my arm and pointed to something in the dense brush. The trees grew so thick here, and interlaced their limbs so closely, that the forest shade was as dark as a summer night, and I could see nothing. My friend gave me little time to look, for clapping his rifle to his shoulder he seemed to take a haphazard shot into the thick of it, and let fly. Then there followed a louder snorting, with the rending of more bushes in hurried flight, and at last I had a glimpse of three dark forms tearing through the covert. One seemed much larger than the others, and at him I fired. To my own astonishment, for the shot was a very hurried one, he lurched forward, evidently hard hit; but he instantly recovered and went on. I had a faint idea that some one was calling me back, telling me that I ought not to follow a wounded boar in thick covert; but as my hackles were now fairly up, I crept and ran as well as I could after my wounded game. The other two guns made for various rides to cut off any of the three boars that might come their way. Once or twice I viewed my beast for a moment, but never well enough to fire in my cramped position.

Meanwhile, the forester had been making what he called music on his everlasting horn, and some of his hounds hearing it were soon on the track of the game. Hot, breathless, and almost in the dark, among the nearly impenetrable thickets, I was on the point of giving up the chase when I heard the dogs baying something not far ahead of me. To creep to within thirty yards or so of them did not take long, and then crouching behind the bole of a huge oak, I waited for my eyes to get used to the darkness. Gradually I began to make out the dogs’ sterns waving eagerly to and fro, and then under a leaning tree-stump, in the very heart of the shadow, the indistinct outline of their enemy. The music all this time was maddening. The dogs’ clamour never ceased. The boar kept half growling, half grunting, while through it all in the distance came the tootle of our forester’s horn. Suddenly the mass moved, and a dog went flying belly uppermost, and his yells were added to the discord. But this movement of the boar’s was fatal to him, as it brought him into a more open position; and seizing the opportunity, I rolled him over with my ‘express.’ Rising he tried to charge, but though I fired again, I believe it was unnecessary, as he was too hard hit ever to have reached me; still I had seen a man killed by a wounded boar, and I naturally preferred to keep this one at a distance.

This was the first really large game I had killed, and I rushed up to him and gloated over him with all the abandon of a boy. I have said I had seen a man killed by a boar, but I should have added it was his dead body and not the event which I saw. Moreover, I had never seen a wild boar before this morning, and now as I contemplated my fallen foe a strange uneasiness beset me. There was something so homely in the innocent face of that dead pig, that my heart for a moment misgave me. But I banished these foolish qualms, the reaction after my triumph probably; and as I heard the tootle of my friend’s horn approach I sat myself down on a broad side of bacon and indulged in a victorious whoo-oop. And now the bushes part asunder, and R., taking in the position at a glance, bursts into a cheer and loads me with praise. But, alas! what is this? As my friend approaches, slowly the gay smile fades, the applauding voice is still; the horn drops from his nerveless grasp, and the merry little visage lengthens out in a telescopic fashion truly awful to behold. ‘Moe domaschne kabân!’ Those were the fatal words that first left his erst joyous lips—‘My own house pig!’

The blow was too awful, too sudden. In my pride I fell. Gradually the fact was borne in on my already half-awakened mind: ‘wild boars are black, but this beast was white.’ I had come some thousand miles to slay a beast which I might have found in any sty at home; I had accepted my friend’s hospitality, and rewarded it by slaying his one cherished porker. How I smoothed him down I don’t know, but I did it somehow. As for myself, I never quite recovered until I had slain a veritable wild boar long afterwards. The fact was, this wretched animal had broken out of his sty some months previously, and betaken himself to the forest to take his fill of love, chestnuts, and other pleasant things. He had apparently been making too free with the lady friends of his black-skinned brethren, and at the moment at which we arrived was doing battle with two of them for his offences. In the dark his own master had not recognised him, so that there was ample excuse for me, and there was even a good side to this mishap, inasmuch as we were all getting very tired of roe-deer’s flesh, and this forest-fed bacon was a grateful change. Dragging him home with a sapling affixed to his snout, was the poorest part of the joke.

During the next day I did not recover my spirits sufficiently to try for big game, so the German colonel and myself devoted it to pheasant-shooting. The covert consists of thick reed-beds, the birds are of the original stock from which our English birds are derived, and in no way differ from them in size or appearance. We killed very few, my dog proving utterly useless in thick covert, in consequence of which I gave her away on the first opportunity. I had no right of course to expect that she as a pointer would be useful in covert, so as the quails had gone and I should have very little open shooting for some time, I thought it better to part with her. I am told that throughout the Kuban district, the tremendous frost of 1876, together with the floods of the same year, destroyed most of the pheasants. They certainly seemed scarcer than they were during my previous visit.

At night, sitting up for big game, I saw a few woodcock flitting bat-like across the rides, but let them alone for fear of disturbing better game. The night was lovely; the fleecy white clouds, floating through the network of dark branches, produced a most charming effect. Of all the bird-mimics I ever met, commend me to the owls you meet with here. At one moment they bark like a fox; at another, yell like an evil-minded infant; at another, you hear them grunting like swine, and creep on noiseless feet towards the spot, rifle ready in hand; and then the wretches shriek out in eldritch laughter at your mistake, and flap clumsily off to repeat the trick further on.

My last day in the Red Forest was spent in an ‘ablouva’ (drive), which, being utterly mismanaged, resulted in nothing but a wild cat and a few hares. In the evening the German colonel and myself had a very hot discussion about the habits of the pheasants. He apparently had shot both the ordinary and the silver pheasant in different parts of Asia, and stoutly maintained that the pheasant never roosted on a tree or bush, but invariably on the ground. My own assertion that with us the pheasant roosts in trees as a rule, and seldom, if ever, on the ground, was ridiculed by both the German and the forester, which, as both appeared to be fairly keen observers, would lead one to believe that the perching of our pheasants is an acquired habit, and not common to their wild congeners.

As we wended our way homeward, we heard in front of us the bells of a troika, and on the bridge we overtook it. The horses were stopped, and a volley of Russian salutations, in a voice that might have shaken the clouds, greeted us, while slowly from the folds of a dozen or more wraps, a grim, gaunt figure of an old Cossack colonel, about 6 feet 3 inches in length, unrolled itself. The old gentleman was vociferous to a degree, and much given to kissing and bebrothering his friends. Having hugged the forester several times, almost shaken my arm out of its socket, and given a multitude of directions to the driver, whom he addressed alternately as ‘son of a dog’ and ‘little dove,’ he unearthed a quart bottle of vodka, and patting it fondly, conveyed it to the forester’s hut, there to give his host a drink, and tell us all about himself. Although very red-faced and very grey-haired, this veteran was about as fine a Cossack as any I ever saw, with the boisterous manners of an English schoolboy, added to the peculiarities natural to a Russian. In about ten minutes he had put me through the usual catechism, to which time and experience had taught me to submit with the greatest placidity. Who was my father? What was my trade? Was I rich? Married? Why did I come here, &c.? To all these questions I had regular stereotyped answers. But when to the last I answered that my only object was to kill big game, the old gentleman’s interest considerably increased. He, too, was a sportsman, and knew the Caucasus better than any man living, having spent his whole life in fighting in it. At this very moment he was on his way to an estate of his, three days’ journey from the Red Forest, on the Black Sea coast, where bears and boars (if one were to believe him) were so numerous as to seriously impede one’s movements. Would I come with him and see for myself? Naturally, as an Englishman I imagined little was meant by such an off-hand invitation as this; but to my surprise the forester backed up his suggestion, assuring me that if I did not assent I should miss a chance I might never get again. Only half credulous, and never expecting it would come to anything, I assented, and, before I well knew where I was, my things were bundled into the tarantasse, myself after them, the old Cossack on top of all, the farewells said, and I was under way again for Ekaterinodar.

The days of preparation passed in Ekaterinodar had in them nothing worth recording; I gave up my portmanteau finally and for ever as too large to travel through the mountains on horseback, and bought myself instead some Tscherkess saddle-bags, in which I stowed three flannel shirts and a few other things. My gun, too, I was obliged to leave behind, and thus on the morning of our departure my entire kit had been reduced to a rifle and small saddle-bags, half full of cartridges and gunning implements. We were to have one other travelling companion, an excessively corpulent cavalry officer; and if I had little luggage, this worthy made amends for my deficiencies. Pillows innumerable, bags and food enough to last through a campaign, while, as to bottles, I really began to think he must be starting as a peddling wine or vodka merchant. All this, as well as our three selves, had to be piled on one fourgon, or four-wheeled open cart, and when all the luggage had been stacked on it, and our hapless selves perched on top, we presented a picture of about as unlikely a group to travel far without falling out by the way as could be readily imagined. The old Cossack got wedged between two of the largest packages, and was thus pretty safe, but the ‘plunger’ and myself, sitting each on some shifting packages of loaves, sardine-tins, or what not, had an exceedingly merry time of it. Briskly our horses trotted along in the keen morning air; the roads were hard with frost, and as the heavy cart lurched from rut to rut, and bounded from hole to hole, we two resembled nothing so much as a pair of erratic human shuttlecocks. As luck would have it, both of us returned from our aërial flights in time to go on with the cart, but at what an expense of finger-nails and other bruises none but ourselves can tell. As for the ‘plunger,’ the exercise acted on him like a rough sea passage, and before long he was grievously ill, and I frankly admit that in another hour I should have been as bad.

The road on leaving Ekaterinodar runs through marshes, and has been raised and constructed by Government engineers, who receive a regular subsidy to keep it in repair. With the money they apparently do what they like. The governor has not heard of the state of the road, or having heard does not interfere; the result is that it is so infamous that passengers prefer a mere track at the side to the engineers’ road, which is practically unused. And this seems to me to be the universal way of doing things out here. The Government seems liberal enough, and anxious to promote the people’s welfare; more than that, considerable sums of money are expended to this end, but owing to the vastness of the territory, difficulty of transit, and want of trustworthiness in its agents, the good intentions of the Government are too frequently frustrated.

Never was I more heartily thankful than when we came to what was (for us) the end of this execrable road; and when at the Tscherkess village of Enem we saw our horses waiting for us, I felt almost content with the instruments of torture which Cossacks call saddles upon their backs. The ‘aoul’ (village) was fenced about with wattled walls, and seemed a busy, thriving little place, but as far as I could see contained none of those lovely women of whom one has heard so much in ‘Lalla Rookh’ and elsewhere. And perhaps I may be permitted to say here that neither at Tiflis nor in Daghestan, nor elsewhere in the Caucasus, have I seen, either among the peasants or the upper classes, one single face sufficiently beautiful to attract a second glance in London. I had heard so much of Georgian beauty that, like the aurochs, it was one of the things I had come to look for, and, like the aurochs, I never found it. I have brought back several photographs of typical Caucasian faces, bought at various photographers, who seem to me to have always chosen the best-looking people they could find, yet even so they are by no means strikingly beautiful. The men, if you will, are many of them magnificent, and as handsome as they are well built; but for the women, even those who have good features are so totally devoid of expression, so extremely animal in their appearance, as to almost warrant the Turks’ conclusion that they possess none but physical properties, and are as soulless as they are insipid. Moreover, they are most of them so wonderfully alike that cases of mistaken identity must be common, even with the most devoted husbands.

By the way, Tscherkess and Cossack are frequently used amongst the Russians as terms of reproach, equivalent to robber and swashbuckler respectively, and no Circassian ever calls himself Tscherkess.

Here at Enem I got the first insight into my companions’ ideas of travelling. We had perhaps been on the road a couple of hours, and had breakfasted as heartily as men can do, yet here we were doomed to repeat the process. And to save further reference to it I may say that our vast supply of stores was by no means unnecessary. Every two hours throughout those three days we had a grand feed, while in the intervals the ‘plunger’ nibbled and nipped, the Cossack only nipping and smoking perpetually. If these fellows require as much food campaigning as they do travelling, they must be a difficult lot to provide for.

At Enem we hoisted ourselves into our Tartar or Cossack saddles, things in which you sit as it were in a narrow deep valley between two gables, your feet thrust into things like a couple of fire-shovels, with the corners of which you poke up the ribs of your Rosinante if he is tired or sluggish. Here, too, the English equestrian meets with a novelty in the pace of his horse, which has been taught to go at a kind of amble called ‘enokod,’ at which pace the beast travels about twelve miles an hour with very little fatigue to the rider. Very few of the horses trot properly, and if they do, and you attempt to rise to the trot as men do in England, you meet with so much banter that you are inclined to wish that they did not. The horses are for the most part small, and possessed of wonderful endurance, but there is one breed of horses in the Caucasus that looks all over like making into good hunters—I mean the Khabardine. They are larger, finer, and faster animals than any others that I have ever seen in Russia, and their price is proportionately higher. A good Khabardine costs from 200 to 500 roubles.

As we journeyed on from Enem the country became more hilly and more wooded, and at every turn we encountered the pretty little trout stream Pscekupz. How often we crossed that stream before we reached the sea I should be afraid to guess, but it seemed to me that we were almost as often in the water as out of it, and it is this small stream that when flooded stops this road to the Black Sea for nearly half the year. We stayed for the night at some mineral springs about forty versts from Enem, beautifully situated near the Pscekupz, with high, well-timbered hills all round. Most of the trees are young oaks, which were now lovely in their russet robes. But there are, besides, wild pear and apple, with everywhere a thick undergrowth of hazel. At the mineral springs is a Russian military hospital, and the doctor in charge was our host for the night. The hospital is built to hold some 300 people, and it was believed that this place would in time become a fashionable bathing-place for the Caucasus. Hitherto, however, the military have had it all to themselves. There are a few good houses in the place, and Government is erecting baths over the springs. The springs themselves are of hot water, strongly impregnated with sulphur, which comes down from the hills at a temperature of 42° Reaumur. I saw some of the water, which was colder, of a dull bluish grey, and stank horribly. These baths are supposed to cure rheumatic affections, and my friend the Cossack pretended to have obtained great relief from them. Nay, so enthusiastic was he that, after taking them both internally and externally, he insisted on my doing the same. Being in extreme need of a tub, I complied with his whim as far as an external application went, and was parboiled for my complacency, feeling a good deal worse when I came out than I did when I went in.

The springs run through a white stone which, though extremely hard on the surface, pulverises at the touch the moment the outside layer is removed. I am myself ignorant of geology, but I was assured that this was quartz of a very high quality, and excellently adapted for the manufacture of glass. If this be so, a glass factory here would, one would imagine, be an extremely remunerative speculation, with any quantity of timber and water-power immediately at hand, and no rival factory nearer than Moscow, especially as glass is in the Caucasus a very dear commodity, bad glass bottles costing from ten to fifteen copecks. In the evening and in the morning we saw the worst side of the village by the springs; for on both occasions a dense white fog rolled up from the valley high up the hills, completely hiding them from view, while the dew lay on the grass like rain after a very severe thunder shower.

We left the springs early, and shivered in our saddles as we waded through the rolling fog clouds, although in a few hours’ time the heat was quite oppressive.

I noticed to-day by the wayside a large quantity of mistletoe, and have since remarked that its abundance is not restricted to this one part of the Caucasus. The insects by the wayside were ‘hyale,’ clouded yellow, red admirals, painted ladies, and several varieties of white butterflies. I also noticed some large pale yellow butterflies, which may have been the common brimstone, but I believe were not. I am pretty sure too that I recognised one ‘comma.’ We passed through one or two villages inhabited by ‘plastoons’ (Russian settlers), who in spite of the richness of the soil appeared to be in the most abject poverty. On every face the fever had set its yellow seal, and all the women over forty were hideous enough to frighten Macbeth’s witches.

Truly, this Caucasus must be the land of the lotus-eaters, yet what sorry beings these lotus-eaters are. All round them such beauty as Tennyson has dreamed of; mountains clothed in gold and purple, with the sea murmuring round their bases; wealth to be had for the taking, from the too luxuriant soil; and yet here the peasant smokes and moons away his life, content to cull in idleness just enough to keep body and soul together, and only doing just enough work to provide for himself a crop of that weed in the consumption of which he wastes life and energy, as well as the money and opportunities that might be his. Each village where Russians lived seemed to me more wretchedly poor than the last, and it became a relief to see how few and far between the villages were. The Tscherkesses, who made a garden of at least some parts of their native home, might almost feel revenged in contemplating the utter failure of the race which has supplanted them.

But for us the day was no day of idleness, but rather one of considerable toil and difficulty. The road grew exceeding steep and rugged, and the little baggage cart which we had endeavoured to send on by our men came to grief, and was broken beyond repair. The driver, who was on the top of the baggage, probably asleep, got a bad fall, and was rather seriously hurt. The tripod of my photographic apparatus was broken, and the stock of my rifle snapped short off at the pistol grip. The ‘plunger’s’ store of eau-de-Cologne, without which this hero felt it impossible to travel, was also lost in the general disaster, and he, poor fellow, had very bad times throughout the day, having had too much to eat and too much shaking up after it. For a cavalry officer, too, it was somewhat undignified, when ascending one steep little ravine, to slide off over his horse’s quarters; and for a man of his weight it must have been as painful as it was ridiculous. Laughter went a long way towards leaving me as helpless as he was, for a more ludicrous sight than our gallant companion rolling off behind, it would be difficult to conceive.

The night was, if anything, worse than the day, for my old friend the Cossack, having a great deal of pain from an old injury near his spine, determined to cure it with hard drinking; the result of which was that he became helplessly drunk, and the ‘plunger’ only irritably so. In this condition the nature of the man showed itself, and he amused himself by baiting me, a stranger, and his friend’s guest, for the amusement of his servants. At last his insolence became so intolerable that, risking all possible consequences, I got him by the scruff of the neck and gave him such a shaking as he had not experienced even during the rough ride of the last few days. It was, of course, extremely unpleasant for me, but my host was too drunk to interfere, and there are some things which a man cannot stand.

Next morning, after having spent the night awake in a state of siege, uncertain what my quondam friend’s servants might think fit to do to me, I had a wretched ride in my own society to Duapsè, the little seaport town which was to be the end of our journey. The ‘plunger’ neither apologised nor called me out, as I had thought he might, but the good old Cossack behaved like a gentleman, and although, of course, we were glad to say good-by to one another at Duapsè, we parted good friends, and I believe he exonerated me from all blame in the matter.

CHAPTER V.
HEIMAN’S DATCH.

Duapsè—Tscherkess emigrants—By the sea-shore—Superb scenery—Drunken guides—A Cossack station—Bears—Take possession of a ruined villa—Hiding our provisions—Wild swine—Astray in the jungle—A rough breakfast—Boars in file—A missfire—Forest fruit—Lose our horses—A panther—Night-watch—Shooting in the dark—On the trail—Barse—A friendly Cossack—Deserted by my servants.

At Duapsè there is an English (Indo-European) telegraph station, so, though unexpectedly thrown on my own resources again, I was much better off than I might otherwise have been. The Englishmen gave me a cordial welcome, and were very good to me. Duapsè, I am informed, is built on a graveyard, in which are buried numbers of the victims of the Russo-Tscherkess war. In 1864, after the final subjugation of the Caucasus, some 200,000 Circassians left the Caucasus for Trebizond, at the invitation of their conquerors. They were for the most part conveyed in small Turkish vessels, in which they were so crowded, starved, and exposed, that not more than half ever reached their destination, the others dying en route. Of these a very large proportion died near Duapsè, and were there landed and buried, or left to bleach, according to the means of their friends. Their graves are still marked by little mounds and inequalities in the ground throughout the place. On their miserable journey they sold everything they possessed, and I have frequently heard in Kertch and in the Caucasus of girls being sold for a few roubles, and valuable daggers (the last thing almost that a Tscherkess parts with) for about the same. Now Duapsè is a vilely squalid hole, with two telegraph stations and a governor’s house. The steamers from Odessa and Poti touch here, if it is fine, once a week, but if there is any sea on they cannot come in, as I was hereafter to learn to my cost. Why Duapsè exists, and still more why it has a governor, I never could conceive.

It was, then, with a feeling of intense relief that on October 21 I left Duapsè behind me and turned my horse’s head southwards along the Black Sea shore. I had managed to engage a couple of Russian peasants, Ivan and Yepheem, to guide me to some happy hunting-grounds of which they knew, some fifty versts from Duapsè. Taking three horses, we loaded each with as much provisions as he could carry, and then climbed on top ourselves. It was difficult work to so adjust yourself and baggage, as to keep your seat over the boulders. Grip was, of course, impossible, and balance, with a shifting basis under you, almost as much so.

The road lay between the base of the cliffs and the sea, and as these two were in close juxtaposition, your horse had at one time to wade and at another to creep from boulder to boulder, in places where even a goat would have to move with caution. This lasted for fifteen versts, and these fifteen have in rough weather to be avoided, and a long circuitous route in the hills substituted for them. After leaving these stony places, the road winds up into the hills, and here the eye had a feast indeed. All the way from Ekaterinodar the scenery had been beautiful, but here it was superb. Range upon range of hills, as far as the eye could see, one behind another, and each range higher than the last, until far away one caught the sheen of snow-peaks against the sky. The autumn foliage was a never-ending glory. One shrub in particular caught my eye, of stunted growth, with a long oval leaf, which was now of the most brilliant shades of red. This shrub grew in immense clumps, and the effect at a short distance was that of vast beds of scarlet geranium.

But the road in the hills was almost as bad as the road by the sea, and after having done some twenty-eight versts in the whole day, our horses were done up, and so were we. Just after noon my men stayed behind for some time, and I, thinking nothing of it, rode slowly on. In about half an hour they rejoined, looking mightily pleased with themselves, and very drunk. They had discovered a large bottle holding about three pints of vodka, which I had brought with me for our use during the next fortnight. This they had quietly sat down to the moment my back was turned, and finished it. It was no good my making a row about it; I was in their hands, and determined to bear with them, at least until I found out where game was to be found, after which I could decide whether to keep them or try alone. Meanwhile they had finished their grog, and as I did not mean to give up mine, they would be punished by enforced abstinence for some time to come.

A Cossack station in the Caucasus is about as strange a place to pass the night in as can well be imagined. Ten or a dozen privates, with the manners of monkeys in the Zoo, all sleeping in the same room with yourself and their officer, a youngster generally little better educated than themselves, and thoroughly hail-fellow with them all. Such is your company. Your couch the top of the ‘petchka’ (oven), if you like heat and dirt, and are inclined to pay for the berth; if not, as much room as you can get on the floor or on a form, with a Cossack’s boots next your head and a Cossack’s head next to your boots. For supper we got some barbel, and a fish they called ‘golovin,’ which one of the soldiers had caught; and though tired enough to turn in gladly even here, we were, I think, even more glad to turn out again at four next morning.

On our way we came across signs of bears; in the first instance, in the face of a Greek settler we met, whose nose and mouth had apparently got discontented with their original positions, and had altered them according to their own fancy. On inquiry, we found that two years ago the Greek had been frightening bears from his orchard, when one of them had attacked him and, striking him on the head, peeled the face off his skull almost, and left him still living in this condition. He was found, and the face replaced as well as possible, but his whole appearance was hideously distorted.

A mile or two further on we came across fresh tracks of a regular family of bears, who had been down to the high-water line looking for waifs and strays whilst we were sleeping at the Cossack station.

Mid-day found us at our camping place—a ruined datch or villa belonging formerly to General Heiman, built on an estate given him, I believe, as a reward for his successes against the aborigines. But the house was never finished and the land never reclaimed. Where once the Tscherkess had magnificent orchards, nothing now remains save here and there a fruit-tree, still bearing fruit though sparingly, choked by the luxuriant growth of forest trees. Through the doorless doorways and windowless frames of the ruined villa, the big trees branch in, creepers and blackberry bushes grow merrily inside, while from the very hearth, disturbed by our intrusion, a scared woodcock bustles away. The spot had evidently been used as a camping place by drovers before our day, for all round the white skulls of cattle bleached on the shore and on the sward, while remains of camp-fires were numerous, although there were none of recent date. All this warned us to be careful, so that our first step, after turning out our horses, was to secrete all our provisions, &c. in a hole beneath the flooring, and to destroy, as far as possible, all traces of our presence.

Having done this, we turned to the greenwood, and indeed it was not far to go. Two dozen strides, and we had almost to cut our way through the dense undergrowth. After a time we forced our way to more open forest, and here we parted. Not twenty minutes afterwards there was a report that set the forest shrieking. Something came crashing down hill past me, and rumbled away into silence down a deep tree-covered gorge. In a few minutes I arrived on the scene of action, and found Ivan and his mongrel pointer gloating over a fine sow he had slain. Having gralloched her, we hoisted her on to the top of a blasted and broken oak, and, there impaled, she presented to us a ghastly, and to the jackals who soon arrived a no doubt very tantalising, appearance. However, we left them to their own devices and, feeling sure of pork chops for dinner, continued our hunt.

Twice I heard swine close to me, and both my men saw game again during the afternoon; but the covert was so dense that we none of us got another shot, and, what was worse, all lost our way. The sun, which had been our guide, went down all in a moment, and left us in the dark without a compass to steer by. For two hours and a half I struggled through jungle that tore me to pieces, and threw me down every few yards. I climbed out of a ravine up the white face of a cliff, gun in hand, which cliff I inspected by daylight on another occasion, and would not climb again for the best day’s shooting that man ever had; and at last, fagged and bleeding, came upon Ivan resting, with his pig up aloft keeping watch for him.

After getting the pig down and finding Yepheem, we started on the back track; but, though the track had been comparatively easy by daylight, with no pig to drag along, we lost it in about five minutes now. In another ten minutes we were completely lost, and, realizing the fact, prepared to meet it. We had, fortunately, between us two boxes of matches, furnished with which Yepheem gave us an occasional glimmer of light, by which Ivan hewed away with his kinjal through the tangled creepers, while I plodded wearily on behind with the pig in tow. Two hours of this kind of thing, added to the previous day’s work, was more than I could stand; so we sat down, made a wood fire, and, by its light, divided the sow longitudinally.

It was no good waiting for the moon to rise, as she was in her last quarter; so Yepheem shouldering one half, and myself the other, we floundered on again, to arrive at last at the ruin about midnight, dead beat and starving, to say nothing of being saturated with the blood of the pig, and lacerated all over by the thorns of that abominable creeper the ‘wolf’s tooth.’ Then, after one long pull at the whiskey bottle, I lay down and slept where I was, too tired to wait for the chops which the men were frying by my side.

Nor were my men much less tired; for when I woke with a shiver at dawn, one of them was asleep with his skewer of grilled pork almost untouched by his side. Of this I speedily relieved him, and, raking together the embers of the fire, which my men had made under the flooring the night before, I re-cooked the kabobs, and breakfasted, not perhaps sumptuously, but with an appetite that made amends for any defects in the cooking.

Whilst the men still slept, I went down to the sea for a swim and a look at the country round us. Looking from the sea you saw nothing but endless hills, growing gradually into mountains, as they receded farther and farther from the shore. Everywhere they seemed covered with forest, the greater part of which was composed of Spanish chestnut trees. Except a solitary eagle, a few porpoises rolling about near in shore, and one of my men coming down now to collect drift-wood, there was no sign of life anywhere. After helping to light the fire and brew the tea, I sent Yepheem to look for the horses, which were nowhere in sight, and meanwhile Ivan and I took our rifles and tried another part of the forest. We had gone but a very little way when the dog gave tongue, and was evidently driving something through the bushes towards us. Ivan ran in one direction, I in another, to cut off the game. Standing behind a big tree at the foot of a small hill, covered with rhododendron clumps, I heard a rustling through the covert, such as some small animal might make if quietly forcing his way through. I never dreamed it was our game, but was still intently listening for the crashing charge I was beginning to know so well. Looking in the direction of the rustling, I was thunderstruck to see three magnificent grey old boars following one another in single file down hill, straight to my tree. The almost cat-like noiselessness with which large and clumsy animals can move about in thick covert, is almost more wonderful than the tremendous noise even small ones make when so minded. I picked out the leading boar, fired, and with a thundering rush they were gone. How I could have missed him I don’t know, but I apparently did clean, and for the rest of that day I found it harder than ever not to speak somewhat unadvisedly with my lips when a long loop of ‘wolf’s tooth’ caught me up under the nose, or a hazel wand flew back and cut me over the ear.

Later on in the afternoon we were all three walking abreast, with perhaps a hundred yards between each gun, when I caught a glimpse of Ivan stealthily scrambling up an old stump, from which elevated position he aimed carefully, for what seemed about five minutes, at something almost under his feet. Then followed the click that denotes a missfire, and a great crashing amidst the rhododendron bushes, as a big brown bear scuttled away in undignified flight. Some minutes afterwards, whilst Ivan with many curses was descending from the stump, his valuable piece went off, luckily damaging no one.

Except some wild boars seen by Yepheem, this was the last game we saw during the day, although we came across regular roads made by bears and swine, and one patch of several acres, which from the broken fruit-trees and trampled state of the ground appeared to be a regular bear den. The quantity of fruit one meets with in these Circassian forests compensates in some measure for persecutions of the ‘wolf’s tooth’ and other thorny creepers. Large apples, walnuts, grapes, ‘fourmar’ (an edible berry for which I do not know any other name), medlars, blackberries, dewberries, and a kind of scarlet plum, occur frequently, and whereever they occur the trees are smashed into ruins by the bears. You begin to get some notion of the power of a bear when you have seen the enormous boughs he has broken in his greed for fruit. To-night the jackals were calling all round us, but the wily little beasts never gave me a shot.

In the morning Yepheem woke us with the pleasant intelligence that our horses had been stolen. A drover had passed along the coast whilst we were shooting the day before, and suspicion immediately settled on his party. Of course after this news there was no hunting for us to-day, for while Ivan and Yepheem scoured the country for our missing steeds, I had to sit at home and watch. At nightfall the best news they could give me was that the Cossacks on the station at which we had slept on our way hither had lost six of their horses at the same time.

I had time during the day to examine the insect life about our camp, and amongst the butterflies I noticed all three meadow browns, quantities of very large brimstones, a fritillary, and a wood argus, whilst amongst the moths I recognized quantities of the gamma and the humming-bird hawk moth.

When we went down to the shore to bathe, huge shoals of what looked like bass were playing close in shore, but alas we had no means of securing any, though they would have been a noble addition to our ill-found larder.

Last night, whilst writing up my journal, with my legs dangling from a rafter, and a great wood fire burning by my side, by which the men lay curled in their bourkas, the wind that came moaning through the open places in the wall brought with it a sound between a child’s wail and a wolf’s howl, which was so distinct from the jackals’ cries that it arrested my attention at once. The men sprang to their feet simultaneously, and with excited faces whispered ‘barse’ (panther). At our backs was the ruined doorway through which the forest trees stretched their arms; in our front was the huge empty window place with thickets of briar and thorn half blinding it, and right under it the sound seemed. For a moment I believe the same feeling was on all of us, that the next event would be the entrance of our serenader by either door or window. However, this wore off at once, and snatching up my rifle I crept to the window place to try to make out the beast in the moonlight. But outside all was a maze of shadowy limbs and dark places, with every here and there a brilliant patchwork of moonshine; and though I went outside and carefully beat all round our camp I could not catch sight of the barse.

To-night, having had a lazy day in camp, I was by no means in a hurry to roll myself up in the least draughty corner, so taking my rifle, having constructed a night sight for it, I betook myself to the beach to await our last night’s visitor should he repeat his visit.

The hills near Heiman’s Datch come down almost to the high-water line, so that sitting hidden under some drift-wood I had the forest close at my back, and a little above me; so close indeed as to suggest the possibility of a sudden spring from the bushes to my hiding place if any beast had the courage to try it. Before me lay some forty yards at most of strand, and beyond a perfectly calm and silent sea. Far up in one of the valleys at my back two wolves were answering each other, and away towards Duapsè I could hear some jackals fighting over some carrion they had found.

But for a long time nothing happened, except every now and then a rustle in the forest at my back, that made me start and bring my gun to bear on its dark fastnesses. I had almost made up my mind to give up my watch and return to the ruin, when a figure like the grey ghost of some large hound was just visible against the sky line. It was too dark to see even the barrels of my rifle, but aiming as best I could, I fired. The figure bounded forward and trotted briskly along the coast from me; so pitching my rifle low, and well in front, I fired again. Then the beast vanished. For a minute or two I waited, expecting to see it again, or at least hear it making off, and then, loading my rifle, I went up to the spot at which I had last seen it. But whatever the beast was, it had vanished, and feeling that I had wasted a couple of hours and a couple of cartridges in missing a jackal, I went back to my roost in the ruin.

However, on the morning after my night-watch, when we went down to bathe and collect drift-wood for our fires, my man Ivan suddenly called to me to look at something he had found on the stones. On inspection it proved to be large blood drops, on the very spot, as near as I could tell, on which my shadowy visitor of the night before had stood. Following the blood track along the shore, we momentarily expected to find a dead jackal, as, from the quantity of blood, the beast must have been very hard hit. Some two hundred yards along the shore the trail crossed the mouth of a little mountain stream, with a bed of soft clay on one side of it, and through this the trail went. Our astonishment may be imagined when along with the blood marks we found the fresh tracks of a large panther (or more properly leopard), which had evidently been the beast wounded by me in the dark the night before. Of course the search was now prosecuted with far greater ardour, at least on my part. As for the men, they have so many yarns about the much dreaded barse, that they were not as keen as they might have been; and when the trail turned from the shore and entered some extremely dense and dark thickets, they came to a stand, and nothing would induce them to enter the forest with me. Unfortunately the dog was of their mind, so that after wandering blindly about for some time, tearing myself to pieces, and losing my temper terribly, I had to give up my search, with the conviction strong upon me that a noble and (in this part of the world) rare quarry was lying dead within a stone’s throw of me.

‘Barse’ is the name given by the peasants on the Black Sea coast, and in fact generally throughout the Caucasus, to any feline animal larger than a wild cat; and this indiscriminate use of the word occasioned me a good deal of trouble. Too often when they tell you of barse, the animal they refer to is only the lynx, of which there are at least two varieties in the Caucasus, and which is extremely numerous on some parts of the Black Sea coast. The natives trap it for its skin, which is one of the commonest in the furriers’ shops of Tiflis and Ekaterinodar. But that the leopard or ocelot (the snow leopard of India) does occur not uncommonly in the Caucasus, even on its western coast, I was assured by Professor Radde, the courteous director of the Tiflis Museum, who showed me great kindness in going over his collections with me during my stay in that town. And even had I had no further confirmation than the tracks I have above alluded to, I should feel convinced that the beast I wounded was an unmistakable leopard.

Returning from our tracking operations, we were startled by seeing a strange figure moving about inside our camp, evidently looking for anything light enough to carry away. Remembering our horses, we never for a moment doubted but that this was one of the gentry who had stolen them, returned possibly for the saddles. Had he been, he would have had fleet feet to have escaped, for we went for him like terriers for a rat. But our anger was turned to rejoicing when we recognised the face of a friendly Cossack from the next station, who had brought our horses back with him, and was looking for nothing more valuable than a still smouldering ember to light his cigarette by. Our horses had joined his ‘taboon’ (herd), which had been pasturing in a valley somewhere between our camp and his station, and he had there found them the night before.

On hearing this good news Ivan and his chum announced to my disgust their intention of going straight back to Duapsè, before any further accidents happened, alleging as their reasons that their wives could not do without them any longer. As a matter of fact, I presume their own appetite for sport was satiated, and their appetite for vodka becoming daily more unendurably keen. As no words or promises of mine could turn them from their resolve I gave in to them, merely stipulating that they should leave me one of their horses to take me twelve versts further up the coast, to the hut of a Tscherkess telegraph watcher, who lived by that irrepressible mountain torrent the Golovinsk. To this they agreed, and I moreover managed to persuade the Cossack to accompany me to Golovinsky, as another Cossack station at which he could rest was not far from the watcher’s hut. So we parted company, my men and I, and I don’t think I suffered any great loss from their defection. My reasons for wishing to go to Golovinsky were, that a report had come down the coast that in the extensive chestnut forest round the watcher’s hut bears were more than usually numerous, the man himself having recently killed two by shooting from a platform in a tree during the night.

CHAPTER VI.
GOLOVINSKY.

Lunch in the forest—Picturesque riding—A spill—Telegraph shanty at Golovinsky—Robinson Crusoe—Native guns—Tracks of game—Multitudes of pheasants—Paucity of native hunters—Tscherkess mocassins—Experiences of forest life—Killing a bear—Cooking him—Another bag—A lost chance—Anecdotes of ‘Michael Michaelovitch’—Shooting a boar.

The Cossack and myself, having seen the two Russians round the first little promontory, unearthed a small quantity of whiskey which I had managed to save from their insatiable thirst, and with this and a pork kabob made a very fair lunch, and laid the foundation of a good understanding between us. Then we piled up a pyramid of odds and ends on the back of each little horse, and made the whole fast with cords. The equestrians’ enviable position was astride the summit of the pyramid of luggage—a position difficult to retain when gained, and almost impossible to attain unaided. However, after many failures the Cossack hoisted me on to my place, and providing we never went out of a walk I felt fairly safe. How the Cossack got up was a miracle, but he did it somehow; and we proceeded at a walk through the shingle, that forms the only possible pathway along this part of the shore.

We had not gone far when it seemed to me that I was gradually leaning over more and more towards the sea. I tried to regain an erect position, and then I became aware of my situation. My girths had got slack, and my saddle, with its huge pile of luggage, of which I was the highest point, was gradually turning round under my horse’s belly. Seated as I was, I was utterly helpless; I could not readjust my saddle, and a voluntary descent, except head first, was impossible. So I waited the course of events, and in a few moments lay sprawling on the ground, half buried in pots and pans, bourkas, and other impedimenta.

This was our only misadventure, however, and about four o’clock we came in sight of the watcher’s hut—a two-roomed wooden shanty, knocked up in the roughest way possible, standing on the edge of the shingle, with a big brown bear-skin stretched over the roof to dry. A more utterly miserable-looking hut cannot well be conceived; but the skin on the thatch consoled me, proclaiming as it did the vicinity of the game I was in search of.

After much shouting and hammering at the board that constituted the hut’s one door, a wild Robinson Crusoe-like fellow came shuffling out. Tall and well built, but taciturn and clumsy to a degree, Stepan was not a favourable specimen of the benefits of woodland isolation to mankind. Instead of giving me a kindly welcome as, to do them justice, all Russian peasants had hitherto done, he eyed me in the doubtful manner in which some big dog might eye a too familiar stranger before snapping at the would-be caressing hand. His face was shrivelled and yellow with fever, and a frequent deep cough formed no pleasant accompaniment to our cottage life. Gradually his sullenness gave way to surprise at the presence of an English gentleman in those evil places, for such he evidently deemed Golovinsky; and when I explained to him that I wished to hire his services and the use of his hut, as well as to put all game killed at his disposal, his delight knew no bounds. His terms were a rouble a week, that is about half a crown; but that seemed so unfair to me that I trebled it, and added to it a promise of ten roubles additional for the skinning of the first bear I should kill; and considering that he gave me house-room, black bread, and his whole time, I think 7s. 6d. per week was not an exorbitant charge.

However, he was delighted, and though rather startled to find that his whole larder consisted of some black bread, onions, and pork fat (‘salo’), I consoled myself with the reflection that with the addition of tea and sugar, which I had brought with me, we should be able to hold out for a week at least, in which time I should probably have obtained my coveted bear-skin.

Outside the hut all was beauty. The hut itself was as nearly as possible the centre of a bay of fairly high hills, enclosing a couple of hundred acres or so of plain covered with low shrubs. Beyond the first chain of hills, which was wooded to the top, rose another and a higher chain, and so one after another, in successive semicircles, they rose range above range, until far away in the sapphire sky shone the white glory of the snow-peaks. Out at sea a long line of pelicans lay tossing on the little waves, like a small fleet riding at anchor. Within the hut all was squalor and filth. The place consisted of two rooms, in one of which was a telegraphic apparatus of the simplest kind, with a handle like that of a barrel organ, and a face like the face of a clock with letters in place of numerals. This was the deity of the place and Stepan’s pride and fear. Near it was a camp bedstead, and here the list of the furniture ends. The other room was merely a shed, in which such cooking as we had to do was done; and though the appliances were of the simplest, we never taxed them overmuch. The floors throughout were of mud, and several inches deep in refuse, dating from the time of Stepan’s arrival in his den.

Borrowing a spade and cutting down a large bough for a broom, I soon had a clear floor, and by dint of hard work had in an hour’s time got a fairly clean place to move about in. Stepan retired to the shed, and, in spite of my protestations, took up his abode there. Had it not been for his cough I should have fallen in with this arrangement readily enough; but as it was, I felt he required the best accommodation the shanty afforded. However, in the shed he remained, and for the rest of my stay I had his best room to myself.

There were, besides Stepan and myself, three other residents at the ‘telegraph station,’ as he loved to call it—to wit, Zizda, Lufra, and Orla, three large cross-bred dogs, devoured by mange, with which Stepan hunts the boars that abound in the thicket at the back of his house, killing on an average, so he tells me, half a dozen in the year. In spite of the numbers which inhabit the adjoining forests, this small bag is not very much to be wondered at, when the impenetrable nature of the covert and the almost utter uselessness of Stepan’s gun are taken into consideration.

Russian peasants have amongst them the most wonderful fire-arms in the world, which, as a rule, they buy in the bazaars at from three to five roubles (i.e. 7s. 6d. to 12s. 6d.) each. I have frequently seen the grebe-shooters along the shore at Kertch using old rifle-barrels worn thin, tied on to a rough stock, with flint lock, &c., the whole thing being compounded of the remains of some venerable weapon in use in the Russian army immediately after the invention of gunpowder. Stepan’s was no exception to this rule, and yet I distinctly remember seeing him put in charges which I would not have ventured to put into my high-class breech-loader.

After putting the house in order, Stepan loaded his valuable weapon with a good charge of powder and two bullets, the first in its naturally smooth state, the other chewed into a rough-edged mass. Thus prepared we sallied forth and reconnoitred the little plain within the hills. Everywhere the tracks of bears, boars, wolves, and occasionally roe-deer presented themselves to our eyes, but of the animals themselves we saw nothing. Pheasants rose several times from the bushes at our feet, and Stepan tells me Golovinsky is a favourite abiding place of theirs, in consequence of the quantity of ‘phaisantchik’ growing here, upon the yellow berry of which they feed. The pheasants have no bad taste in berries, for when ripe I know no berry much pleasanter in flavour than that of the ‘phaisantchik,’ in spite of its acidity. The flavour strongly resembles that of the pineapple.

Of course, as pheasants abound here, Stepan has no fowling-piece, and I have left mine behind at Ekaterinodar. You would imagine that living as the Cossacks, Stepan and many others, do, in a state of semi-starvation in the matter of meat from week to week, with an abundance of game birds round them, they would become good shots and keen sportsmen, or at the very least turn trappers, and so supply themselves with food. And yet it is not so. Not one Cossack amongst the many I have met was a sportsman, and this perhaps their want of sporting rifles and ammunition may account for; though, if they were allowed to use them, no better rifle than the Berdianka, with which they are supplied, could be desired. But that neither they, nor the settlers and peasants, should have any idea of trapping, is most strange. In all the Crimea and Caucasus I never saw or heard of snare, or pitfall, or any of the hundred and one devices for killing game without fire-arms, which other nations use. The only thing of the kind I ever heard of, was told me by a German settler, who assured me that in some places they caught pheasants by inserting small cones of paper, limed inside, into the earth; in the bottom of each cone a pea is placed and others strewn around. The pheasant, after finishing the peas scattered on the surface of the ground, finds the pea at the bottom of the cone, and, in trying to peck it out, hoodwinks himself with the limed paper cone, and being blinded becomes frightened, and remains cowering on the ground, an easy prey to the trapper. But I could never hear of any one amongst the Tscherkesses, Cossacks, or ‘plastoons’ (settlers), who had either done this or heard of its being done; and I believe I am right in saying that the Russians, at least in the Crimea and Caucasus, know very little of trapping, and indeed of woodcraft generally.

I had passed the first part of this my first night at Golovinsky, sleeping as well as I could in my only too well ventilated quarters; and rising while it was still dark, Stepan and I had wiled away the time in chatting of the snares and traps with which different nations used to kill their game. As we chatted he busied himself on a pair of rough sandals or mocassins he was making for me from the skin of a wild boar he had killed in the spring. As soon as they were finished, he steeped them in water to soften them, and then, first wrapping my leg round with canvas, he fastened on the sandals, winding the long laces round and round the canvas until they fastened just below the knee. Thus I was booted and gaitered à la mode Circassienne in a very short time; and as the dawn slowly broke over the mountains, and the stars grew pale and died in the grey of morning, we left our hut and walked hard to warm ourselves in the soft rain that began with dawn.

On our way to the forest, which began at the foot of the first range of hills, we had to ford that turbulent trout stream, the Golovinsk, and as its waters come straight down from the higher peaks, and are fed almost entirely by melted snow, right bitterly cold we found it. Chilled and wet to the waist, we forced our way through a weary half hour’s work in thorn brake and strangling creeper, while the gathered rain-drops ran in streams down our necks and up our sleeves from every bough we touched.

At last we gained the more open chestnut forest, and here we found how great a boon the rain really was to us. The leaves, which the day before had sounded like small minute-guns under our feet, firing a warning to every beast in the forest, were now soft and silent. Arrived among the chestnuts, Stepan and I separated, he taking a line along the base of the hill, I choosing a parallel line much higher up. To-day the dogs had been tied up, and our modus operandi was simply to walk as silently as possible through the forest, stopping every twelve yards or so to listen, and trusting at least as much to our ears as to our eyes to find the game.

For over an hour I stalked noiselessly on, hearing nothing but the rattle of the falling chestnuts, the patter of the ceaseless rain, and the screaming of the everlasting jays. It is easy to understand why the Indian, whose whole life is spent more or less in the chase, becomes such a silent, self-contained being. The whole chase is a school for silence and self-restraint. Should you tread carelessly, a twig breaks and your chance is lost; should a thorn run right up under your nail from end to end, you must not complain; and should the bitter blows dealt you in the face by the rebounding twigs, or the tearing and strangling of the thorny creepers, at last extract an exclamation, your chance is over for the day.

For over an hour I bore all the malice of the forest fiend silently and uncomplainingly. But at last, in an evil moment, a long trailing loop of thorny vine hooked me under the nose, and pulling up that tender member to an unusual angle, held it firmly hooked in its painful position. Then I fear the wrath within me boiled over; and as I released my mutilated proboscis, I spoke unadvisedly with my tongue. Hardly was the imprecation out of my lips when there was a short sharp snort, and a black object flashed past me downhill at a hundred miles an hour. A quick snap-shot failed to stop him, and so I passed on, reflecting that my little explosion had cost me probably the only game I was doomed to see that day.

But this lesson taught me caution, and a short half-hour afterwards, whilst I was creeping noiselessly along a kind of natural cutting, I was suddenly aware of a big black thing moving in the hazels high above me. The creature looked as if it was browsing, and might have been anything from a cow to a rhinoceros, for any distinguishing feature that I could discern. However, in such a position, I argued, it must be game of some sort, so, raising my rifle, I aimed as nearly as possible into the middle of it, and fired. The yells that followed my shot were proof positive that I had hit something, and before I had time to turn, an old bear was coming straight down to me through the brushwood, ‘puffing’ furiously as he came, like an excited locomotive engine. I had time to notice that his mode of progression was curious and lopsided, lurching as he did on to his hams at every step, and when he was almost on top of me, rolling over the cutting in which I stood: only avoiding me by a few yards, he went crashing downhill, taking another bullet with him as he went, and lodging under a fallen tree far down the hillside.

Here for a time I left him, making the woods hideous with his snarling and moaning; and after some ten minutes’ shouting I managed to get my guide, Stepan, to come to me, white and shaking with fright. He explained to me that he thought I had been certainly killed, and in consequence of this, I suppose, believed I should want his services no more. Standing in the cutting, I pointed out to him the place where Bruin lay, far down through an almost impenetrable thicket of blackberry-bush and wild vine. Stepan did all he knew to induce me to leave the bear to die by inches, and come for him next day; but this seemed to me not only unsportsmanlike, but uncertain: so leaving him to watch Bruin, I crawled into the thicket, and began forcing my way by a game-track under the bushes to the place where he lay.

It was a difficult path, and the creepers hampered me sadly, so that it was not without a considerable quickening of the pulse that I heard Stepan screaming, ‘Look out, Barin (master), for heaven’s sake, here he comes!’ The bushes parted about ten yards below, and slowly pushing his way uphill came the bear, swinging his head from side to side, throwing the blood and foam from his jaws, and moaning and sobbing hideously. As soon as he caught sight of me he gave his jaws a kind of vicious snap, and even managed to increase his pace to a trot. It was difficult to fire in my cramped position, but I managed to do it, and, thanks to his extreme proximity to my rifle’s muzzle, the ball went right through his head, passing through a large oak sapling beyond, leaving a hole in it as clean drilled as if it had been done with a hot iron.

The bear, when we came to examine him, was a very old fellow, quite black, and with a skin in anything but a good condition. However, being my first bear, we skinned him with great care and much exultation, and brought home his head, tired but rejoicing.

It was still early when we got back to our hut, not more than mid-day, in fact; but the weather was of the roughest, and our uprising had been an early one, so that we were not sorry to pass the rest of the day in cleaning our bear’s skin and preparing his flesh for our evening meal. And fresh-killed bear’s meat takes a considerable time in preparation, and when the animal happens to be as old and wiry as the beast killed to-day, not forty cooks with forty rolling-pins could ever beat his flesh into a reasonable degree of tenderness.

The Cossacks on the station won’t eat bear’s flesh, though they only get meat once a week here; and partly for that reason, and partly because with their single-barrelled rifles they consider the risk too great, they never molest the bears. So little in fact do they know of their comparative harmlessness, that they gave me quite an ovation when I came back loaded with spoils to-day, and for the moment I figured as quite a Nimrod to an admiring audience of eleven semi-savages.

I had heard a great deal in time past about the excellence of bear’s hams, and the delicacy of bear’s paws stewed, but I felt that another of the pleasant illusions of my youth had been destroyed when I encountered to-night the mass of boiled black whipcord, which, in spite of its unpleasant flavour, was undoubtedly real bear’s ham. As for the paws, Stepan and myself baked them à la mode in a little subterranean oven; but on unearthing them we could find nothing but skin and leather, with bones and bony sinews, and certainly nothing to eat. Even our dogs did not seem to make much of them.

In spite of the poor quality of our food, we made, however, the heartiest of suppers, having been strangers to meat for nearly a week; and with a storm raging outside which seemed to threaten a repetition of the disastrous flood that swept our cottage away last year, we slept the sleep of the weary but successful.

The next day, Saturday, was a red-letter day for me. Rising rather later than usual, we tried the other side of our bay of mountains, and, in spite of the noisy wind, with great success. Hardly had we forced our way through the growth of briars at the bottom of the hill into the chestnuts above when Stepan, turning round, beckoned me to stop, knelt down, and aiming deliberately, fired at something which the bushes concealed from me. On going up to him I found that he had fired at a boar standing end on to him some thirty yards off, and, as might be expected, with his extraordinary weapon, had only succeeded in frightening the beast.

Angry at the luck which had given Stepan such a chance to throw away, I pushed noisily through the thickets, never dreaming of finding any more game, at any rate for another half mile. Yet hardly had we gone three dozen paces from the spot whence the last shot was fired, when our ears caught the sound of a bear’s even step close to us, and approaching still closer. Slipping silently behind a couple of trees, we waited with our hearts in our mouths. Softly and deliberately the steps drew near, with a sound closely resembling the step of a man slowly picking his way through the forest. Every now and then the bear paused to give a loud snuff of inquiry, which, luckily for us, the constant shifting of the wind in these narrow valleys completely baffled. At last I got a glimpse of her passing slowly through the bushes, and stopping every now and then to pick up the fallen chestnuts in a leisurely way as she paced along. I waited for a minute or two until I could see her grey shoulder plainly through the rhododendrons. Then I pulled, and wheeling round with a short sharp cry, she disappeared in the higher covert, followed in her retreat by a snap-shot from my second barrel, which evidently did not take effect.

Uncertain whether the bear was killed outright or only wounded, Stepan and myself were somewhat shy of following her into her stronghold. At first we both tried climbing trees, hoping to get a view of her thus; but finding that of no avail I persuaded Stepan to follow me at a distance in a careful survey of the place in which we had last seen her. Poor beast, she had not gone far; the moment she was out of our sight her strength failed her, and when we found her she was lying stone dead, not sixty yards from the spot where the bullet had reached her.

‘Express’ rifles are terribly destructive little weapons. This second bear was totally unlike the one killed the day before, at least in colour: for while he was black, her coat, a very fine one, was of a soft light brown, so light as to be almost grey.

On examination we found that she was a yearling, and was returning from her morning’s work, the ruin of half a fine chestnut-tree, when we met her. Some of the boughs she had managed to break were almost as thick as a man’s waist. On looking at her fore-arm after Stepan had skinned her, I could not but reflect that the stories one meets with from time to time, of hand-to-hand conflicts with bears, require a large grain of salt for the swallowing.

Leaving Stepan to finish the skinning, I wandered on somewhat higher up the hillside. I had not left him a quarter of an hour when I again heard the peculiarly soft regular tread of a bear above me, and after waiting patiently for about five minutes, I caught a glimpse for a moment of the head of an exact counterpart of the bear then under Stepan’s hands. Unluckily for me, she sighted me at the same moment, and with a loud sniff plunged straight downhill at a pace that, even had the covert not concealed her, would have rendered my chance of hitting her extremely problematical. I saw from the direction she had taken that she would pass almost over Stepan, and I hurried on to be able to lend him a hand in case he only wounded her. But I waited in vain for the report of my man’s mighty blunderbuss. Sitting engaged in the sanguinary task of disrobing our dead bear he had suddenly become aware of what appeared to him either the shade or the enraged sister of the deceased charging furiously down upon him; and oppressed with a consciousness of his guilt, Stepan fled red-handed from the avenger, leaving his gun to take care of itself.

Poor Stepan, who was originally I believe no coward, but in days past, according to his own version, a mighty hunter, was an instance of a man who had suddenly lost all his nerve, and this occurred as follows. One day, when suffering severely from fever, he was walking along the dried bed of a mountain torrent, when, on turning a sharp corner, he almost ran into a large bear. For a moment they stood facing one another. Stepan, having no weapons, thought his last hour had come. There was an awful noise, something struck him on the face, and for the time the hapless Tscherkess passed away from this bear-haunted world to a land of oblivion. On returning to his senses, he was surprised to find no bear, and no bloody wound upon his scalp. Further examination showed him, however, that a bear had stood facing him, and it was probably the gravel thrown up by its hind feet as it slewed round in headlong flight, that had struck Stepan, not stunning him as he supposed, but merely in his weak state frightening him out of his senses. Since then until now my man had only shot at bears from a platform in a tree at night—a style of sport extremely free from danger, as, although Bruin can climb, he very rarely if ever attempts to do so in pursuit of a foe.

Living, as Stepan had lived all his life, in bear-frequented forest lands, he had many a story to tell of ‘Michael Michaelovitch,’ as the peasants call him. On one occasion he and a friend had observed an apple-tree well laden with fruit, some seven or eight versts from their village in the forest, standing unclaimed of any man, almost sole relic of some once prosperous Tscherkess village. Stepan and his friend, who lived at some little distance, arranged to meet at the tree one morning early, and gather the fruit, to be shared amongst them. Arrived at the tree, Stepan saw some one already engaged throwing the apples down. Thinking his friend was trying to steal a march on him, the irate Stepan heaped all manner of abuse on him, accused him of spoiling the apples by throwing them down; and, at last, getting no answer, fairly yelled with rage, and began to throw things into the tree. Then the shower of apples ceased, and, with a gruff snort, a huge old bear came tumbling out of the tree, almost on top of the terrified villager. As usual in these cases, Bruin was just as much frightened as the man, and shambled off as quickly as possible, leaving the apples to the friends.

All the Russians and Tscherkesses with whom I have talked about bears, say there are two kinds in the Caucasus—the ordinary big brown bear, and a smaller one, that lives in the higher ranges, has a kind of white shirt-front to his coat, and is much fiercer and more carnivorous than his brown brother. Dr. Radde, however, of the Tiflis Museum, tells me there is only one kind; and though I have myself seen great variety in the sizes and coats of different individuals killed on the Black Sea coast, I can well believe he is right. Still, I fancy the higher ranges of Transcaucasia are very little known; and it may well be that a variety of the common bear, differing considerably from the specimens found on the coast, is to be met with nearer the snow-line. The peasants tell wonderfully circumstantial stories of their favourite’s craft (for, in a way, the bear is a great favourite with the moujik, and hero of many a droll story): how that he lies in ambush for the unsuspecting roe or wild goat, and pounces on him, or knocks him down with a log used club-fashion, as he passes. Or, again, that lying hid on a ledge overlooking some favourite pass of the tûr’s, he rolls huge stones on his prey as it browses beneath him, and then, having killed it in this way, climbs down and dines at his leisure.

Of course all these are mere peasants’ stories, but as they have been told me repeatedly by peasants who have lived amongst the beasts of which the stories are told all their lives, I give them for what they are worth. There may be some grains of truth in them.

After putting my bear’s skin out of harm’s way, and leaving the hams to take their chance till we returned, Stepan and I continued our hunt. In a deep glade, where no sunlight came to disturb the drowsy stillness, something bounded to its feet with a great noise, and hurried off unseen, making the whole forest re-echo with its short sharp barks. The cry was new to me, and I imagined all manner of grim beasts from whom the sound might have proceeded, and regretted intensely my evil luck in not obtaining a shot. Stepan, however, consoled me by telling me it was only ‘cazeole,’ the roebuck of this part of the world, which answers—so an old Indian sportsman tells me who has shot many of these ‘cazeoles,’—to the Indian ‘karkee.’ Indeed, all the game found in the Caucasus is the same as, or very nearly allied to, species found throughout the mountains of India.

Later on in the day, whilst exploring a rhododendron thicket at the very summit of a high hill, shut in and encircled by still higher eminences, I heard something bolt from me through the rattling covert, and then pause, and with a loud sniff try to get my wind. Apparently getting it, the beast changed his course and proceeded at right angles to the line of his first rush, and then halting, again tried for my wind. Luckily for me, shut in as we were by the higher peaks, the wind kept veering round; and, thoroughly puzzled and beaten, the unlucky beast kept changing his course until at last I, standing behind a tree, saw a long grey snout and a pair of gleaming white tusks peering out of a thicket some thirty yards in front of me. The quick eyes sighted me at once in spite of my tree, and I had hardly time to fire before the owner of the eyes had retreated out of sight. Quick as the shot had to be, however, it was wonderfully effective, and the boar went crashing head over heels from top to bottom of the hill, there to rest still as sudden death could make it until I could get down to him. The bullet had gone in at the front of the shoulder, and traversing the whole length of the spine, had perfectly pulverised it, remaining buried just under the hide near the root of the tail; whence I extracted it and still preserve it, smashed and flattened as it is, a memento of the wonderful force of the ‘express’ (450) rifle.

Laden with spoils, the bear’s skin and head, as well as the tidbits taken from the boar, we hurried home, to send up the Cossacks for the rest of the boar, which would be a welcome addition to their perpetual cabbage soup.

CHAPTER VII.
DENSE COVERTS.

Unsuccessful sport—Bruin and Stepan—Black bread and onions—Forest music—Mosquitoes—Ticks and other insects—Bruin’s fondness for honey—Butterflies—Our larder—Narrow escape of Stepan—Unlucky days—Watching for swine—Otters—A cold vigil—An exasperating march.

To recount day by day our adventures whilst hunting at Golovinsky would certainly be wearisome to the general reader; and even the keenest sportsman has enough blank days of his own without reading the record of other people’s. In spite of the fair beginning I had made, in the first two days of my stay, sport was not always as good or game so plentiful. Day after day, from dawn to dusk, often dragging our weary limbs home through icy torrents, by the feeble rays of a young moon, without whose light we had already been some time wandering in the forest darkness, we toiled unceasingly without getting another bear, although their tracks abounded everywhere.

Boars were at first fairly plentiful, and with them we did pretty well, though with them as with the few bears we did see, Stepan almost invariably got the shot and invariably missed it. Once he did hit an old she-bear, and a rare mess he very nearly made of it. I had got sick of seeing nothing, and was standing on an old log under which a bear had at one time made his lair, gazing idly down a long vista of forest below me. As I gazed I saw a small animal, which at the distance I could not recognise, being rolled over and over in the dead leaves by what was unmistakably a bear. I was on the point of descending to stalk her, when a report rang out below, and the old bear rolled over beside her cub. In another moment she was on her feet again, and using her fore-paw to urge him along, she was rapidly driving her cub towards me and away from the spot whence the report had come. As I watched, too much engrossed to think of firing, I saw her leave the cub and go at a really good gallop for something between her and myself. For a moment I thought I was the object of her attack; but a view of Stepan, his wretched old fire-arm as usual abandoned, bolting like a rabbit, revealed at once the true state of the case, and I made all haste to his rescue. Seeing me coming and Stepan stopping as I approached, the old she-bear turned, much to my surprise and infinitely to my disgust. Blown with my sharp rush and unduly excited, I missed the old lady entirely, or only hit her behind as she dived downhill through the high covert. Though we heard her once or twice, tramping about in the bushes and growling over her wounds, and though I am convinced she and the cub were within a few hundred yards of us whilst we munched the black bread and onions that made our lunch, we never saw either of them again.

Black bread and an onion sounds but a poor kind of refreshment after a hard morning’s work, yet what real enjoyment that half-hour at lunch used to be to us, only those who really love forest life and nature at home can tell. All the mysterious rustlings of the forest, every breaking twig, suggested a whole volume of possible adventure to us. Coming but six weeks before from the stifling atmosphere of London, every breath of fresh air seemed full of fresh life, every forest sound replete with music. The chirping of the green frogs—those mysterious little saurians whose bird-like note is so pitched as rather to lead you from than to their hiding-place; the harsh shrill note of the handsome black woodpecker, whose crimson crest is the more distinctly beautiful as it is his only adornment; the continual chattering of the traitor jays, who seem always bent on proclaiming the hunter’s presence; even the sharp rattle of the chestnuts, falling over-ripe from the trees; the droning of the bees, and the tiny but insatiable mosquito, combine, though in themselves not all harmonious, with the murmur of the sea and the whisper of the breeze, to make a woodland concert, which to some ears no other music, either of the present or of Herr Wagner’s future, could ever hope to rival.

Those mosquitoes were the only bitter drop in our mid-day draught of lazy pleasure. That they were bonâ fide mosquitoes I do not pretend, though we called them so, and hated them as much as if they had been, because, though mere microscopic midges, the lumps they raised upon us were worthy of the efforts of a Goliath among mosquitoes. From every rotten tree-stump rose a perfect steam of these evil little beasts, and being so small they could and did get through everything, and elude all vigilance.

There was another insect pest which used to cause us considerable annoyance: a kind of tick which dropped upon us unawares as we brushed against a bough, and creeping in under one’s clothing buried its head unfelt in the skin, and there took up its abode. If not found and dislodged at night, the body of the creature would grow to such an extent that in the morning it had the appearance of a large wart growing upon you, and if left longer would swell to almost any size, taking root by its head and requiring infinite care in removing; for of such a bull-dog nature is the insect that it will allow its body to be torn from its head rather than let go its hold. If this happens the result is a bad wound, hard to heal and apt to fester. There are other insects in these woods, though of a less obnoxious nature; and from one class to-day we received a most welcome addition to our larder.

My man spent a good deal of his time in hunting for honey, and was wonderfully sharp-sighted when bees were concerned, noticing them at once across a valley, observing the line of their flight, and eventually tracking them to their secret hoard with a certainty that seemed almost like the result of instinct. These Tscherkesses have a way of making a rough sort of hive for the wild bees in trees to which the bees are partial, and I believe respect each other’s hives when they come across them. Bruin, however, has less conscience than the Tscherkess, and if there is one thing which will tempt him into an indiscretion sooner than another it is honey. This man told me that once in a tree, with his nose smeared with honey, and stung all over by the indignant bees, the bear will go on feeding greedily, though the whole time he keeps crying and bemoaning himself for the pain given him by his tiny foes. At such times, so intent is he on his feast, that the hunter may approach him as closely as he pleases, and shoot him at his leisure.

The peacock butterfly was another insect of which I noticed large numbers from time to time round the outskirts of the forest; and indeed, in the whole of autumn in the Caucasus, I never noticed any butterflies, or only very few, which were not familiar to me as British insects, while I saw specimens of almost every butterfly which occurs with us at home. The most numerous, I think, was the clouded yellow, and its paler variety ‘hyale.’

The day we got our honey was a red-letter day for us, for on that occasion our larder reached its maximum of plenty; the boat, with stores from Duapsè, turning up on the afternoon of the same day. A bear’s ham, some pork, black bread, honey, onions, and a bottle of abomination, labelled ‘Vieux Rhum, Marseilles,’ which I doubt not had never been much nearer France than the Crimea, made my servant’s face beam with delight at the sight of such unwonted plenty; but alas! from this day our evil times were to commence; and so bare did our larder at last become that the very flies that then swarmed gave us up as inhospitable paupers before the end of a fortnight.

On trying the part of the forest in which I had killed my first bear on Monday, we could find no fresh traces of game, although the place was quite a warren of old boar runs, and full of beaten roads made by the bears. The cause of the game’s absence was evidently the presence of the carcass of my first bear, which, mangled by jackals, was already tainting the air far and wide. Some large game I did almost bag, but that was nearly being a very serious matter for one of us.

As usual, we took parallel lines along the hillside, and though from time to time a broken twig betrayed the presence of the one to the other, Stepan and I were otherwise lost to each other. For over half-an-hour we had been stalking in this way, without any event occurring to wake the stillness of the wood, when from a point above me, and coming down wind towards me, I heard a sound like that of approaching game. Slowly it came on, and as the leaves were crushed softly under its heavy even tread, which stopped from time to time that the beast might listen or pick up a chestnut, I recognised the step as that of Bruin strolling slowly home after his early breakfast. Stooping to get a better view through the hazel stems, I saw them swing and shake some eighty yards above me, and caught a glimpse at the same moment of something lighter in colour than the covert passing through it. Instinctively my rifle covered it, and from that moment, for quite three minutes I should think, I followed the bear’s every movement with my rifle’s muzzle. Twice I half pressed the trigger as a larger piece of the creature’s grey side was visible to me, picking his way slowly past me; but just as I was on the point of firing he turned and came downhill towards me. Thanking my stars that I had not fired a random shot into the brown of my game, I waited for him to come closer. There was twenty yards from me a little open space, and here, if he entered it, as he seemed likely to, I meant to kill him. Jealously my rifle followed his every movement, dreading a change of direction, and in another moment the shot would have been fired. The grey thing suddenly rose on end, or seemed to; and parting the thorn vine with its fore-arms walked into the open my man Stepan!

For a moment I felt absolutely sick, and I don’t think I was ever more unhinged in my life than I was for the rest of the day; and when, later on in the heat of noonday, I was resting in a ravine by a small pool, half dozing after lunch, hearing the same pace just above me, and seeing a great patch of grey move through the bushes, I lost a veritable bear by not firing. So Stepan’s folly nearly cost him his life, and cost me a bear. He had, it seemed, gone on too fast to the end of his beat, and getting tired of waiting for me, thought he might as well come back to meet me. Heard on the dead leaves, a bear’s step as he moves slowly along, stopping from time to time to feed or listen, is wonderfully like that of a mocassined hunter stalking slowly over the same ground.

And now, day after day, the sport grew worse. Stepan was evidently but a very poor guide. Living, as he had done, for a couple of lonely years in his hut at Golovinsky, his spirit of enterprise had never led him to explore more than the two beats in which we had already been successful. Beyond these two tracts of forest he knew nothing, and in this dense covert it is almost useless to attempt to shoot until you have first explored a little. If you do attempt it, you find yourself, sooner or later, lost in a dense mass of thorns, in which you cannot move without noise—in which, in fact, you can scarcely move at all. From above hang thick curtains of the abominable creeper which the people call aptly enough ‘wolf’s tooth,’ which is so keen and strong that even my stout jacket of moleskin was torn by it; while Stepan’s clothes, though made of the toughest canvas, ceased to exist, in spite of all his ingenious patchings, by the end of the fortnight. A few boars and two more bears were all we could get; and at last I consented to a trial of Stepan’s vaunted pack. But not until we had tried every other method did I consent to having the forests disturbed in this way.

One day, after twelve hours’ spent in the usual stalking, Stepan and I perched ourselves like ungainly birds each in a tree above a hole full of mud and water, in which herds of swine wallowed nightly. But our limbs grew cramped, and the moon rose higher in the heavens, making quaint patterns on the dark hole below, without our ever being disturbed in our night-watch. As the moon grew more dim, we climbed down again with aching limbs; and as Stepan relieved his feelings by a hoarse cough long pent up, a sudden charge through the thickets close by, with indignant snortings, told us that the herd was just approaching as we left.

On our way back, as we crossed a small tributary of the Golovinsk, a big silvery thing slid off a stone into the water, and swam along the bottom of the shallow stream close by me. In the grey morning light it looked to my drowsy eyes like a large fish, and it was not until I heard Stepan’s wretched old gun miss fire that I recognised in it a very fine otter; then, of course, it dived into deeper water, and was lost to us. Many of these, as well as a few sea-otters, are found between Novorossisk and Sukhoum, and my man showed me the skins of several which he had killed; but though I frequently saw their spoor, this was the only live specimen it was ever my luck to see.

Another long night we sat down under a juniper bush on the shingle that has, at some time or other, formed the bed of a broader Golovinsk, or has been brought down by the stream during its winter floods. On the opposite bank rose the hill forest, coming down in thorny thickets to the water’s edge. Half a mile behind us, on our side the stream, the other forest began, and a quarter of a mile below us the sea kept moaning. On all the little patches of sand the tracks of game were numerous and recent, and we had good hopes of sport: indeed we needed them to keep us up through that cold night. On the far side of the river there was a large tract of sand and clay, which was one close-written record of the goings and comings of thirsty beasts. Yet all that weary night we saw hardly anything. At six we marched down to those icy waters of tribulation as men prepared to do or die—that is, to be miserable as comfortably as possible. Pitching ourselves and a flask of Marseilles ‘rhum’ into the bush, we arranged that Stepan should watch until midnight, and the morning watch should be mine. With a stone for a pillow, and my knees tucked up to my chin, I soon slept to the tune of the stream at my feet, to wake in about an hour’s time shivering and wet through with the mist. The sound of a well-known snore explained to me how rigid had been Stepan’s vigil; and as two or three dusky forms bolted back into the thicket on the far side as I rose unwarily to kick him, I bitterly regretted that I had not kept watch all night through.

Resolving not to disturb my trusty henchman, I settled myself in the warmest corner I could find, and prepared to keep watch till morning. And I did so through all that livelong night, until the Pleiads had worked right round into the west: a little querulous wind arose, the stars grew greyer and greyer, there came a sudden bitter chill into the air, to which all the cold of the night had been as nothing, and then we knew it was morning.

A violent shake roused Stepan, and without troubling ourselves about more breakfast than a crust of black bread and the flask afforded, we went into the forest. Here we had a blank day; though had Stepan chosen to fire, he had a splendid chance at two bears; but as I was at some distance, he held his hand, apparently from prudential motives.

When we came back late that evening, empty-handed, to conclude our twenty-four hours of toil with a march of a mile over the bed of the Golovinsk—feeling its boulders through our worn mocassins as plainly as if we were barefooted; the small stones burning into our sore feet like hot irons, while from the big ones we slipped, risking sprains and breakages every other step, and getting clear of the stones only to plunge into the icy stream—when we were enduring all this, I might, I think, be forgiven if I said ‘Amen’ to the Russian proverb which my wretched guide kept repeating, to the effect that ‘the chase is worse than slavery.’ It does not say much for the sporting spirit of the Russians that such should be a favourite proverb among them; but in Stepan’s case, where he had all his share of the toil and none of the enthusiasm which novelty lent me to keep him up, it was a pardonable sentiment. Poor fellow, it was quite tragic to see him, having crossed his enemy the Golovinsk for the last time that night, sit down beside its waters, and, casting the remnants of a pair of mocassins into the stream, walk home barefoot.

CHAPTER VIII.
HUNTING WITH DOGS.

Refitting—Our mongrels—Shipping our spoils—Visitors—Stepan’s yarns—The hedgehog—Legend of the bracken—The Euxine in a fury—Trebogging—Traces of Tscherkess villages—Enormous boars—Their feeding grounds—Lose a bear—Impenetrable thickets hiding the proximity of big game—A rare day’s sport—Shooting in the moonlight—An expedition—Fever—Precautions against it—Unsuccessful sport and hard fare.

After our twenty-four hours of unsuccessful labour recorded in my last chapter, we were too tired and too tattered to take the field again next day. So we spent it in drying our clothes, mending and washing them, constructing fresh mocassins from the hide of one of our boars, and generally preparing for a campaign of another kind against our enemies the bears and boars.

In this campaign we were to be assisted by a canine force, consisting of three mangy curs belonging to Stepan, and one utterly useless beast, the property of the neighbouring Cossack station. Stepan’s trio were, in their way, the three ugliest half-starved mongrels that ever were possessed with the pluck of a gamecock and the unreasoning devotion that never shows itself in anything but a dog. Why they should have been Stepan’s faithful slaves no human reasoning could explain. They could have picked up more by themselves than he could give them. Poor fellow, he never had any great abundance for himself. They had to sleep outside the shanty, were kicked if they put their noses inside, and were devoured by the mange, which their master never seemed to think of curing. As for breed they had none, or perhaps I should say they had a touch of every breed in them. Zizda was said to be in some way connected with a race which they called ‘harlequin;’ and if oddity of shape, oddness of eyes, and a general unevenness of colour and outline, entitle a dog to the name, old Zizda was a veritable harlequin. He was a large dog with huge paws, a very square head, wall eyes, a capital nose, and indomitable pluck, which had from time to time earned him the innumerable scars with which he was marked from tail to muzzle. The other two were utter mongrels, but staunch supporters of old Zizda in any emergency. They were an old bitch called Lufra, and a young dog, Orla, or ‘The Eagle.’ I cannot refrain from giving the dogs’ names, because they were such real heroes in the chase, and good servants to me.

The first duty of our day of rest, then, was to feed our pack—a duty often forgotten, and appreciated by the dogs now as an unprecedented attention from us. This done, we busied ourselves in getting the skins of the game we had killed ready to send away, as a boat had been seen passing a day or two before, and having been signalled to, had promised, if possible, to call on its way back from Sotcha. It called to-day, took our skins on to Kertch, and left us a good supply of tobacco, the want of which we had hitherto keenly felt.

Another visitor turned up to-day to our utter surprise (for visitors are rare at Golovinsky)—the head gardener from the Grand Duke Michael’s forest of Ardenne, who had been out hunting for two days and taken nothing. With him was a Greek from a colony somewhere near, who complained bitterly that though he and his fellow colonists had spent most of their nights about harvest-time on platforms or trees, to shoot at and scare the bears and boars, these gentry had completely destroyed the crop of ‘koukourooz’ (maize), on which the Greek villagers greatly depend. When I found that in spite of the number of guns in the trees, not one bear or boar had been killed, I was not so much surprised at Bruin coming to look upon the noise as merely a military salute intended in his honour, which in no way interfered with his appetite.

From time to time during the day I managed to extract a little information from the taciturn Stepan, but his lonely life has made him so reserved as to be almost inaccessible to the wiles of the inquirer. He is a Tscherkess who has abjured Mahometanism without apparently adopting any other faith; so of his religion he had little to tell. About his village and the life in it he said little more, and of the Tscherkess wars he absolutely refused to speak—though on that topic he evidently had more to say—from what seemed to me a fear lest any words of his being repeated might get him into trouble. So we fell back upon natural history, and on this topic he was fairly fluent.

Amongst other things he told me of some quaint habits of the hedgehog—for I presume it was the hedgehog and not the porcupine he meant; for the word he used for the beast was one which I did not know, being Tscherkess patois of some kind. But from his description the animal was either one or the other; and as the porcupine is only supposed, I think, to inhabit the Persian border of the Caucasus, the animal of Stepan’s story was probably a hedgehog. He described a hedgehog perfectly, and then added that there were two kinds in the Caucasus, one with head and feet like a pig, the other with head and feet like a hound. It was one of the latter which he noticed one day under an apple-tree in the forest, collecting and carrying off the fallen fruit by rolling over it (so he described it) until she had impaled an apple on one of her spines. She then impaled another on the other side of her body, and thus laden, retired for some time, to return without her load, for two more apples. This sounds very unlikely to me, but as the fellow had no object in inventing the story, and invariably told me the truth as far as I could discover, I give it, as well as other yarns from the same source, for what it is worth. Of the same beast the Cossacks and Stepan assert that he kills snakes by seizing their tails in his jaws and then rolling on them, turning a somersault over them, in fact, so as to drive the spines into them.

I heard too, to-day, a quaint superstition about the common bracken, which abounds here, and on the roots of which the swine feed when there are no chestnuts or berries to be had. The Circassians say there is one moment in one night of the year (alas, my authority had forgotten which night), at the very stroke of midnight, when this plant blooms. The flower lasts but a few moments, in the which if any one has the good fortune to gather and preserve it, he obtains omniscience thenceforth. Talking of such things as the foregoing, and making fresh mocassins for the morrow, the day soon passed, and we rolled ourselves up in our rugs and were happy, though we went to bed almost dinnerless.

The sea rose to-night, and raged as the Black Sea sometimes does, in so wild a way that one almost forgets its habitual calm in these short bursts of Berserker fury. So close did the white waves come to our fragile hut, that we began to tremble lest the sea should wash through the ground floor (our only floor), as it had done once last winter; and in the middle of the night old Zizda, pressing close to the wall outside for comfort from the keen wind and driven spray, pushed his way right through the lath and plaster, and appeared wet and unceremonious by my bedside. Whether he found it much warmer inside than out I very much doubt. It must have been very bitter outside if he did. But by morning, though the waves were still white below, a bright sun was shining, and the rain-drops had been dried off the grass.

We gave the sun another hour or two to complete his good work, and then, at about nine, started for the forest with our pack.

The method of procedure was simplicity itself. Once in the forest each dog went whithersoever he pleased, and the whole team, cruising about at random, at last hit on the track of something and gave tongue. Then, with our ears only to lead us, we made to what seemed the likeliest spot to intercept the dogs and their quarry, and right good fun it was, though rough work in the extreme. Bad as are the briars and tangled masses of vine, I think the frequent ravines and hillsides, covered with their fine short grass, are infinitely worse. Rushing pell-mell to the scene of action, you expect to have face and hands lacerated as you go and take it with equanimity, content if only you can force a way at all. But having forced a way, it is annoying to have your feet slip upon those dry hillsides, and, perfectly helpless, feel yourself and rifle rapidly gliding downhill away from the point towards which, at so much personal inconvenience, you have been struggling. It was better fun to see Stepan, as he strove to descend a ravine, slide helplessly down, sixty miles an hour, to a pool at the bottom, into which he unceremoniously plopped, pursued at once by Zizda, who followed his master on his haunches, looking the picture of imbecile misery. But for bipeds and even ordinary quadrupeds there is some excuse, seeing that Bruin himself often comes to grief in these places. Witness the numerous slides on these banks, looking as if Bruin had been diverting himself and his family by the innocent amusement of trebogging.

Throughout the forest where we were hunting to-day, we found every here and there the traces of Tscherkess villages, whose occupants have fled, some long ago in the old war time, and some only last spring, to join the Turks in their war against Russia. Even in the case of these latter no sign of a house remained, only a piece of ground more level than that which surrounded it, overgrown with a dense jungle of briar; here and there a piece of hand-wrought wood, a relic of some Circassian house furniture, and fruit-trees that were merged into the forest when their owners joined the Turks. These old ‘aouls’ are very strongholds of Bruin, and his work is visible on all sides. Little pathways, beaten smooth through the briary places, torn-down branches of the walnut and apple, and bees’ nests dug out where none but he could have got at them, all attest his presence.

It was from one of these old ‘aouls’ that our dogs first got anything to make a really good stand. The ‘aoul’ had been on the very summit of one of the chain of hills on which we were shooting. The site of it was covered with acres of dense briars, from the midst of which towered what had probably been the village pride, a patriarchal chestnut of enormous size. Here Zizda gave out his deep bass warning that game was afoot, and the other three curs made a chorus of it. I was down below in a belt of chestnuts outside the region of briars; and thinking that whatever the game was, it would probably break downhill from the thicket in which the dogs were baying it by a little track that passed me, I jumped on to a tree-stump and waited. Stepan was on the other side of the briars, quite close to the scene of action, and I naturally imagined would close in still more and get his shot. After waiting a good ten minutes, during which time neither game, dogs, nor Stepan appeared to move an inch, I whistled to let the latter know that I was coming to the assistance of the brave dogs which he was leaving to their fate. To force my way uphill through those briars was a labour worthy of Hercules; and if the game should have broken through the dogs, there would have been small chance for the hunter fast meshed in that briary net. When at last I did get a view of the field of battle, so dense were the briars that I could not have swung my arms round where I stood; and though I stood on tiptoe, all I could discern were the waving sterns of Orla and Lufra, the brave old veteran Zizda being too close to his quarry to be visible; but from where I stood I could hear his sharp charges and the low snorts of rage which they elicited from the object of his attack.

Unable to see to shoot, I picked up a clod, and guessing the beast’s whereabouts by the low muttered thunder that came from the roots of the chestnut, I heaved it over the dogs in the direction of the sound. Then for a moment the briars swayed as if an earthquake had moved them; one of the dogs yelled as he was rolled over, with another scar added to his already numerous decorations; and then, not ten paces from me, passing at a gallop went the biggest wild boar I ever hope to see. And I missed him. It is true that I had but a momentary glimpse at him as he shot across a yard of open, and I snapped at him as one would at a bolting rabbit; but I shall never forgive myself for missing his enormous broadside for all that. Far through the crashing forest I heard him, with the dogs at his heels, for almost ten minutes after I had missed him; but I never saw him again.

I had heard frequently previous to this of the immense size of these Caucasian boars when old and lonely, and have myself since seen the specimen in the Tiflis Museum killed by the Grand Duke or one of his friends at the Royal forest of Kariâs, which is said to weigh twenty-one puds; and as sixty-two puds go to the ton, this would make him about 780 pounds. But in my own mind I feel convinced that the boar that charged past me from his dark fastness at the root of that old chestnut was half as large again. Every angler knows that the fish you miss is the heaviest that ever rose at your fly; of course I may have misjudged the dimensions of my boar, and therefore ask no one to believe in his immense size, though firmly believing in it myself.

That boars should grow to an enormous size here, where they are never disturbed, and where every variety of food to which they are peculiarly partial is so abundant, is hardly to be wondered at. The forests are full of all sorts of fruit, of which bears and boars alone have the gathering; patches of bracken, on the roots of which the boar feeds, are on every hillside; at certain seasons of the year he finds quantities of fish washed upon the shore, and on these he riots. As for the chestnuts, some idea of their abundance may be formed from the fact that, kneeling in one place not purposely selected, to-day, I filled all my pockets with fallen chestnuts without once changing my position; and yet their only use is to fatten the wild boar, who munches them husks and all, or more dainty Bruin, who eats the nuts, but leaves the husk in his path.

Once during the day I saw an old bear as I struggled through a veil of thorn vine up a slippery hillside, and firing brought him down with what was almost a bellow of rage or pain, in a succession of somersaults that took him past me down the hill at a pace that he would never have attained to by his ordinary method of progression. But, alas, on searching for him at the bottom of the hill where he should have lain, we found no trace of him; and though the dogs followed for a while, a large stream which he had crossed foiled them, and sent us back empty-handed.

Twice during that day did I get into close proximity to big game without seeing anything. Once in the thicket, whence the old boar had charged, I had forced my way beyond all hope of a speedy return, when the sound of Stepan’s gun down below, and the sharp treble of the younger dog’s bark, told me something was afoot in that direction. Straight towards me up the hill came the dogs, and right eagerly did I look for a tree as a coign of vantage from which to get a view of the approaching game before he absolutely ran over me. But there was not even a stump in reach. Round me was perhaps a yard of almost open space, but beyond this the briars formed a wall impenetrable everywhere, except at the point at which I had entered the little opening by an old boar’s run. To quit the opening by the only apparent outlet, on my hands and knees, with my tail to an approaching foe, did not seem prudent: so I remained where I was, hoping I should see whatever the game might be before it saw me. Suddenly, though the dogs were still only halfway up the hill, struggling slowly through the brake, as impenetrable almost to them as to us, right at my elbow I heard a heavy breath drawn, half sigh and half sniff, and then a soft shuffling of feet in the hidden places of the thicket. Almost directly this was followed by another and another sniff, and I knew that a bear was deliberately walking round me, trying to get out probably by the road by which I had entered. I would rather not have been there I admit, as Bruin fairly cornered is an ugly foe to face; and I fully expected that when the dogs arrived on the scene he would go for his own private pathway, taking me as a mere obstruction en route, as I never for a moment doubted but that he was the beast the dogs had roused. As I stood expectant, a lovely wild cat, with a fine tawny skin, marked almost as clearly as a tiger’s, stole snakelike across the opening, utterly unheeding me, and disappeared in the brake beyond. Expecting the bear in another minute I let the cat go, and regretted it directly after, for with a regular burst of hounds’ music our pack dashed into the open, mad after their cat, and went raging on, taking no notice of the larger game close by. We searched afterwards, and found that a bear had really been there, and had stolen off by another of the hidden ‘trapinkas’ (game tracks) with which the whole brake was warrened. The dogs treed the cat, and we spent our luncheon hour in smoking her out.

The other occasion on which I got too close to big game that day was in a rhododendron brake, when our dogs, having bayed something on the other side of the hill, I was hurriedly forcing my way to them, when I became aware of sniffings and tramplings to the right of me and to the left of me, and plunging wildly on, nearly ran into something else advancing. Had the rhododendron clump not been exceptionally high (higher far than my head), I could have seen my game and had capital sport; as it was, I was kept fumbling about in the thicket for nearly ten minutes, expecting every moment to run up against a bear, who was at the same time just as anxious not to come into collision probably as I was.

Tired and happy after a good day’s sport, during which the fun of racing after the dogs had been a pleasant change from the ordinary silent stalking, we wended our way home, the dogs at last keeping fairly close to our heels. When we were down in the flat by our old enemy, the snow-fed Golovinsk, the moon came up hazy and dim, and the owls began their weird hootings; then with a sudden rush the dogs left our heels, and were once more wakening the echoes with a nocturnal chorus worthy of the Demon Hunter’s infernal pack. In the patchwork of moonlight we caught a glimpse of something scudding away before the dogs, and joined heartily in the chase, forgetting our fatigue in the excitement. After ten minutes’ slow hunting in the briars they bayed him in a dense clump, where some larger trees shut out the silver moonshine and made midnight of the place. This wood being a favourite resort of bears at night, on account of the roseberries with which the place abounded, and of which they are fond, we went somewhat cautiously to work, and as we pushed out of the moonlight into the darkness we went shoulder to shoulder, literally feeling our way with our rifles. The dogs were right at our feet, and, as I expected, were sitting heads in air under a tall tree, on one of the limbs of which I could just make out in the moonlight an excrescence which experience taught me must be a wild cat. Rifle-shooting by moonlight is not as easy as by daylight; and though the cat came down, I don’t think she was hit hard; probably not hit at all, but merely dislodged by the bough beneath her being broken. However, be that as it may, when she did come down, she scattered the dogs right and left, and got clear away into the thicket again. Long after, when we were smoking the last pipe rolled in our rugs, we could hear them making music either over her or some luckless jackal which they had come across.

But this, our great day with the dogs, was the last on which fortune smiled on us at Golovinsky. From that day we got from bad to worse. No more boars fell to our guns, and on wild cats and fresh bear’s meat even a hungry Tscherkess will hardly feed. But when our supply of bear’s meat failed too, and nothing but a cheese rind remained, we grew desperate, and having heard of a place with a name fathoms long about ten miles from Golovinsky, where boar abounded, and had not been lately disturbed, we hired two horses from the Cossacks, and with one of them for a guide started to try our luck there. As usual, the guide knew as little of the way as we did, so that we spent nearly all the day in getting to our ground, and, on arriving, found not only no vestige of the hut which we had been told existed there, but no chestnut forests either. Add to this that, though the scenery was even finer than at Golovinsky, the herbage grew more rankly luxuriant every hundred yards as we rode up the glen—the mist, which rose in a white wall round us, drenching us to the skin before we had been in it a quarter of an hour—and it will not appear so strange that, having toiled all day to get there, I gave the order at once for a counter-march, considering that to pass one night in this den of fever would be certainly dangerous, and possibly fatal to some of us.

I was not far wrong, as events proved, for next day, although I had beaten such a hasty retreat, Stepan and the Cossack were both down with the fever, and I had an attack of intense lassitude and headache, which, if yielded to, would probably have resulted in the same. Stepan told me the weather was becoming dangerously feverish, an east wind having set in, which is always the harbinger of ill to the Tscherkess on the Black Sea coast. Fever never comes, they say, when the wind is from off the sea; but when it comes from behind the hills, then it is that the fever seizes its wretched victims.

As we climbed over the hills or up the watercourses to-day, the cold wind that was blowing would lull for a minute, and a soft hot blast come over us, just as if fresh from the mouth of some furnace. Then the fresh breeze rising would blow it off again. These puffs of hot wind recurred at long intervals throughout the day, and were, Stepan assured me, sure precursors of fever. Whether they really were so, or whether his croaking frightened us into it, I don’t know, but next day we were certainly extremely ill. Stepan had genuine fever, and as all Russians and Tscherkesses do, lay down at once and gave the fever full play.

I had read somewhere of a doctor on the African coast who used to get his fever patients into a room with doors and windows shut, and there make them have the gloves on with him for a quarter of an hour, after which the fever left them. I owe that athletic doctor my best thanks for his example, and hereby tender them; for though I had no gloves, and no one to use them upon if I had, I acted on what seemed to me the principle of his cure, and, selecting the stiffest bit of country I knew, started on a solitary hunt with the dogs. At first I reeled, and my knees gave under me at every stride. I was sick and blind and dizzy, and felt altogether worse than I ever did, even after the first half-mile of a Rossall paper chase as a boy; but gradually things improved, as they always do if you stick to it, and I had the satisfaction of shaking off the fever, never to be troubled with it any more, though I have spent days in Poti, of which town Baron von Thielmann says, in his excellent book on the Caucasus, that ‘no European has passed a night there and been spared the fever.’

It is my firm belief that abstinence from water whilst in the chase or on the journey will be found almost a safeguard against fever, and if, in spite of this, the mists and chills of the undrained swamps are too much for the traveller’s constitution, a good bout of violent exercise, taken as soon as the fever seizes him, will free him from his illness in its infancy.

That the natives suffer from fever is not to be wondered at. They live so poorly that an Englishman would die of want of nourishment alone, did he live as they do. They sleep out in mists that soak through and through a man as no rain ever could, and, worse than all, in the chase or on the journey, when heated and over-wrought, they lie down at every rill, and drink like thirsty cattle. I attribute my own freedom from fever to the fact that I never touched the water of the Caucasus for drinking purposes, except in the shape of one cup of tea in the morning and one at night, never drinking at all throughout the day; and though my tongue sometimes grew dry and seemed almost to rattle in my mouth, habit soon enabled me to do without water, and that without any great discomfort.

But, although I avoided fever myself, and believe that with these precautions a foreigner might well pass some time in the Caucasus and escape, more especially if he went in late autumn and returned by the end of March, I have no wish to describe the Caucasus, more especially the Black Sea coast and the neighbourhood of Ekaterinodar and the Kuban, as anything but a nest of fever. Where the vegetation is as rank, and marshes so frequent and of such extent as those round Poti and Lenkoran on the Caspian, the summer time is a dangerous time for even the most prudent.

For two or three more days, after our visit to the valley of mist and fever, I continued to hunt near Golovinsky, though my man was too ill to help me much. But day after day proved more decisively that unless I could get deeper into the forest than I had ever penetrated yet, my labour would continue to be but labour in vain. So I determined to return to Heiman’s Datch, the old ruin where I got my first boar on this coast, and after spending a few days there in search of the panther which I had wounded, or another if he was dead, return to Duapsè and thence to Kertch. To this I felt impelled by a number of reasons, of which the bareness of our larder was by no means the least. For over a week chestnuts had formed the greater part of my fare, bread even running short, and as for meat we had none. Often at night I had had to tighten my belt as the best way of reducing the vacuum I had no means of filling. But this is a method of which Nature soon wearies, and I was longing greedily for even the good things of Duapsè.