THE CAUCASUS
BY CLIVE PHILLIPPS-WOLLEY
I. INTRODUCTORY
Although the Caucasus is within a week’s journey of Charing Cross, to
the average Englishman it is as little known as Alaska. As a hunting
ground for big game it is infinitely less known than Central Africa.
The men who have shot in Africa and written of their sport in that
country may be counted by the score; but, as far as I know, up to
the present moment no book has been written (except my own)[2] upon
the sport of the Caucasus, and in this chapter I am obliged to rely
upon my own experience and some rough notes sent me by Mr. St. George
Littledale. That being so, it may well be that much has been omitted
which may hereafter become common knowledge; I can only affirm that
the statements made are trustworthy, as being the outcome of actual
personal experience, unvarnished and undiluted.
To me the Caucasus is an enchanted land. The spell of its flower-clad
steppes, of its dense dreamy forests, of its giant wall of snow peaks,
fell upon me whilst I was still a boy, and will be with me all my life
through. It was the first country in which I ever hunted, and it may
be that I am prejudiced in its favour on that account, or it may be
that I am right, that there is no country under heaven so beautiful and
none in which the witchery of sport is so strong. Let my confession of
prejudice be taken into consideration by all who read this chapter, and
with it the verdict of my quondam companion in Svânetia: ‘The Caucasus
is an accursed country to hunt in, a country of ceaseless climbing and
chronic starvation, in which the sport is not nearly worth the candle.’
This was the honest conviction of one who is no mean sportsman, and who
since his Caucasian experiences has done exceptionally well in India.
But men define sport differently. To those whose ambition it is to kill
really wild game in a wild and savage country in which they will get
but little help from any but their own right hands, to them I say, try
the high solitudes round Elbruz and the ironstone ridges of Svânetia.
The best time for sport in the mountains is the end of June, July,
August, and the first week in September, after which another month
may be spent profitably hunting bear and boar in the chestnut forests
on the Black Sea; for aurochs the hunter should be in the sylvan
labyrinths at the head of the Kuban in August.
Taking London as your point of departure, you can reach the Caucasus
by four different routes: either by Paris, Marseilles, and thence
by one of the boats of the Messageries Maritimes (running once a
fortnight) _viâ_ Constantinople to Batoum; or by Calais, Cologne,
Vienna and Odessa, to Batoum; or by the Oriental Express _viâ_ Paris
and Constantinople; or by Wilson’s line of boats from Hull to St.
Petersburg, and thence by rail _viâ_ Moscow and Voroneze to Vladikavkaz.
The first route takes about eleven days, and costs about 16_l._ 16_s._;
the second takes (roughly) nine days, and costs about 20_l._ The third
route is, I believe, the quickest and most expensive, but I have not
tried it.
My own favourite route is the fourth, by adopting which you gain
the advantage of a quiet and untroubled journey, with few vexatious
changes, only one custom-house (and that with a consul-general at
hand to help you through), and the possibility of alighting from the
train within a drive of the outskirts of your hunting ground. The
cost of the journey from London to Vladikavkaz by this route is about
(including food, &c.) 20_l._, or as much more as you like to make it.
From St. Petersburg to the Don the level lands of Russia glide by
your carriage window unbroken by a single hill--I had almost said by
a single tree. After Voroneze you enter the steppe country proper, a
sea of flowers in spring, a perfect hell of dust, or mud, or wind,
for all the rest of the year. From Voroneze these steppes roll right
up to the foot of the main chain of the Caucasus, and standing on the
plains near Naltchik you may see at a _coup d’œil_ some hundreds of
versts of snow-capped mountains rising like a sheer wall drawn from
the north-east to the south-west of the peninsula. These snow-capped
mountains and the ‘black hills’ (as the natives call the densely wooded
foot-hills) constitute the principal game preserve of the country,
and resemble, in their appearance and in the varieties of game with
which they abound, the hill country of India, to such an extent that
an old friend of mine, whose happiest days had been spent in shikar in
the Himalayas, used to allege that all the game beasts found in the
Caucasus were mere varieties of the Indian fauna.
Before dealing with the different districts and the game found in each,
a few general hints to the traveller may not come amiss.
The Caucasus is the arena of the hardest fight Russia ever fought,
and, having partially depopulated the country, she still holds it by
force of arms. That being so, the more unpretentious a traveller is,
the better is his chance of passing unquestioned about the country.
Strong introductions from home and from the Foreign Office are more
likely to hamper than to help, and if you want leave to go to any
little travelled district, the best way is to take it. If you ask for
it you are likely to be refused, but if you go in quietly, with a small
outfit, and devote yourself exclusively to hunting, no one is likely to
interfere with you.
The best outfit in the Caucasus is that which comes nearest to the
hunter’s _beau idéal_, i.e. as much as he can carry himself. This
of course, like all ideals, is unattainable, but you may come very
close to it; and as there are many places in which, when in pursuit
of mountain game, you cannot use horses, your baggage must be such as
one, or at most two, men can pack in a bad place. Now a man should
pack 50 lbs., and if your means are unlimited, your baggage need only
be limited by the number of men you can persuade to accompany you; but
the more men you have with you the less work you will get done per man,
as the chief luxury of the Caucasian is gossip, and with a crowd of
followers the temptation to loaf and talk would prove irresistible.
Two men, one as a guide and gillie, and one to leave in camp (both of
them taking their share of packing whenever camp is moved), should
be sufficient for anyone. Of course, where it is practicable, ponies
should be used, as with them a greater weight can be packed, and packed
too more expeditiously, than with men; and in most cases it will be
found easy enough to take pack ponies to establish your main camp,
proceeding from that on foot for short expeditions of three or four
days. It is as well to remember that 200 lbs. is a good load for a
pony in rough country, more, probably, than he could carry on most of
the Caucasian trails, and from 50 lbs. to 60 lbs. quite enough for a
man, although I have known one of my own men carry nearly double that
weight during an ordinary day’s tramp, arriving at camp towards sundown
brimful of spirits and devilment. I remember that when his load was
off he stood on his head, and ‘larked’ about with the other fellows to
relieve his exuberance of vitality. A _tente d’abri_, to weigh about 15
lbs., is the best tent for Caucasian travel, because it is the lightest
and handiest to carry. My old tent used to weigh about 20 lbs., and
this with an express rifle (about 10 lbs.), cartridges, field glasses,
a revolver and a few sundries, used to constitute my own ‘pack.’[3]
When travelling with Caucasian porters and hunters it is as well to
treat them as comrades and not as servants. Although they work for
hire, they do not understand the relation of master and servant, and,
though perfectly ready to help you when you need help, expect you to
help yourself when you can, whilst in all matters of food and camp
comfort they expect to share and share alike with the head of the
expedition. May I digress here for a moment to say that this is one
of the most important secrets of travel? Never allow yourself any
luxuries in a ‘tight place’ which your men have no share in. If you
have only one pipeful of tobacco, when provisions are short, share it
with your men, and in the Caucasus at any rate you will not lose your
reward. It is a good many years ago now, but the memory of one chilly
night among the mountains is with me still, when I woke at 3 A.M. to
find myself warm and snug under two extra bourkas (native blankets).
The owners of the blankets were squatting on their hams, almost _in_
the fire, and talking to pass the long cold hours until dawn. Having
rated them for their folly and made them take back their blankets and
turn in, I rolled over and slept again. When I next woke--it was 7
A.M. (shamefully late for camp)--the men were still crouching over the
embers, helping to cook breakfast, their bourkas having been replaced
upon my shoulders. I had paid those men off _the day before_ this
happened, and they left me next morning with a hearty ‘God be with
you,’ utterly unconscious that they had done anything more than the
proper thing towards their employer and companion who, ‘poor devil,
could not sleep unless he was warm, and became ill if he did not get a
meal every day in the week.’
A sleeping bag such as Alpine Club men use would be an excellent
substitute for blankets, and with that, a pipeful of tobacco, a little
bread and bacon and a small flask of whiskey, any reasonably keen and
hearty sportsman should be able to hold out for a few nights among the
mountain-tops in August. Indeed, if this is too much hardship for the
would-be ibex hunter, he had better give up ibex hunting.
In all the best districts for mountain game round Elbruz the traveller
will find smoke-blackened lairs amongst the rocks, and round beds
amongst the fallen pine needles at the base of some great tree just
on the timber limit. In these, for generations, the ibex hunters of
Svânetia have rested from their labours and waited for the dawn.
[Illustration: Waiting for the dawn]
As to general camp outfit, any light outfit for a hunter’s camp in a
temperate region (e.g. Europe or North America) will suffice; extreme
portability being the principal thing to aim at, as the trails are
infamously bad in the best game districts.
Eschewing luxuries, let the hunter take with him all the flour he can
carry, as round Elbruz and in all the best mountain districts the only
flour obtainable is of villainous quality, and the bread made from it
will damage the most cast-iron digestion.
As to foot-gear, English hobnailed boots may do excellently well for
mountaineers, and may be the best possible things on ice. I would as
soon wear rings on my fingers and bells on my toes as attempt to hunt
in boots. For still hunting of any kind, whether in the mountains or in
the forest, moccasins of some sort are essential, whether they be soled
with india-rubber like tennis shoes, or simply soled with a double sole
of deer’s hide, like those used in North America. For the ‘tender foot’
old tennis shoes are excellent things, but a pair per diem would not be
too much to allow for ibex shooting in the Caucasus, the rocks cutting
any foot-gear to pieces in the shortest possible time.
The native moccasin is the best after all; a sock of deer skin or some
other soft tanned hide, made large and loose, with a split down the
middle of the sole from toe to heel, which is laced up with raw hide
laces, the laces running across and across each other thus ××××. The
moccasin is stuffed with fine mountain grass, and is then put on damp
and tightly laced. By these means a comfortable fit is ensured, the
tender hollow beneath the instep is protected from sharp rocks, and
a firm grip in slippery places is given by the kind of network made
by the laces. In boots a man has no chance of using his toes to cling
with; even to bend his foot is beyond his powers, and a boot once worn
out cannot be repaired in camp, whereas a moccasin may be patched until
none of the original article remains.
A sling for your rifle is a necessity in all mountain shooting; so,
too, is an alpenstock, which should _never_ be shod with metal, the
ring of which against the rocks would proclaim your approach half a
mile away. Choose a good stout pole of some hard wood for yourself;
harden it (and especially the point) in the fire, and test it carefully
before using it, as it may have to carry your weight in awkward places.
Wages in the Caucasus vary according to the amount of travel in the
district. If the sportsman is unfortunate enough to run across a
district in which foreign tourists are common, the charges made for men
and horses will be excessive, but in remote districts, off the main
lines of travel, you could (in 1888) hire a man and his horse for 5_s._
a day, and a porter to carry your food and blankets in the mountains at
1_s._ a day.
In 1882 I travelled and shot for three months in the Caucasus with a
friend. During the whole of that period I carried the money-bags, and
at the end of the trip, I believe that I was able to return a little
small change to my companion out of the 100_l._ with which he had
entrusted me, as his share of our joint purse. Out of our 200_l._. I
paid railway fares, hotel bills, and all camp expenses; and it is only
fair to add that when in a town the best room in the best hotel, and
its best bottle of wine, was only just good enough for us. Luckily, we
spent very little time in towns.
Those days, I am afraid, have already passed away, but two roubles
a day should still be ample pay for any of the men who accompany a
shooting party, and less than that would probably be taken gratefully.
The chief difficulty of the Caucasus as a shooting ground for
Englishmen lies in the language of the country, which varies in every
district. Either Russian or Georgian would probably be sufficient to
carry a man through the whole country between the Black Sea and the
Caspian, as he would generally find some one who spoke one or other of
these tongues in every village he entered, and even if now and again he
came to a hamlet where no one could understand his speech, the ordinary
Caucasian is wonderfully apt at the language of signs.
An interpreter can be hired at Tiflis or Kutais, but he will be more
trouble than a valet and more fastidious, besides doubling the expense
of the expedition and causing constant trouble with your men. There
may, of course, be good interpreters; if so, I have been unfortunate in
never meeting any. My last word of advice shall be, try to do without
them, pick up a little Russian for yourself, and then trust to luck and
good temper to pull you through.[4]
II. NORTH-WEST CAUCASUS.
The Caucasus includes not only the great range which gives its name to
the isthmus, but also a district as large as France, bounded on the
north by Russia, on the east by the Caspian, on the south by Armenia
and Persia, and on the west by the Black Sea and the Azov.
In any similar area you would expect to find districts varying
considerably in their fauna, but in the Caucasus the districts to
the north and south of the chain vary to such an extent, that the
naturalist Eichwald speaks of the ‘tall peaks of Caucasus,’ as putting
the most distinct limits to the fauna of Asia and Europe.
The northern side of the chain, from what is called the Manitch
depression to the foot-hills of the main chain, is simply a
continuation of the steppes of Russia, a land without trees, and, until
you get near the foot-hills, devoid of all game except feathered game
and wolves.
To the north-west of the mountains, the great game district is that
which lies along the banks of the Kuban, a river rising in the main
chain near Elbruz, and flowing thence due north for a space, after
which it turns sharply westward, and flows parallel to the main chain,
finally emptying itself into the Black Sea. On its road from Elbruz
to the sea it receives the waters of every stream which drains to
the north-west of the chain; and it is here, between the Kuban and
the mountains, and upon the banks and head waters of the Kuban’s
tributaries, that the hunting grounds of Northern Caucasus are to be
found.
Going east from Taman along the line of the Kuban, the country is
broken up by huge beds of a tall reed called kamish by the natives
(_Arundo phragmites_ of the naturalists), which grows to such a height
as to hide a man riding through it. In places these reed beds stretch
for miles, and through them the Kuban runs, a dull sluggish flood, more
like a great canal than a mountain-born river.
Its banks of black mud, however, are interesting enough to the
sportsman, written over as they are with the ‘sign’ of the beasts which
find safe harbour in the adjoining jungles.
Of these beasts the commonest is the wild boar, an animal which I
believe grows to larger proportions, and exists in greater numbers, in
the Caucasus than anywhere else on earth. A pair of tusks, the tracings
of which are before me now (the originals being in the possession of
Colonel Veerubof, Governor of Naltchik), measure round the outside edge
11½ ins. and 11¼ ins. respectively.
Like the European wild boar, the Caucasian beast is of a blackish-grey
colour, covered with a long coat of stiff bristles, which he erects
along his spine when irritated, making him appear some inches taller
than he really is. Professor Radde, of the Tiflis Museum, has been
kind enough to supply me with the following particulars. ‘The largest
solitary boars,’ he says, ‘measured at the shoulder and measured
straight, stand about 105 centimeters, and their total weight not
dressed rarely exceeds 15 puds (600 lbs.).’ These are undoubtedly big
beasts, but in the chestnut forests of Circassia, and in the reed beds
of the Kuban, there are such rich feeding grounds that in them even a
600-lb. boar seems possible. In India, I suppose, to shoot a boar is as
vile a crime as vulpecide in Leicestershire, but, except on the plains
of Kabardah, there is no place in the Caucasus where the boar could
be hunted on horseback, and even there the hunting would be but a very
short scurry at early dawn from the maize fields to the foot-hills, the
shelter of which once gained, the quarry would be absolutely safe from
any mounted enemy.
Enormous as their numbers are, wild boars would be even more numerous
between the Black Sea and the Caspian, were it not for their nocturnal
raids on the maize fields of the natives, most of whom, being
Mahommedans, only hunt the marauders in self-defence, not deigning
to so much as touch them when dead. The Cossacks, of course, have no
such scruples about pork, and the principal object left in life to the
old scouts (‘plastouns’), who were wont to keep the Kuban red with
Tcherkess blood, is the pursuit of the boar.
In the great reed beds in which they used to lurk waiting until the
men of some native ‘aoul’ went out to harvest, that they might give
the village to sword and flame, these same scouts wander to-day, grey
as the boars they hunt, rough, savage, and uncouth as their quarry,
wounded probably in a score of places, but silent-footed, enduring, and
as well acquainted with every game path in the reeds as the very beasts
which made them. These are the men to obtain for guides if you can get
them, but beware of paying them a single kopeck as long as there is a
cabak (whisky shop) within a day’s march of you. As a rule the plastoun
shoots his game at night, waiting by some wallow or by the side of
some swine path leading to water or fruit trees, until he hears a
rustling among the reeds, sounding strangely loud in the moonlit August
night, and growing nearer and nearer until between the watcher and the
skyline comes a great dark bulk. Round the muzzle of his old musket
the plastoun ties a white string with a large knot in it, where the
foresight should be, and aiming low into the middle of the dark mass,
pulls his trigger when the boar is almost on the muzzle of his rifle.
My first experience of boar shooting was connected with such a shot as
this; but on that occasion the victory rested with the boar. Through
a long summer night I waited for my gillie to come back from his
vigil by the Kuban, and at dawn he came, four men carrying him. He had
wounded the old grey beast on a narrow path through the kamish, and had
lain still while the boar gnashed his teeth and glared about for his
foe. But the tall reeds hid the hunter, and the boar turning retraced
his steps, leaving a broad blood trail as he went. Until the grey dawn
the Tcherkess waited, and then, confident that he would find his enemy
cold and stiff not far away, he got up and followed the tracks. Before
he had gone far, there was a crash among the reeds behind him, followed
by a fierce rush along the trail, and as he turned to face his foe, the
keen white tusks ripped him from knee to thigh-joint and across and
across his stomach, until his bowels rushed out and he lay across the
pathway nearer death than the boar.
[Illustration: The boar’s charge]
When his companions found him he had still life enough left to tell
the story, and an examination of the scene of the encounter proved the
extraordinary cunning of the wounded boar, who, failing to ‘locate’ his
enemy when first struck, had retraced his own steps along the trail,
had entered the reeds at a point higher up and on the opposite side to
that from which the shot had come, and, returning by a line parallel to
the trail, had lain in hiding opposite to the ambush of the hunter.
Only once in eighteen years’ wanderings have I seen anything to match
this in cunning, and as it was in the same neighbourhood, I may be
allowed to allude to it here.
In the Red Forest, near Ekaterinodar, the wood is cut up into square
versts, divided by rides. The snow had fallen, and in one of these
squares old Colonel Rubashevsky, the forester, showed me where a pack
of wolves had surrounded a small band of roe deer, having taken up
positions along the four sides of the square, from which, on some
preconcerted signal, they appeared to have converged simultaneously
upon the centre where the deer lay. They had surprised in this manner
four or five roe deer, whose remains we found. But to return to the
boar. If anyone should care to hunt this beast specially, the best
plan to ensure success is to sit up for him at night when the pears
round some Cossack settlement are fresh fallen, or else to hunt him
with a small pack of hounds. Half a dozen curs will suffice, and with
these, in the chestnut forests on the Black Sea, or in the lovely
pheasant-haunted woods near Lenkoran, very good sport may be obtained,
for not only will the boar, shifting rapidly from holt to holt in an
almost impervious tangle of thorns, tax the endurance of the hunter to
the utmost, but should that hunter be tempted to take a snap shot at
the black quarters and crisply curling tail of which he gets a glimpse
as it vanishes into dense covert, it is a thousand to ten that the
next thing which he sees will be the other end of the gallant beast
coming straight for him at something less than a hundred miles an hour.
There is no beast alive for whose uncalculating courage I have so much
admiration as I have for the boar’s. I have seen him scatter a pack of
hounds nearly as big as mastiffs (they were mongrel harlequins) and go
straight for the hunter. I have seen a sow with her back broken trying
to worry with her teeth a hound nearly as big as herself, and fighting
till death stiffened her muscles, and I have also seen an old boar,
with a bullet in his neck, trying for my wind like a pointer trying
for birds, and as angry as a drunken Irishman who can find no one to
fight with. Luckily, he gave me a broadside shot at him before he had
discovered my whereabouts.
As to a locality suited for hunting boar, it is hard to choose in the
Caucasus. Wild swine swarm on the coast of the Caspian; they are the
road-makers and chief denizens of the kamish jungles on the Kuban;
they abound in all the scrub oak districts among the foot-hills, but
perhaps they are most numerous where Circe tended her herds of old, on
the wooded slopes near the Phasis, between Sukhoum and Poti. Like most
beasts, they are more or less nocturnal in their habits, coming out to
feed on the peasants’ crops, wild fruit, oak-mast, chestnuts, or the
roots of the common bracken at dusk, and retiring during the day to the
densest thorn thickets, where neither sun nor man can molest them, and
where the thick black mud is most moist and dank.
A smooth-bore (No. 12), with a round bullet in it, is the handiest
weapon for shooting wild boar over hounds, as with it you can make
better practice snap shooting in the dense jungle than you could
possibly hope to make with a rifle.[5]
But the kamish beds and the foot-hills hold nobler beasts of chase even
than the wild boar. Besides the tracks of the roe and the wild swine,
the hunter’s eye will be gladdened now and again by the big track of
the ollèn, although the proper habitat of this noble beast is in the
foot-hills and the lower ridges of the main chain.
The ollèn is the red deer of the Caucasus, and is found from the Red
Forest (‘Krasnoe Lais’), near Ekaterinodar on the Kuban, to the snows
on the mountains of Daghestan. Naturalists may be able to detect some
points of difference between this deer and the red deer of Europe and
the wapiti of the New World. To the ordinary hunter he is the same
beast, only that in size he more nearly resembles the great stag of
America than our Scotch red deer.
Mr. St. George Littledale puts the ollèn midway in size between the
bara singh of Cashmere and the wapiti, whilst Dr. Radde, curator of
the Tiflis Museum, maintains that the quality of their food makes the
only difference (a difference merely of size) between the wapiti, bara
singh, ollèn and red deer. When I hunted the ollèn I had no notion that
I should ever be called upon to carefully discriminate between them
and their kin in other countries, so that I am obliged to rely upon
my memory for any points of difference, and memory only suggests that
whereas the wapiti rarely (if ever) has ‘cups’ on his antlers, the
ollèn royal has the peculiar cup formation as often as the red deer.
Again, the call of the Caucasian stag in the rutting season (September)
is similar to that of the Scotch stag, and does not resemble the weird
whistle of the wapiti. In size both of body and antler the ollèn comes
very near to the great American stag. The dimensions of four heads,
obtained by Mr. Littledale at one stalk, will give a very fair idea
of the average size of ollèn heads, and a glance at the illustration
taken from a photograph of this gentleman’s bag for 1887 will convey an
idea of the general character of ollèn heads as well as of the sporting
capabilities of the Caucasus. In this photograph, to make it a complete
record of his year, Mr. Littledale should have included trophies of
boar and bear which also fell to his rifle.
On the day upon which Littledale’s four heads were obtained, this
fortunate sportsman, lying on a ridge near the summit of the divide,
looked down at one _coup d’œil_ upon a dozen old male tûr in an
unstalkable position, two bears whose skins (it being in August) were
not worth having, a chamois scorned as small game, and the stags which
he ultimately bagged.
[Illustration: MR. ST. G. LITTLEDALE’S CAUCASIAN BAG FOR THE SEASON OF
1887]
The following are the dimensions of three of the four heads referred
to; the fourth, a 12-point head, had some of the velvet still
clinging to it in shreds, and the dimensions I see are not given.
+---+------+---------+----------+-----------------+
| |Points|Girth of |Length of |Length from skull|
| | | beam | brow | to tip along the|
| | | | antler | curve of antler |
+---+------+---------+----------+-----------------+
|(1)| 14 |6¾ inches| 20 inches| 44½ inches |
|(2)| 13 |7 ” | 16¼ ” | 46½ ” |
|(3)| 13 |7¼ ” | 13½ ” | 48 ” |
+---+------+---------+----------+-----------------+
Compare these measurements with those of the biggest wapiti exhibited
at the American Exhibition of 1887, belonging to Mr. Frank Cooper, of
which the length along the curve was 62½ ins., the girth of the beam 8
ins., and the number of points 16, and it will be seen that, given as
large a number of _picked_ Caucasian heads to choose from as there were
picked American heads in England in 1887, the probability is that the
ollèn would not be very much surpassed by the wapiti.
Like the latter, the ollèn is daily growing scarcer. In Mingrelia,
before the Russian conquest of that province, this grand red deer
abounded, and for some time after that date the Russian peddlers did
quite a lively trade in antlers, which they obtained by the cartload
for a mere song from the natives. But ill-blood arose between the
Russian officers and the native princes, which led to a wholesale
slaughter of the ollèn, so that to-day it is comparatively scarce
in its old haunts, although on the head-waters of the Kuban and its
tributaries, and in Daghestan (where the natives call it ‘maral’), the
ollèn still exists in sufficient numbers to satisfy any honest hunter.
The worst characteristic of the beast is that, as a general rule, he is
as fond of timber as a wapiti in Oregon.
The Caucasian ollèn has his antlers clean from about the middle of
August, and his rutting season is (in the mountain regions near
Naltchik) about the middle of September.
The only other deer in the Caucasus is the roe (_Cervus capreolus_),
a pretty graceful little beast, which is plentiful on the Black Sea
coast, amongst the foot-hills, and forms the principal item in the
bag made at the big drives in the Imperial and other preserves of the
district. The sharp bark of these little bucks, as they bound away
unseen from some thicket above you, or a glimpse of a group of roes
standing as still as statues, dappled with the shadows of the foliage
above them, are incidents in most days’ still hunting in Circassia.
In the Crimea, round Theodosia and Yalta, men may hunt specially for
roe, as there is no larger game (except, they say, a few red deer
near Yalta), but in the Caucasus he is only looked upon as useful for
filling up the void in one’s larder.
After all, in big game hunting half the charm lies in the mystery of
the dark silent forests and the mist-hidden mountain peaks. Once well
away from the haunts of men, you are in a land of romance, and if you
do not actually believe in the eternal bird who broods upon Elbruz,
at the sound of whose voice the forest songsters become dumb, and the
beasts tremble in their lairs; if you don’t believe, as the natives
do, that the tempests are raised by the flapping of her hoary wings;
if you scout the camp-fire stories of the tiny race seen riding at
night upon the grey steppe hares; you have still some superstitions of
your own--you look for some wonder from every fresh ridge you climb,
in every dim forest that you enter. In America it is the hope of a
2,000-lb. grizzly or a 20-in. ram which buoys up the hunter; on the
head-waters of the Kuban, on the Zelentchuk, on the Urup, on the Laba,
and especially upon the Bielaia river beyond Maikop, in the least known
and most unfathomable wooded ravines from which the Kuban draws his
waters, it is the rumour of a great beast, called zubre by the natives,
which draws the hunter on.
If the zubre differs at all from the aurochs,[6] he is the only beast
left, now that Mr. Littledale has slain the _Ovis poli_, of which no
specimen has fallen to an Englishman’s rifle.
That a beast nearly allied to the great bull of Bielowicza does exist,
and in considerable numbers, in the districts indicated, there can be
no doubt. A fine is imposed by the Russian Government upon anyone who
slays a zubre, and this in itself goes a long way to prove the beast’s
existence; but there is better evidence than this. In 1879 I knew of
two which were killed as they came at night to help themselves in
winter to a peasant’s haystack, and in 1866 a young zubre was caught
alive on the Zelentchuk and sent to the Zoological Gardens of Moscow,
where the savants decided that he was identical with the aurochs of
Bielowicza. Unfortunately the chance of adding the head of a zubre to
the sportsman’s collection is becoming more and more remote, as, in
addition to the law protecting the beast, the districts in which he is
most common are now included in a preserve set apart for the sons of
the Grand Duke, who formerly ruled at Tiflis.
III. SOUTHERN SLOPES OF THE CAUCASUS
The black hills and the pine forests on the northern side of the chain
are the favourite haunts of the red deer and the aurochs, as the reedy
bed of the Kuban is the favourite home of the boar and the pheasant;
but though bears are found on the northern slopes in fair numbers,
occurring sometimes even above the snow-line, the true home of Michael
Michaelovitch (as the peasants call him) is on the sunny slopes of
the southern side of the chain, as for instance in the great wild
fruit districts of Radcha, between the Kodor and the Ingur, or in the
sweet-chestnut forests and deserted orchards of Circassia.
The change from one side of the main chain to the other is as marked
to-day as ancient legend made it It is a change from a northern land
of storm and mist and pine forest to a land of tropical luxuriance,
of rank vegetation, of enervating sunshine. Vines and clematis, and
that accursed thorny creeper which the Russians call ‘wolfs-tooth,’
form impenetrable veils between the trees, while huge flowering weeds,
thickets of rhododendron and azalea, and jungles of the umbelliferous
angelica pour down dew upon you in the morning until every rag of your
clothing is soaked through, or later on in the day impede your progress
and render every footstep noisy.
Through all this wild tangle of forest growth run the brown bears’
paths. Down below are tracts of wild currant bushes; in the gullies
made by the mountain brooks are patches of raspberry canes, and leading
to them, from the cool lairs higher up (which he affects at noontide),
are the broad pathways down which the lazy old gourmand half walks,
half toboggans, just as the sun goes down, when you can hardly tell the
outline of his clumsy bulk from the other great silent shadows which
people the gloaming.
The natives of Radcha and the mountain forests to the north-west of
that province, having but little arable land, clear small patches in
the forests and grow crops of oats amongst the charred stumps. These
are the places in which to wait for Bruin at night, and earn the thanks
of your neighbours, as well as the brown coat of the old thief himself.
I well remember once in Radcha, when the moonlight was so bright that
I could read a letter by it, waiting with my Tcherkess until it grew
so late that we gave up all hope of a bear that night. Suddenly a
bough snapped in the forest above us, and within ten minutes a great
brown shadow was biting at a bullet hole near its shoulder, after
which it galloped off into the rim of gloom which hedged in our little
oat-field. Within half an hour from that time the field seemed full of
bears, four or five of which we could distinguish plainly, their backs
moving about slowly just above the level of the crop, and all of them
as silent as spectres. We got a bear every night we stopped at that
camp, and left feeling sorry for the local agriculturists.
Amongst the chestnuts and old orchards between Tuapsè and Sukhoum bears
are as numerous as in Radcha, and I have frequently seen half a dozen
in a day’s still hunting. Being undisturbed, they feed or wander almost
all day long through the still, shady forests, and though early morning
and evening are the best times to look for them, the man who with
moccasined feet will ‘loaf’ slowly upward, standing still from time to
time to listen and to watch, will rarely go half a day without a shot,
at any rate in late autumn.
Still hunting in October is the best way of obtaining game in the
forests by the Black Sea; but later on in December, when the berries
are over, the fruit rotten and the chestnuts eaten, the bears ‘house
up’ (or hibernate), and the only chance of getting any sport at all
is with hounds; even then pigs and roe deer will be your only quarry,
and nine times out of ten you will waste your day hunting wild cats or
jackals, your pack appearing to prefer these beasts to nobler game.
The common bear of the Caucasus is a small brown bear, like, but not
as large as, his cousin of Russia, although I have once killed a young
specimen (full grown, but with teeth unworn) as light in colour and as
large as the ordinary Russian bear. As a rule the Caucasian bear is
an inoffensive brute, but, like all his race, he will every now and
then turn upon his assailants. I said above ‘the _common_ bear’ of the
Caucasus, and I said it advisedly; for, although I am aware that I
may meet with contradiction from high authorities, I am myself firmly
persuaded that there is another variety of bear found, for the most
part in the highlands of Central Caucasus about Radcha, Svânetia, and
on the uplands of Ossetia, and the head-waters of the Baksan, Tchegem
and Tscherek, tributaries of the Terek.
It may well be that these bears occur elsewhere in the isthmus; but I
have never seen them or their skins in the lowlands by the Black Sea.
The highland bear of the Caucasus, whose tracks I have found over and
over again among the snow and ice far above timber level, is called
‘Mouravitchka’ (the ‘little ant-eater’) by the natives, who allege that
he is as savage as the common bear is pacific; that he preys upon the
flocks and herds, which the ordinary bear never does; that he is much
smaller and more active than his fruit-eating cousin of the lowlands,
and that his skin is greyish in colour, with a broad white collar round
the neck. The coat altogether reminds one rather of the Syrian bear
than of any other variety of the tribe.
Unfortunately, I have never killed one of these bears myself. Every man
who has shot bears anywhere knows that it is a good deal a matter of
chance whether you meet one or not, and with this particular kind of
bear chance has been against me; but I have found their tracks above
the snow-line; and I have had exactly the same story repeated to me
year after year in different villages by the natives. On the Balkar
pastures in 1888 the herdsmen told me that they had suffered very
severe loss from this beast’s depredations, and sold me a fresh skin
of a bear of this kind which they had slain on one of the high passes
between Svânetia and Balkaria, after putting eleven bullets into him.
I have seen some dozens of skins, among them those of bears in every
stage from cubhood to toothless old age, and in all the marking was
like the marking of the skin I bought in Balkaria, a coat of silvery
grey with a broad pure white collar round the neck.
The coats of bears, I know, vary enormously. I have in my own library
at this moment skins of the same variety which differ in hue, from
a brown which is nearly black to a pale straw colour; but amongst
them all the Caucasian mountain bear’s skin looks distinct. The
native hunters all believe as firmly in the existence of two distinct
varieties of bear in their mountains as Western trappers believe in the
grizzly as distinct from the black bear; and I agree with and believe
in the hunters.
In a Western camp the tales told at night are invariably of the
‘grizzly.’ He is the devil of the mountains. In the Caucasus and in
Russia it is otherwise.
The Russian peasant makes Mishka (a pet name for the bear) the comic
character of his stories. The ‘bogey’ of the woods on the Black Sea
coast is the ‘barse,’ of whom all sorts of terrible yarns are spun.
Most of them, I fear, are lies. In nine cases out of ten the barse is
merely a lynx, of which there are very many all along the coast, and in
the foot-hills on the southern slope of the Caucasus. Now and again,
as you come home late with your hounds, you may be lucky enough to tree
one, but you don’t see them often. The tenth time the barse may really
be what he is supposed to be, a leopard, but whether this leopard is
_Felis pardus_ or _Felis panthera_, I don’t know.
Professor Radde mentions both in his list of Caucasian mammals. All the
skins of barse which I have ever seen were similar to the leopard skins
of India and Persia, on the borders of which country, near Lenkoran,
the Caucasian barse is most common.
In spite of the stories told in his honour, I am inclined to think the
Caucasian leopard as great a cur as the panther of the States, which he
resembles a good deal in his habits. My own experience of the beast is,
however, limited. In a district which I used to hunt a certain barse
had his regular beat, appearing even to have a particular day of each
week allotted to each little district in his domains. One moonlight
night I was obliged to sleep by myself in a ruined château, once the
property of General Williameenof, standing where the shore and the
forest met. The old Caucasian fighter had made no use of the land given
him by a grateful government, so the roof had come off the château, the
trees had climbed in through the empty frames of the great low windows,
and I flushed a woodcock in the nettles which grew on the hearth.
At midnight I woke, the moonbeams and the shadows of the boughs making
quaint traceries on floor and ceiling, whilst underneath the window,
a barse was expressing his earnest desire to taste the flesh of an
Englishman, in cries in which a baby’s wail and a wolf’s howl were about
equally represented.
The brush was too thick for me to be able to get a shot at my visitor
that night (though I got a shot on a subsequent occasion), and though I
wandered about among the trees looking for him, and went to sleep again
lulled by his serenade, he never dared to attack me. Hence I fancy that
the Caucasian bogey is as harmless as other bogeys.
Everything on the southern slope of the Caucasus warns you that you
have left Europe behind you. It is not only the jackals’ chorus at
sundown, or the antelopes’ white sterns bobbing away over the skyline,
but now and again a report comes in that somewhere down by the Caspian
a man has killed or been killed by the tiger.
I have even seen the tracks of ‘Master Stripes’ myself, and sat up
for nights over what a native said was his ‘kill,’ not very far from
Lenkoran.
Still tigers are too scarce to take rank amongst the great game of the
Caucasus.
IV. PLAINS OF THE CAUCASUS
I have said that the Caucasus is divided by nature into several
distinct districts: the plains of the North, the deep forests of the
Black Sea coast, the great wild region at the top of the ‘divide,’ and
the arid eastern steppes, deserts such as Kariâs and the Mooghan.
Each district has its typical game. On the barren lands outside
Tiflis, where nothing will flourish without irrigation, except perhaps
brigandage, and on the great wastes through which the Kûr and the
Araxes run, there is a short period, between the stormy misery of
winter and the parching heat of summer, when the steppe is green with
grass and dotted with the flocks of the nomad Tartars.
Later on the sun burns up everything; the Tartars move off to some
upland pastures, and the natives of the steppes have the steppes all to
themselves. These natives are the wolf, the wild dog, and two kinds of
antelope, not to mention the turatch, a sand grouse as fleet-footed as
an old cock pheasant and as hard to flush as a French partridge. The
two antelopes are _Gazella gutturosa_ and _Antilope saiga_, of which
the former is by far the most plentiful; indeed, in stating that _A.
saiga_ is found at all in the Caucasus, I am relying upon the authority
of a Russian author (Kolenati), upon whose authority, too, I have
enumerated the wild dog (_Canis karagan_) as among the denizens of the
steppe.
Wolves, djerân (_Gazella gutturosa_) and turatch I saw daily in
1878, when I crossed the steppes from Tiflis to Lenkoran, before
the Poti-Tiflis line had been extended to Baku. The saiga antelope,
unless misrepresented in drawings and badly stuffed in museums, is
an ill-shaped beast, with a head as ugly as a moose’s, the ‘mouffle’
being, like that of the moose, abnormally large and malformed. But the
djerân is a very different creature, built in Nature’s finest mould,
with annulated, lyre-shaped horns, coat of a bright bay with white
rump, of which the hunter sees more than enough, always on the skyline,
receding as the rifle approaches.
[Illustration: A gutturosa]
In the young djerân the face is beautifully marked in black and tan and
white, but the old lords of the herd get white from muzzle to brow. The
illustration is from a photograph of a full-grown young buck shot at
Kariâs.
There are many beasts in the world which are hard to approach. It is
not easy to creep up to a stand of curlew, or to induce a wood-pigeon
to get out of your side of a beech-tree: it is fairly hopeless to try
to stalk chamois from below when they have once seen you--but all these
feats are easy compared to the stalking of djerân on the steppes of
Kariâs.
Nature has given the pretty beasts every sense necessary for their
safe keeping, and, like wise creatures, they generally stay together
in herds, so as to have the benefit of united intelligence, some one
or other of the herd being always on the look-out while the rest are
feeding. They do not appear to want water often, as no one ever tries
to waylay them at their watering places (indeed, I never met anyone
who knew where they went to drink), and the country they live in is
flatter than the proverbial pancake, and as smooth as a billiard-table.
There is hardly a tree in the whole of it; not a reasonably sized bush
in a mile of it; I almost doubt if there is a tuft of grass big enough
to hold a lark’s nest in an acre of it. I remember once finding cover
behind a bed of thistles on Kariâs, and the incident is indelibly fixed
upon my memory, I suppose, by the rarity of such comparatively rank
vegetation in that country. Add to this scarcity of cover the fact that
a floating population of shepherds, Tartars and outlaws from Tiflis,
hunt the djerân incessantly, and it is easy to imagine that a shot at
anything less than 500 yards is difficult to obtain. The Tartars have
a method of their own for circumventing these shy beasts. Knowing that
under ordinary circumstances even the long-haired Tcherkess greyhound
would have no chance of pulling down _G. gutturosa_, the dog’s master
manages so to handicap the antelope that the greyhound can sometimes
win in the race for life. Choosing a day after a thunderstorm, when
the light earth of the steppe will cake and cling to the feet, half a
dozen Tartars ride out on to the steppe, each with his hound in front
of him on his saddle. Having found a herd of antelope, the hunters ride
quietly in their direction. Long experience has taught the antelope
that at from 500 to 1,000 yards there is no danger to be apprehended
either from man or horse, so that for a little while the herd fronts
round, calmly staring at the intruders, and then quietly trots away,
turning again ere long to have another look. From the moment the herd
is first found the Tartars give it no rest, nor do they hurry its
movements unduly, but are content to keep it moving at a slow trot,
not fast enough to shake the caked mud off the delicate legs and feet
of their quarry. In this way they gradually weary the poor beasts
(who seldom have wit enough to gallop clean out of sight at once),
and then, as the weaker ones begin to lag behind, the Tartar’s time
comes, and, slipping his great hound, man and dog rush in upon the
tired creatures. The antelope of course is half beaten before the race
begins, whereas the dog is fresh and would at any time get over the
sticky soil better than the antelope; so that, thanks to this and to
the aid of other hounds and men who head the devoted beast at every
turn, one djerân at any rate is pretty sure to reward the Tartars for
their pains. To us this always seemed unfair to the antelope, besides
which we had neither hounds nor horses at Kariâs, so that we had to
resort to stalking pure and simple.
Long before the dawn we used to rise, and, with some local Tartar for
our guide, steal out silently across the level lands. Arrived at what
our guide considered a favourable spot, we would lie down and wait for
dawn. As the morning approached, the cold increased; then the sky grew
lighter, and the mists began to roll off the plain. By-and-bye a long
string of laden camels, which must have started from camp by starlight,
would appear upon the horizon, and then the sun came up and it was day.
The Tartar’s idea was that when the sun rolled up the mist-curtain
for the first act, a band of antelope would be seen feeding within
rifle-shot; but, as a matter of fact, we only used to see those
antelopes as usual making their exit over the skyline. One of the two I
killed I shot at over 400 yards, going from me, and the other was found
feeding behind what I think must have been the only ant-heap in Kariâs.
As I had spent some days going as the serpent goes in a vain endeavour
to approach a djerân unseen, I found no difficulty in stalking this
comparatively confiding beast. On the Mooghan steppe the djerân is
less hunted than at Kariâs; there is more cover, and the game is less
shy. It may be worthy of remark that, having tasted game flesh of many
kinds, including bear in America and Russia, deer of all sorts from
Spitzbergen to Elbruz, white whale and a score of other questionable
delicacies, I consider that there is no meat which I have ever tasted
to be at all compared with that of _G. gutturosa_.