THE FIRST GORAL
We were awakened before daylight by Wu's long drawn call to the
hunters, "_L-a-o-u H-o, L-a-o-u H-o, L-a-o-u H-o._" The steady drum of
rain on our tent shot a thrill of disappointment through me as I opened
my eyes, but before we had crawled out of our sleeping-bags and dressed
it lessened to a gentle patter and soon ceased altogether. It left a
cold, gray morning with dense clouds weaving in and out among the peaks
but, nevertheless, I decided to go out with the hunters to try for
goral.
Two of the men took the dogs around the base of a high rock shoulder
sparsely covered with scrub spruce while I went up the opposite slope
accompanied by the other two. We had not been away from camp half an
hour when the dogs began to yelp and almost immediately we heard them
coming around the summit of the ridge in our direction. The hunters
made frantic signs for me to hurry up the steep slope but in the thin
air with my heart pounding like a trip hammer I could not go faster
than a walk.
We climbed about three hundred yards when suddenly the dogs appeared
on the side of the cliff near the summit. Just in front of them was
a bounding gray form. The mist closed in and we lost both dogs and
animals but ten minutes later a blessed gust of wind drifted the fog
away and the goral was indistinctly visible with its back to a rock
ledge facing the dogs. The big red leader of the pack now and then
dashed in for a nip at the animal's throat but was kept at bay by its
vicious lunges and sharp horns.
[Illustration: Hotenfa, One of Our Moso Hunters, Bringing in a Goral]
[Illustration: Another Moso Hunter with a Porcupine]
It was nearly three hundred yards away but the cloud was drifting in
again and I dropped down for a shot. The hunters were running up the
slope, frantically waving for me to come on, thinking it madness to
shoot at that distance. I could just see the gray form through the
sights and the first two shots spattered the loose rock about a foot
low. For the third I got a dead rest over a stone and as the crash of
the little Mannlicher echoed up the gorge, the goral threw itself into
the air whirling over and over onto the rocks below.
The hunters, mad with excitement, dashed up the hill and down into the
stream bed, and when I arrived the goral lay on a grassy ledge beside
the water. The animal was stone dead, for my bullet had passed through
its lungs, and, although the front teeth had been smashed on the rocks,
its horns were uninjured and the beautiful gray coat was in perfect
condition. It so happened that this ram was the largest which we killed
on the entire trip.
When the hunters were carrying the goral to camp we met Yvette and
Heller on their way to visit the traps just below snow line, and she
returned with me to photograph the animal and to watch the ceremonies
which I knew would be performed. One of the natives cut a leafy branch,
placed the goral upon it and at the first cut chanted a prayer. Then
laying several leaves one upon the other he sliced off the tip of the
heart, wrapped it carefully in the leaves and placed it in a nearby
tree as an offering to the God of the Hunt.
I have often seen the Chinese and Korean hunters perform similar
ceremonies at the death of an animal, and the idea that it is necessary
to propitiate the God of the Hunt is universal. When I was shooting
in Korea in 1912, and also in other parts of China, if luck had been
against us for a few days the hunters would invariably ask me to buy a
chicken, or some animal to sacrifice for "good joss."
After each dog had had a taste of the goral's blood we again climbed
the cliff at the end of the meadow. When we were nearly 2,000 feet
above camp the clouds shut in and, as the impenetrable gray curtain
wrapped itself about us, we could only sit quietly and wait for it to
drift away.
After an hour the fog began to thin and the men sent the hounds toward
a talus slope at the base of the highest peak. Almost immediately the
big red dog picked up a trail and started across the loose rock with
the pack yelping at his heels. We followed as rapidly as possible over
such hard going but before we reached the other side the dogs had
rounded a sharp pinnacle and disappeared far below us. Expecting that
the goral would swing about the base of the peak the hunters sent me
back across the talus to watch for a shot, but the animal ran down the
valley and into a heavily wooded ravine where the dogs lost his trail
only a short distance above camp.
I returned to find that Heller had secured a rich haul from the traps.
As we supposed, the runways which Yvette and I had discovered above
timber line were made by a meadow vole (_Microtus_) and in the forest
almost every trap had caught a white-footed mouse (_Apodemus_). He also
had several new shrews and we caught eight different species of these
important little animals at this one camp.
Wu, the interpreter, hearing us speak of shrews, came to me one day in
great perplexity with his Anglo-Chinese dictionary. He had looked up
the word "shrew" and found that it meant "a cantankerous woman!"
The following day Heller went out with the hunters and saw two gorals
but did not get a shot. In the meantime Yvette and I ran the traps and
prepared the small mammals. While we were far up on the mountain-side,
Baron Haendel-Mazzetti appeared armed with ropes and an alpine snow ax.
He was about to attempt to climb the highest peak which had never been
ascended but the drifts turned him back several hundred feet from the
summit. He dined at our camp and as all of us carefully refrained from
"war talk" we spent a very pleasant evening. During his three years in
Yün-nan he had explored and mapped many sections of the province which
had not been visited previously by foreigners and from him we obtained
much valuable information.
On the third morning we were up before daylight and I left with the
hunters in the gray dawn. We climbed steadily for an hour after leaving
camp and, when well up on the mountain-side, skirted the base of a huge
peak through a dense forest of spruce and low bamboo thickets, emerging
upon a steep grassy meadow; this abutted on a sheer rock wall at the
upper end, and below ran into a thick evergreen forest.
As we entered the meadow the big red leading dog, trotted off by
himself toward the rock wall above us, and in a few moments we heard
his sharp yelps near the summit. Instantly the pack was off stringing
out in a long line up the hillside.
We had nearly crossed the open slope and were standing on the edge of
a deep gully when the dogs gave tongue and as soon as the hunters were
sure they were coming in our direction we hurried to the bottom of
the gorge and began the sharp ascent on the other side. It was almost
straight up and before we had gone a hundred feet we were all gasping
for breath and my legs seemed like bars of lead, but the staccato yelps
of the dogs sounding closer and closer kept us going.
When we finally dropped on the summit of the hill I was absolutely
done. I lay flat on my back for a few minutes and got to my knees
just as the goral appeared on the opposite cliff. The sight of the
magnificent animal bounding like rubber from ledges which his feet
seemed hardly to touch down the face of a sheer wall, will remain in my
memory as long as I live. He seemed the very spirit of the mountains, a
thing born of peaks and crags, vibrant with the breath of the clouds.
Selecting a spot which he must touch in the next flying leap, I waited
until his body darkened the sights and then pulled the trigger.
The game little brute collapsed, then struggled to his feet, and with a
tremendous leap landed on a projecting shelf of rock four yards below.
Instantly I fired again and he sank down in a crumpled gray mass not
two feet from the edge of the precipice which fell away in a dizzy drop
of six hundred feet.
The dogs were on him long before we had worked our way down the cañon
and up to the shelf where he lay. He was a fine ram nearly as large as
the first one I had killed. I wanted to rest the dogs for they were
very tired from their two days of hunting, so I decided to return to
camp with the men. On the way a second goral was started but it swung
about the summit of the wooded ridge instead of coming in my direction,
giving one of the hunters a shot with his crossbow, which he missed.
It was a beautiful day. Above us the sky was clear and blue but the
clouds still lay thickly over the meadow and the camp was invisible.
The billowy masses clung to the forest line, but from the slopes above
them we could look far across the valley into the blue distance where
the snow-covered summits of range after range of magnificent mountains
lay shining in the sun like beaten silver. There was a strange
fascination about those mountains, and I thrilled with the thought that
for twelve long months I was free to roam where I willed and explore
their hidden mysteries.