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.