Page:Mongolia, the Tangut country, and the solitudes of northern Tibet vol 1 (1876).djvu/243

 We now for the first time in our lives experienced the difficulties of hunting in the mountains. I can confidently affirm that a man should have an iron constitution and a robust frame for such work. The dangers are often imminent, the hardships such as are unknown to the native of a plain country. You must climb over almost precipitous crags, stopping every ten minutes to recover your breath, and cling to narrow and sometimes treacherous ledges, now feeling your way along the brink of a deep gorge, now clambering over the loose detritus appropriately termed in Siberia 'the devil's stones.' A false footstep, a stone giving way under you, and you may be precipitated down some deep abyss, and your career as a sportsman brought to a sudden and untimely end.

Sport in these mountains hardly repays the trouble, and depends a good deal more on luck than skill. How often your quarry, bird or beast, escapes you, giving time only for a snap shot as it vanishes in the thick wood, scales the rocks, or, if a bird, disappears behind the projecting crags of yonder cliff.

The animals, too, are very wary and difficult to stalk; they generally see or scent you before you have caught sight of them. One occasionally gets up under your feet, but the forest is so dense that before you see it, it has disappeared like a flash behind a rock, and you hear nothing but the sound of its hoofs and the noise of rolling stones disturbed in its flight. Even when a fair shot presents itself, your hand is so unsteady from hard climbing that