THE glamour that surrounds a woodcock is due not only to its solitary woodland habits and the mystery of its coming and going, but also to an element of unexpectedness about the bird, a certain elusiveness. It is something of the same kind that has led to the serow being esteemed among the elect of Himalayan big game. Men that have done a good deal of shooting in that region have mostly spied a serow at one time or another, many have shot one or two, but there must be few indeed that have so much as seen half a dozen. My first glimpse of the beast was in Kashmir many years ago. We had left camp early on our way to a glen where was said to be a stag of many points. As we had far to go my rifle was in its cover on the shikari's broad back. On the right of the ridge on which we were walking a forest of deodars fell away to sombre depths; on our left a scarred hillside, dotted with low scrub and littered with fallen rocks, was just beginning to light up under the beams of the rising sun. What a morning! Youth, the untrodden snow, crisp and sparkling as life itself, the big stag in front! Suddenly Ramzana shouted, "Serow! serow!' A beast was bounding over the rocks below me like the very

devil-and I use the simile advisedly. There he was, hoofs, short black horns, donkey-like ears, uncouth, black as Satan, with an unlustrous rusty blackness. The devil himself. Moreover, writers on Natural History, who ought to know-about serow that is,-assert that he awakens the mountains at times with an unearthly scream, and that when charging his eyes have in them a red fiendish gleam. Truth compels me to state that I have neither heard the scream nor seen the gleam, though curiously enough it happens that my several meetings with serow have all been of a kind to make the exclamation "Well, I'm d-d!" peculiarly appropriate. This may be only coincidence. The name Nemorhædus Bubalinus which has been given him means, I believe, nothing worse than "goatantelope."

By the time I had the rifle out of its cover and loaded the serow was far away, going across the hillside, as I have said, like the devil; over bushes and rocks and fallen trees, taking every obstacle with ridiculous ease, and, culous ease, and, of course, out of shot. Then he was lost to view. I would have forgone my chance of the stag for that serow, as one would a shot at a tall cock pheasant for a woodcock. I never saw him again, and in many years' shoot

ing in the western part of the Himalaya I never came across another.

It was not till the last two years of my service, spent in Nepal, that I had another glimpse of the beast. In that country, hidden in the dense vegetation that clothes the gorges below the snow-line, serow may be said to abound. But you don't see them-not much! After all, what do I mean by "abound"? One or two in a glen of ten thousand acres? Perhaps. It is impossible so much as to guess. I was anxious to bag one of these beasts, for its own rare sake and for the more ignoble reason that, with few exceptions, I had shot every kind of beast that was to be shot between, say, Bagdad and Calcutta, and of these exceptions the serow was the most notable. My wife, daughter, and self rode out one morning through the wonderful city of Khatmandu, where streets are vistas of gold-roofed pagodas, the lights and shadows of their airy architecture suggesting avenues of cedar-trees, where at every turn you are faced by images-gods, beasts, and men in stone and metal and wood, of all sizes and of more than heraldic grotesqueness. The stranger rubs his eyes in amazement. The men and women a motley throng, Aryans from the plains of the south, Mongols from the steppes of the north, and that blend of the two which, superior to either, has produced the Gurkha. Then

VOL. CCXXIII.-NO. MCCCXLVIII.

across the sacred river, whence through the morning mists we could see the massive piles of Pashpatinath and the smoke of its funeral pyres. The city left behind, we rode through miles of rich terraced fields, to where spur of the Phulchoah range throws a dark arm into the cultivated valley. On this one of the Nepalese princes had built himself a pleasance whence one could look over the saucer-like depression and picture it as it was in bygone ages, a great blue lake lying quiet among the mountains. But not less beautiful now, for the eye could range from the vivid green of the nearer ricefields to the paler green of those more distant, the city glittering far away in a luminous haze, while beyond on high reclined the great white Titans of the snows in a line that stretched from east to west.

In front of the building a fountain splashed into a marble tank inhabited by friendly fish that would nibble a tentative forefinger. The surrounding garden, hot and odorous with flowers, was the haunt of butterflies of unforgettable beauty; while the air was full of the hum of bees, the cooing of woodpigeons, the crow of jungle cocks and kalij pheasants. At dusk one heard quite close the sharp bark of kakar (muntjac), now here, now there, and by taking pains one could get a glimpse of their little red forms on the fringe of the jungle. We and a spaniel would return from a morning's walk with a

G 2

couple of woodcock, and so that English people mad as ourselves might lack for nothing, nature had provided round the little palace open undulating ground that only required the finishing touches of flags and holes to convert it into a golf course. For the satisfaction of those who disbelieve in ointments without flies, roses without thorns, and Paradises without serpents, I must admit the existence of leeches.

Narbir was a little soldier in the Legation Escort, and, being a Gurkha, was a shikari. I do not in this respect mean to compare him with a Tharu or suchlike jungle dweller, for he was born a tiller of the soil, and as a hunter therefore was an amateur. The real shikaris of Asia are not to be found amongst town dwellers or even agriculturists, but amongst the pastoral and aboriginal peoples, the goatherds of the mountains, the shepherds of the plains, the dwellers in forests and terais. To the one nature may become an open book, the other is part of nature himself, Pan's very offspring. One evening he turned up with two small wild men he had enlisted to explore with him the dark wooded mountains to the south, their skins bearing the marks of work among thorn and undergrowth, and the Gurkha's triumphant salute told a tale. He had not only seen a serow, but had discovered its retreat during the noonday heats. We went outside. Looking south there was a high conical hill, on the top of which was a

small but very holy shrine visited by pilgrims on one day of the year. Narbir pointed upwards to where a beam of sunlight cut the blue hazy darkness. Just there, he told us, in thick jungle was an overhanging rock; below it a ledge, where a serow had made his retreat, protected from sun, rain, and storms. It had been his house, his fort, his refuge for many days. But from where we were no rock could be seen even with the glasses, nothing to break the uniform greenery which fell sheer down like a curtain hung from the sky.

Our road next morning was easy for some way, as we followed the pilgrims' track as it wound among the hills. As soon as we left it walking was at an end. I could not longer watch Narbir's exceedingly shapely brown legs in front of me, but only his leathery heels. No doubt to an Alpinist it would have been a mere "scramble," and if as I suppose that is how one would describe a mouse's ascent up an ivy-covered wall, the term may be allowed to pass. We had been progressing upwards, hands, feet, and toe-nails for an hour or so, when Narbir sat down and nodded, indicating that the serow's cranny was on a level with us-and near. "How near?" I whispered. "Near, quite near." Rifle in one hand and holding on to branches and creepers with the other, I crept forward with infinite care. The woods were still, and a twig snapped with

a noise that sounded terrible. A touch on my back. Narbir was pointing with his forefinger just in front. A big grey rock above me was dimly outlined through the trees, the lower part hidden by a dense tangle. If he was there at all, the serow must be under the rock and quite close. Peering about to get a clearer view, I could still see nothing. Is he lying alert and listening? Has he vanished silently away? Suddenly, through the thicket a black shadow rose, and in one movement fell over the precipice. There was a crash fifty feet below, and then a succession of crashes growing fainter and fainter. The little man laughed, as a Gurkha does under all circumstances. I looked at the spot where Nemorhædus had been lying. He had certainly chosen his retreat well. A panther might have stalked him successfully, a twolegged man with a rifle hardly. Chance the second was gone.

A few days later Narbir, in consultation with his little jungle friends, had arranged a drive. The beaters had gone off early. Our route that morning was in a different direction up a narrow valley, crossing and recrossing a stream that came tumbling and foaming over the stones. Mornings and evenings the sound of deeptoned bells had reached us from somewhere among the labyrinthine hills, and now, following our guide, my wife and I presently found the way blocked by a temple's grey moss-grown walls. Facing us

A

a heavy wooden door was open, and, taking the path through, we found ourselves in the temple courtyard. A masonry tank of clear mountain water fed from the stream formed the centre of the square. On the opposite side the doors of the shrine, guarded by grinning stone beasts, stood open, and we caught a faint sacrificial whiff of incense and what-not. little Newar maid bearing an armful of flowers entered by the farther gate, and, making her way to the temple doors, disappeared into the gloom. Presently she came out emptyhanded, and with a shy glance at the white strangers, left by the gate she had come in at. Here surely, amid the everlasting hills, remote and secluded, must be the abode of peace. We did not risk disenchantment by looking into the temple's dim interior, only to descry perhaps some red many armed monster before whom the simple offering had been laid. At Narbir's behest we left a silver coin or two at the temple to placate, if so it might be, the spirits of the glen. At that moment neither he nor we considered that other more personal spirit which is always waiting round the corner to bring on us confusion and disaster, well called by Poe the "Spirit of the Perverse."

Past the temple we followed the stony track for an hour or so till Narbir halted at a point where it lay high above the stream. The opposite side of the valley was to be beaten, and our stand was below us on the

hither side of the water and perhaps twenty yards above it. From here the hillside facing us rose very steeply to a high pine-fringed ridge. Just opposite our stand the dark-green curtain had been rent by a landslide, making a steep bare gash perhaps sixty yards long vertically and ten or fifteen yards across. In this sylvan theatre we, so to speak, had the centre seats in the dress circle, the stream below was the orchestra, the naked streak of earth with properties littered about such as boulders and tree trunks, the stage; while dark forest formed background and wings impenetrable to the eye, so that nothing moving in it could be seen. An excellent setting if the serow would be so kind as to walk on to the stage. A big "if "! Granted that somewhere on the mountain's broad flank a serow lay hidden, could thirty or forty beaters, or a regiment of beaters for that matter, push him on to this little open space when a thousand secret paths existed by which he could reach another glen? My morning's hopes had grown cold indeed, but I said nothing to Narbir, as the whole thing had been arranged, and the beaters were in their places waiting for the signal. To my wife, however, when Narbir had gone, I said something about the absurdity of the plan. But she-lucky had the temperament of the optimist. "My dear A.," I replied, "you know as well as I do that the entire art of driving is to take advantage of a natural line of retreat.

woman

If

You cannot drive wild beasts where they don't want to go. It's not a sheep-dog trial. there is a serow on that hillside can you imagine our thirty beaters in thick stuff, a hundred yards between each man" But the beat had begun. A distant noise of shouting indicated that the men had formed a semicircle, the centre of the line being near the top of the hill, pretty near three thousand feet above the stream. Very, very slowly they came nearer. Though hopes may be faint, there is something in the noise of beating in a forest with its possibilities and anticipations and hopes and fears that "revs up" the heart-beats of the oldest and the most pessimistic. Unlikely though it was, if I was to get a chance at all, it would probably be at a serow crossing the stage in two bounds, so I was prepared for a quick shot. When the beaters were a couple of hundred yards or more away, there came a sudden crescendo in the noise, short shouts of excitement, and then-the rush of an animal. But he did not show on the stage. The silence that followed seemed to show that the animal, whatever it was, had broken back. Then the beaters' noises began again, and I noticed a lack of conviction in the shouts: they were of the perfunctory kind that beaters make when they know the beast has gone. And now the beaters have closed in. One can be seen at the top of the gash; some on the flanks are already out by the stream