I agreed, at his earnest desire, to let him have my alpenstock when he had not the pony; if he said he was tired and sat down I said it was the very thing I was dying to do; when he wished to carry my field glasses I took a fancy to pack his rifle, and so the farce went on; Mrs. Littledale was in fits of laughter at us. But he was worth the trouble, and knew more about the habits of the game than all the rest of them put together. Before we camped that night he was himself again, and he had no other opportunity of breaking out; once or twice he expressed a wish to go down to look after his bees, and we appealed to his feelings by telling him he was the only trustworthy person in camp, and that Mrs. Littledale would not feel safe were he to leave. Little presents of tea and quinine kept him contented till we broke up our party. As an instance of a curious custom in the Caucasus, I relate the following circumstances. I had had bad luck in losing a wounded beast or two, and the Lesghian told me the rifle wanted washing. I let him look through the barrels, which were bright as silver, for never under any circumstance do I go to sleep without first cleaning my rifle. He said it looked clean, but it wanted washing. After wounding and losing a stag, the Lesghian insisted on returning to camp. He said I might fire at all the animals in the whole Caucasus, but until my rifle was washed we should get nothing. To humour the man we retraced our steps, and I asked him to cure the rifle; he said we must wait till the morning, and then get water from different streams before any animal had drunk, or man had washed in it. The Russian hunters were equally confident of the necessity, so the following day they brought water from three different springs, carefully boiled it, and then washed out the rifle with the hot water. Whether it was owing to their fetish, or to my having substituted solid for hollow bullets, I express no opinion, though the hunters were less modest, but from that time forth I lost no more wounded beasts.
Early one August morning, with my two best hunters, I made another attempt after zubr (this being the Russian name for aurochs). We struck right down into the timber, making for a mineral spring, where we hoped to find tracks. On our way we passed and examined another small spring and found nothing fresh, but on reaching the lower spring we came on the track of a bull that had drunk there the previous evening. We followed his trail as quickly and silently as we could. The tracks showed that he had gone up the hill and had been browsing about there, and we found a comfortable bed which he had scraped out for himself in the pine needles, under a big pine with low spreading branches. We now redoubled our precaution; the head hunter went first, tracking; I, with the other man carrying the rifle, kept a sharp look-out ahead. Several hours passed, and we were still steadily creeping through dense pine woods, when the aurochs dashed out of a thicket, and down a watercourse, barely allowing us a glimpse; but soon I saw about a hundred yards off, ascending the other bank, a great ungainly brown beast. There he was at last--‘everything comes to him who waits.’ What struck me most during the moment that I was bringing the rifle up was not his size, but the extreme shortness between his knee and fetlock. Bang, bang, went the double Express, the first bullet catching him through the ribs, as he was sideways on, the other just by his tail as he disappeared into the brush. I made record time down that hill, jumping fallen trees, and loading as I went. How I escaped a broken leg I don’t know, but I got below him, and saw the beast coming down, evidently very sick. Again, again, and again, I let him have it. I ran up to within forty yards, and when he saw me he lowered and shook his head, but he was too far gone to do more. Not wishing to spoil his skull, I waited till he turned and gave him his quietus behind the shoulder; he ran twenty yards and fell on his back into a deeply cut watercourse. As we stood on the bank looking down at his great carcase, it struck me as strange that such an ungainly beast, without excessive speed or activity, with eyes and ears small in proportion to those of a stag, should have managed to survive at all in this thickly populated Europe of ours, his very existence being only known to comparatively few people. As he lay I took the following measurements: