At midnight I woke, the moonbeams and the shadows of the boughs making quaint traceries on floor and ceiling, whilst underneath the window, a barse was expressing his earnest desire to taste the flesh of an Englishman, in cries in which a baby’s wail and a wolf’s howl were about equally represented.
The brush was too thick for me to be able to get a shot at my visitor that night (though I got a shot on a subsequent occasion), and though I wandered about among the trees looking for him, and went to sleep again lulled by his serenade, he never dared to attack me. Hence I fancy that the Caucasian bogey is as harmless as other bogeys.
Everything on the southern slope of the Caucasus warns you that you have left Europe behind you. It is not only the jackals’ chorus at sundown, or the antelopes’ white sterns bobbing away over the skyline, but now and again a report comes in that somewhere down by the Caspian a man has killed or been killed by the tiger.
I have even seen the tracks of ‘Master Stripes’ myself, and sat up for nights over what a native said was his ‘kill,’ not very far from Lenkoran.
Still tigers are too scarce to take rank amongst the great game of the Caucasus.
I have said that the Caucasus is divided by nature into several distinct districts: the plains of the North, the deep forests of the Black Sea coast, the great wild region at the top of the ‘divide,’ and the arid eastern steppes, deserts such as Kariâs and the Mooghan.
Each district has its typical game. On the barren lands outside Tiflis, where nothing will flourish without irrigation, except perhaps brigandage, and on the great wastes through which the Kûr and the Araxes run, there is a short period, between the stormy misery of winter and the parching heat of summer, when the steppe is green with grass and dotted with the flocks of the nomad Tartars.
Later on the sun burns up everything; the Tartars move off to some upland pastures, and the natives of the steppes have the steppes all to themselves. These natives are the wolf, the wild dog, and two kinds of antelope, not to mention the turatch, a sand grouse as fleet-footed as an old cock pheasant and as hard to flush as a French partridge. The two antelopes are _Gazella gutturosa_ and _Antilope saiga_, of which the former is by far the most plentiful; indeed, in stating that _A. saiga_ is found at all in the Caucasus, I am relying upon the authority of a Russian author (Kolenati), upon whose authority, too, I have enumerated the wild dog (_Canis karagan_) as among the denizens of the steppe.