We left Tiflis in a snow-shroud, which had, after three days’ continual fall, frozen hard. We found Poti in her spring dress, bright with violets and cyclamen. Here we were detained two days waiting for the steamer, and it may give some idea of the place, when I say that the second day was passed in hunting wild boar within a verst of our hotel, which is the centre of the town; and so successfully, that after plunging about in pools waist-deep from dawn to mid-day, we carried back a fine porker in triumph for our dinner. To help us in the hunt we had some sixteen dogs and all the able-bodied roughs of Poti, one of whom was armed with the only specimen of an ancient blunderbuss which I ever saw in actual use.

The neighbourhood of Poti must at no very distant date have been one of the most favourite habitats of the red-deer in the whole world. The Mingrelian nobles were all staunch preservers of game, and it was not until Russian greed of territory had angered them, that they in revenge for their wrongs, real or fancied, at the hands of their somewhile ally, and to deprive that ally of his favourite recreation, taken with or without their consent, slew all the tall stags and graceful roebucks in their land, whenever they could find them, by foul means or fair. So it came to pass that within the last ten years speculators have bought cartloads of stags’ horns in the neighbouring ‘aouls’ for a few roubles the load, and even to within the last three years it was still possible to find in out-of-the-way places ladders used to reach from the peasants’ ground-floor to his loft, composed entirely of the branching glory of the forest king. These things are now of the past, for the Mingrel has discovered that stags’ horns are marketable commodities: native middlemen have ferreted out every pair of antlers in the province, and established a regular trade in these and in boars’ tusks, the majority of which articles were sent to France to be made up into the hundred and one knicknacks with which people adorn their libraries. Still the red-deer is by no means extinct even now; in proof of which a gentleman working at Poti, in the capacity of a civil engineer, told me that a few months before my arrival he had been invited to a large shooting party on the domains of one of the neighbouring princes, on which occasion not less than one hundred shots were fired at red-deer during the day, although, owing to bad shooting, very few were bagged.

From Poti we steamed to Sotcha, where I was entertained by the agent of a German gentleman, Mons. G., who stayed on the estate to protect it throughout the late war. The danger to the property, he informed me, was to be apprehended not from the Turks but from the Russians, more especially the Cossacks, against whose evil doings he inveighed very bitterly. According to my authority, wherever the Turks camped during the war, private property was respected, and crops only mulcted of as much as was necessary for the immediate use of the troops. On the contrary, whereever the Cossacks were, there too was wanton destruction. Their only excuse if remonstrated with was, ‘if we don’t do it the Turks will;’ and their officers refused to interfere. At a small place in the immediate neighbourhood of Sotcha, for example—Adler or Pol Salian—the Turks never showed their noses, and yet the place is in ruins. No compensation was granted to any of the sufferers from Cossack wantonness after the war by the Government.

In Sotcha roses were in bloom when I arrived, as well as strawberries; and my host told me that a few days before my arrival he gathered half a dozen ripe strawberries in his garden, which had ripened out of doors, and this in the beginning of February. Up to the time of which I write there had been no frost at Sotcha. The chief produce of the neighbouring gardens are grapes, of which several varieties grow in great luxuriance on the slopes just above the town—if town you can call the few houses that surround the landing-place. But if the Governor has not been misinformed and is not too sanguine, Sotcha has a future, and may at no distant date develop into a second Yalta. A little table-land on the Poti side of the town has already been laid out in sites for villas, to be erected as summer residences for a number of old military officers and their families. Better still, all the sites are bought and paid for.

During the day which I lost at Sotcha waiting for horses—for of course I lost one, as every impatient traveller in this land of delays must be invariably content to do—I heard again of the fearless depredations of the lynx. During the night the dogs of Sotcha—an extremely large and influential body—were heard raising their voices in a manner altogether unusual even with them; and on inspection it was found that one large beast of half sheep-dog, half setter breed, had been killed on his chain by a lynx in the very middle of the town, and partially eaten where he lay.

It has been said that there is very little game in the Caucasus, and it was partly to correct that mistake that this book was written. To show how far from true the assertion is, Mons. G., with whom I was staying at Sotcha, told me that before the Tscherkesses left the Caucasus it was their custom to make an annual expedition to the main chain of the mountains along the Black Sea coast, between, say, Anapa and Sukhoum, to obtain game to salt for winter use. On one of these expeditions my informant accompanied seven Circassians, a few years before their evacuation of their native wilds; and, during a fortnight, of which at least a week was spent in coming and going, the eight guns made an enormous, though by no means unusually large bag, of which one single item was forty-two chamois. There were also bears, ibex, mouflon, and red-deer among the slain; and though on this occasion they saw no aurochs, Mons. G. assured me that he has seen some even more recently than that.

On the second day at Sotcha, after a row with the chief of the Cossacks, I managed to get horses for my now formidable party, composed, with the exception of myself and servant Ivan, of volunteers from the little town we were leaving. Some of these volunteers, however, when they had it finally explained to them that my little bell-tent would really only hold two, and those two would certainly be my friend Mr. Digby Lyall and myself, made up their minds wisely to stay behind; so that in the end the party only consisted of Mr. L. and myself, my servant Ivan, a guide Niko, an Imeritine—whose services, had I only been lucky enough to obtain them on my first visit, would have been invaluable—Ivan Kotoff, a Russian moujik or peasant proprietor, and a Cossack with the horses named Kalivan; while at Golovinsky I added my old ally Stepan to the motley crew. This was by far the largest party I had ever had with me in the Caucasus; and by their aid, and the aid of Stepan’s dogs, I expected to do great things with the bears and boars of Golovinsky.

As soon, however, as we arrived at the place, I found times had changed. Stepan had now some work to do; and a gruff German telegraphist was in possession of the hut in which I had formerly taken shelter. However, by the help of his chief’s letter of introduction to all telegraphists at the various Caucasian stations, and thanks to my bell-tent, I was soon fairly comfortable; but the next morning revealed a very sad state of things. Where in early autumn the bears’ tracks had been as thick as leaves in Vallombrosa, there was not now a single broad footprint to be seen. All the family of Bruin was either hybernating, or had moved off to winter quarters in some more favoured spot. Boars, however, were as plentiful as before, and the first day’s sport gave me as fine a run with the dogs after a wounded sow as I ever wish to have. Crouching in a narrow track, which her kindred had worn by frequent use through the dense covert of blackberry bushes, I first saw her come pounding down upon me in an opposite direction to that in which I was going, and for a moment expected to be run over by her if no worse. She saw me luckily in time to pull up, and before she could turn I gave her a bullet from my smoothbore, which lodged somewhere near her spine. After this the dogs got round her, and snapping and snapped at she carried the whole pack headlong down the precipitous wooded banks at a pace that rendered human pursuit all but hopeless. For all that, ten minutes break-neck work, with many a crashing fall and all too rapid slide, brought me to a point from which I caught a glimpse of the old black beast brushing through a thicket, with the dogs all over her; and hardly thinking of the risk the pack ran, I took a snap-shot, and, as good fortune would have it, turned her there and then into pork.

Leaving her suspended in slings of wild-vine tendrils beyond the reach of prowling wolves or marauding jackals, we kept along the edge of the cliffs until we came to the fairest site for a sportsman’s grave that the mind of man could conceive. Here, on the very summit of a gracefully rounded hill-top, was some three acres of greensward, almost as fine and even as an English lawn. Up to its very edge rose the dense forest-trees, through and over the tops of which came glimpses of the opalescent sea far down beneath. Here, in the morning, the soft sea-breezes shook music out of the rustling leaves, and in the evening the lengthening shadows wove strange traceries on the grass. Here the wild cherry-blossoms whitened the sward in the spring-time, and in autumn the drooping vines hung heavy clusters over the dead chiefs tomb, in recognition of the tender care his ancestors had bestowed upon the parent vine in days gone by. What a difference between this breezy sunlit hill-top and the terrible regions of brick and mortar in which, after their narrow life in town, the dead of London lie pent! One could almost echo the sentiment of a veteran fox-hunter speaking of his favourite grass country as compared to another, ‘It would be better to be buried here than live there.’

But in the midst of our day-dreaming a distraction of a sufficiently startling nature called us back to the present. In admiring the view we had strolled from our first post of observation into a thicket of already budding yellow azaleas, from which, as soon as we put foot in it, went forth the most extraordinary noises, while we found ourselves the centre of what appeared to be an enormous black shell in the very act of exploding. A second glance revealed the true nature of the black objects that rushed frantically about on every side of us. Unwittingly we had disturbed the rest, nay, stepped right into the middle of the resting-place of a big black sow and her litter of lively black imps. Such a hunt after sucking pigs as followed it would be difficult to describe. The dogs had been sent home; so all the work had to be done by ourselves; and from the small size of our prey and the thickness of the covert, it was almost as easy to catch as to shoot the succulent morsels. Most of them escaped us, but we got enough to satisfy us; so, tired and fairly content, we retraced our steps.

During the rest of our stay at Golovinsky we had excellent sport with the wild swine, killing one boar whose head an English naturalist declared to be the largest he had ever seen in England. But all boar and nothing else grew monotonous; and after a week of this sport we struck our tents and moved away to Yakorski, where, with hills and woods all round us, a clear purling brook by our side and the sea at our feet, we had good sport till the weather changed. The only drawback was that the tent which was meant to hold two had to hold four, and owing to accidents and oversights, our gear was of the most primitive nature. We had one enormous caldron, in which we boiled our pig-soup or our tea, as the case might be, and from this, when its contents had somewhat cooled, we, sitting in a circle round it, had to bale our dinner with spoons constructed by some genius from the bark of the willow. The process was rather slower, owing to the incommodious shape of the spoons, than lapping would have been, but it was the only way. Amongst the many things for which I have to be grateful to the Indo-European Company is the one teacup which did service for the four. This was neither more nor less than a broken insulator which someone found, with a piece of wood inserted in the hole at the bottom to prevent leakage.

Living in this primitive fashion, we passed several days, and enjoyed fair sport; the large supply of meat which we had hung on the beech-tree nearest our tent, attracting nightly bands of jackals, who formed a cordon round us and kept our dogs in a state of excitement the whole twenty-four hours. Apart from the sport, my man Niko was almost sufficient amusement in himself. A wilder, less tutored fellow could not be found, unless it were among savages; full of superstition and stories of the chase, he always kept us amused by the camp-fire. Amongst other things in which he firmly believed, as do most of his people, was the ‘evil eye.’ He had a gun with him, with which he told us that last year he had wounded eighteen wild boars in succession without bringing any to bag. Alarmed by this bad luck, he went to the ‘wise man’ of his village, and by him was reminded that the gun had been lent for some time to a friend. This friend possessed an ‘evil eye.’ The only remedy was to secure a gun belonging to his friend and spoil it, after which his own gun would return to its natural good behaviour. Niko took the ‘wise man’s’ advice, and I presume paid him for it, surreptitiously spoilt his friend’s gun, and from that time his shooting improved rapidly, until he was again the Niko that he used to be. Nothing I could say would convince him of the folly of his story; and so much did he believe in it that he even tried to persuade me, when one of my guns went wrong through an overcharge of powder, that the ‘evil eye’ had been at work on my own weapons also.

But after a few days the clouds began to gather blacker and blacker amongst the mountains, and the rainy season, which we believed we had left behind us by the Caspian, was upon us with a rush. On Friday, February 15, the rain swept over us in torrents; but, though the hills were all hidden, and the creaking and groaning of the trees almost frightened us, whilst the ground underfoot became a morass, the bell-tent kept us fairly dry. A temporary lull in the storm on Friday afternoon tempted us out of our shelter; and, though the woods were dripping and full of the music of a hundred newborn rivulets, we essayed a farewell hunt. The rain seemed to have aroused all the dormant energies of the porcine race; and, at one time, the noise they made amongst the fresh pools as we came on them unawares was rather suggestive of a morning in a cattle-market than one spent in a mountain forest.

It is difficult to believe how wild swine swarm in some parts of this coast, warrening the bushes with their runs, and covering every marshy place with their bathing-holes. Once we were fairly in the forest the heavens opened their sluices again, and before long our clothes were so sodden as to be almost too heavy to carry, our boots parting like wet blotting-paper; and when, weary and drenched, we got back to camp, we found the camp-fire submerged, and our bell-tent merely an awning over a pond about a foot deep. The men had neglected to entrench our position, and we were fairly washed out. Luckily my aversion to beetles had induced me to have my bed raised some two feet from the ground, and, cowering on this, we spent our time until Sunday morning. To make a fire was impossible. There was not a dry spot of earth within a square mile from our tent on which to lay it; and, even had we found a dry spot, the blinding sheets of rain would have washed it away as soon as laid. No fire meant very little food, as none of us could eat raw wild swine’s flesh, and we had very little else.

In the night a lot of wolves descended from the mountains, and, attracted by the smell of our beech-tree larder, came right into the camp, their weird howlings, as they answered one another from point to point, sounding very eerie in the storm. Worse than that, Niko, who had been hunted by wolves only a year before, within a mile or two of this spot, got extremely nervous, and, worse still, made the other men so. This, they said, was the month in which wolves were most to be dreaded; and, in a pack, with no fire to scare them, there was no certainty that they might not invade our tent during the night-watches.

To get back to the telegraphist’s hut was our first idea; though, remembering its fragile nature, I had my doubts whether there was much better accommodation there than with us. This, however, was rendered impossible. During the night the mountain streams had risen, and a man who had attempted to cross them in the evening was all but drowned before he could get back to shore. At the outset of the storm our Cossack, with the horses, had deserted and left us to our fate, so that there was nothing for it but to sit perched like owls on our little platform in the bell-tent, and smoke away the time until the rain should cease. My wretched men had no change of garments, so that for the two days they had to sit and sleep in their sodden clothes, and nothing but constant application to their beloved vodka-bottle could have saved the poor devils from fever. During that last night the rage of the storm increased, and, though our tent was in a wonderfully sheltered place, it rocked and tugged at its moorings in an alarming manner, whilst at last it ceased to be waterproof, and our roof resembled nothing so much as the rose of an immense watering-pot. I think on Saturday night I must have gone to sleep in spite of the streams from above and the howling wolves outside, for in the morning I was quite startled by a gleam of sunshine, and, roused, I fancy, by the cessation of that perpetual pattering of rain-drops which had lulled me to sleep. As I moved my stiff limbs my clothes cracked with the frost that had followed the rain, and our tent itself was hard frozen, while outside the sun was shining through a heavy snowstorm going on in the second range of mountains behind and giving but a very cheerless light to the miserable scene around. Still, it was sunshine, and as such stirred us to fresh endeavour, as nothing but sunshine can stir a human being. By dint of drainage and a few sticks we had kept moderately dry, we managed to light a fire, although, except for the few feet drained for the fire-place, there was still no dry spot for the sole of a man’s foot. But the crushing blow was to come. The rain had done worse than wet us—it had washed down the meat from our larder. The watchful wolves had been rewarded for their patience, and we were left breakfastless!

Very miserable wretches must we have appeared when rescue came in the form of our returning Cossack, late that afternoon, with some strong horses to carry us safely through the rapidly-subsiding torrents; and a bare-legged ride on bare-backed Cossack horses, through streams which wetted, and nipping north-easters that froze, our half-starved bodies, was no pleasant finale to our adventure. It was hardly to be wondered at that when we did get to shelter my men told me they had had enough sport for some time to come, and meant to return to DuapsÈ as soon as possible. I myself was no longer as keen as I had been, and it was agreed that we should gradually make our way to DuapsÈ, stopping for one last hunt, if only to supply us with food, at the ruins of Heiman’s Datch.

On February 19 we bade adieu to Golovinsky for the last time, and since then its bay of wooded hills, with the three tall blasted trees marking the spot where my first bear fell, has been only a memory to tempt me back. I should like to see it once more, with its glorious cone-shaped tulip-tree in full blossom; its jungles of rose-bushes, whose enormous berries testified to the size of its perished blooms, in the perfect beauty of summer; its great forests of chestnut decked with spires of flowers; and its long stretches of rhododendron and azalea in their summer dress. It must indeed be lovely then; and if the fever were only a possible and not an absolutely certain consequence of the enjoyment of its wonderful beauty, the pleasure would be worth the risk.

But the wintry scene around us now was very different. Above, the ragged clouds hung black and threatening. Out at sea, the waves were for some distance yellow with the influx of turbid mountain torrents. Trees were hanging their heavy dripping heads, broken and mutilated by the three days’ storm. The sea, too, had been at wild work during the night; and when the Black Sea does wake to mischief it is a demon in its gusty rage. The shore was strewn everywhere with drift-wood, and over the carcass of an unhappy stranded porpoise eagles were poising and soaring. Two of my little party had a touch of the fever, and my own throat was sore and swollen, so that the tonsils seemed almost to choke me if I made any unwonted exertion. It was evidently time to get home. At Heiman’s Datch a forest fire had recently raged, and no game could be obtained for the larder, so that we were almost without provisions.

Taking all these things into consideration, we determined next morning to go straight on to DuapsÈ, and give up any further hope of shooting. Thus resolving, we built up a fire of drift-wood under the old flooring, and lying round it dreamed of home, dry clothes, and good dinners. Alas! that good resolutions should always be formed too late. When morning came, like a nightmare came upon us that creaking and groaning of the trees we had learned to know so well; that rush and babble of waters that meant imprisonment for a starved-out garrison. The tiny rill below the ruin, which the day before had been nowhere ankle-deep, was now boiling and foaming with a rage perfectly ludicrous in such a baby river, and with a force that made it almost unfordable. Not a moment was to be lost, and in spite of the pitiless storm we determined to push on foot along the shore to the next Cossack station for horses before we were hopelessly hemmed in by the mountain-streams.

It was already doubtful if we were not too late; so leaving Ivan the Pole at the ruin to guard our effects, my young friend L., Ivan Kotoff, and myself, shouldered our small kits and trudged away breakfastless over the wet shingle. It was heavy going over the yielding beach, laden as we were with bourkas and what not in that blinding rain, and I was thankful when I saw my friend L. safely at the end of it. Young as he was, I am bound to say he made less trouble of it than our burly Russian fisherman, whose red beard kept wagging the whole time, and whose complaints were the harshest sound even in that stormy scene.

At Selenik’s Datch we found the stream that there empties itself into the sea swollen beyond recognition, and divided into two, forming two small cataracts, which hurtled along the big boulders in a way that was a marvel to those who had only seen it in its days of restful calm. Kotoff at once pronounced it unfordable, and, being our guide, the others unluckily would not listen to my arguments, though at considerable risk I backed them by fording the first stream, which was more than waist deep, by myself. Naturally, though I was several times all but washed off my feet, and to lose my footing would in all probability have been to lose my life, it would have been simple enough to have crossed had we all linked ourselves one with the other, and together breasted the torrent. But the Russians were white-livered, and would not come, so that I had to wade back again; and wet through, disgusted and hungry, with my throat as I knew in a dangerous state, I felt very like throwing up the sponge.

After a weary tramp through the long wet covert, Kotoff found us a dismantled cowshed on the Selenik property. Here we kindled a poor fire, and tried in vain to dry the clothes which the rain, driven through the broken roof, soaked as fast as we dried them.

Our only supplies were three or four handsful of rice, and we had a two days’ appetite to appease. Hunting about in the cowshed, we found an old paint-pot, and having cleansed it by burning, patched its leaks with clay, and boiled in it the rice and the few bunches of sorrel which we found growing near, we made our first meal since noon of the preceding day. What with the unpleasant taste which the pot possessed and imparted to what was put in it, together with the naturally disagreeable flavour of the coarse sorrel, it was all we could do to eat the mess when made, in spite of hunger, and the root of horse-radish which we boiled with our greens to give them a flavour. After this we brewed our last pinch of tea in the same pot, and immediately regretted the waste, as the horse-radish flavour so far predominated that the addition of tea to the water was useless.

In all our distress we had one consolation. I had by great good luck saved a box of really first-rate cigars which I picked up in Tiflis; and with these to comfort us, young L. and myself huddled together in a corner where there was more wall and fewer crannies than elsewhere, and prepared to make a night of it, while the men lay huddled in their bourkas. Nothing save the voices of the storm and the spluttering of the fire, which the rain soon extinguished, broke the sullen stillness of the night.

It was not a cheerful end to my shooting expedition; and again the truth of the Russian proverb, which the men sometimes muttered, appeared a possibility, ‘the chase is worse than slavery.’

During the night one of the men sang us some wild Cossack songs, one of which I had often heard the women crooning parts of before. Whether it was that the wild forms and scenes that were round me lent them a beauty the words do not really possess, or whether there is in fact some charm in this cradle-song of a warlike race, in some things not unlike our borderers of two centuries ago, it seemed at the time very impressive. I will therefore try to help my readers to judge for themselves, from a translation of Poushkin’s verses, which, if it does not convey all the spirit of the original, is at least a close transcript of the words and metre.

The words ‘bai-oosh-kie-baiou’ are merely the refrain of the song, and as untranslatable as our ‘lullaby,’ so that I have left them in the original.

From scraps of songs which I have from time to time heard crooned in the Crimea and elsewhere, I should almost imagine that Poushkin’s words here translated are only a remodelled and completed form of some popular cradle-song in use in his time among the Cossacks.

I am sadly afraid the Cossacks are no longer the romantic personages they were when the poet wrote of them. ‘Richard’s occupation’s gone’ may be said of them. There is no one left for them to fight, and their existence as Cossacks would lack an object were it not for their duties as postmen. They are as rough as ever, but not, I should say, as ready with their weapons. Their love of cattle-lifting can no longer be legitimately gratified, and I fear I have cause to add that it has degenerated to the level of petty pilfering.

Singing and smoking we passed the night, trying in vain to still the voices of our unappeased appetites with the dull narcotic which refused to numb our pain. The rain had partially ceased at dawn, and with that wonderful rapidity which characterises their fall as well as their rise, the mountain torrents, which had been our gaolers the night before, had now sunk to such a degree that arm in arm we just managed to struggle through.

Once free from our prison, with the prospect of breakfast and horses at the next plantation, even Ivan pulled himself together, and before mid-day we were all lying rolled up in borrowed rugs, while our clothes were dried, and our appetites appeased by a meal of black bread. This was all we could get, for, like ourselves, Koylor’s Datch had been in a state of siege, and if the rain continued was likely to remain so.

These Russian plantations in the Caucasus are terribly unremunerative I am told, in spite of the richness of the soil. I think the reason is chiefly that they are very much neglected by their owners, no capital being expended on them; in addition to which there is no market for their produce within reach, and no reasonable roads anywhere. Moreover, fever demoralises the workmen, and the wild swine devastate the crops.

Whilst refreshing ourselves at Koylor’s Datch, we sent for horses, intending to make all speed for DuapsÈ; and to our great joy the weather cleared a little in the afternoon, so that when the horses and the Cossack guide arrived we were able to swing ourselves into dry saddles and proceed forthwith.

Between our starting point that afternoon and the Cossack station, at which we hoped to pass the night, a mountain stream larger than most of its fellows emptied itself into the sea, and it was of this stream that we were most afraid. The Cossack who brought the horses reported it extremely high, but in one place still fordable, so that it was with eyes fixed anxiously on the sky that we hurried on. My young friend L. had become so far knocked up that he thought it wiser to stay at Koylor’s Datch, from whence I was glad to hear that he eventually got safe back to Sotcha, and thence to Tiflis.

For the first verst or so of the sixteen we had to travel before nightfall, the weather kept clear and bright, after which it grew suddenly murky and overcast. The sea, muddy and discoloured near the shore by the unwonted access of turbid fresh water, spread itself out in broad streaks of vivid green and Oxford blue in the distance. The waves rose apace, and came washing right under our horses’ feet till they touched the cliff that walled us in beyond. Thunder began to mutter, and the whole under-sky seemed to grow into waving plumes of dark purple smoke. Then the rain came again, with sheet lightning, near thunder, and little drifts of snow, which seemed strangely out of place with the vivid lightning. By this time the cold had grown so intense that I was glad to fasten my rapidly stiffening bourka round my neck and bury myself in its voluminous folds. Suddenly the snow and the thunder ceased, and for ten minutes there was a respite, the sky growing more wild and eerie every moment. What with the fury of sky and sea, the horses became so panic-stricken as to be almost beyond our control. Then the sun, after being long hidden, showed himself low down on the waves—for it was already five o’clock, and owing to the storm nearly as dark as night. In shining out now he only added to the horrors of the scene the most ghastly purple face ever sun put on. And no wonder, for he was peering through a hailstorm, which soon reached us, whitening the waves with its volleys of ice-bullets as it advanced.

Never before or since have I seen such a hailstorm. The stones gave us positive pain as they struck our faces and hands, and were as large on the average as the bullets of my ‘express.’ Meanwhile the thunderstorm had commenced anew, and, while the lightning flashed with extreme brilliancy so near us as to be dangerous, the voice of the thunder almost drowned all other sounds. Alas! in the intervals between the thunderclaps we now began to hear another voice—the voice of gurgling, fighting waters, and of the heavy stones and tree-trunks whirled along by them in their fierce career seaward.

When at last the stream came in sight, its appearance was no more inviting than its voice; but from its great breadth for a mountain stream, I judged it was not so deep as its turbid appearance led one to believe. Deep or shallow, it had to be crossed. The Cossack said he knew the ford, and offered to lead the way; and, after all, its wild foamings were little worse than the hailstorm that raged around. So, when he plunged in, leading the packhorse behind him, I followed close on his heels, entirely trusting to his local knowledge for a safe passage. Luckily for him, the Cossack was only a featherweight, while the horse he bestrode was one of the largest and most powerful I had seen during my travels; so that, though the packhorse with his burden was immediately upset and washed away, the man, clinging to his horse, which made a gallant swim for it, got safe to shore a long way down stream. I was less lucky than the Cossack, whose fate I had not seen; for, while half blinded by a vivid flash of lightning, my wretched little screw toppled over into the deep water, and was immediately carried after its comrade, leaving me to swim for my life in a stream like a mill-race, with my long wet bourka round my neck, hampering my limbs and drowning me with its heavy folds, and a ten-pound ‘express’ rifle on my shoulders. It was well for me then that swimming had been one of my favourite forms of athletic exercise in my boyhood, or I should never have managed to extricate my hands from the bourka and make a fight of it with the stream. Something, a stone or some drift-wood I suppose, gave me a severe blow on the kneecap in crossing, but this I only discovered subsequently, and when at last I struggled somewhere safe to shore amid the shouts of my men, I think, as I stood spent and dripping in the hailstorm after my icy bath, I fully realised the pleasures of travelling in the Caucasus in the rainy season.

To go for the Cossack who had led me into the scrape by his ignorance of the ford, to deprive him of his horse, and, having seen my men cross by the true shallow higher up, to gallop madly for the Cossack station, were my first acts on recovering myself a little; and between my bath and the station I never drew bridle until I tumbled off breathless at the door, whence, regardless of questions, I made my way to the room where a dozen Cossacks lay loafing in every stage of dirt and idleness. Casting all squeamish scruples to the winds, I stripped off my icy clothes where I stood, borrowed a shirt from one dirty rascal and an unutterable sheepskin from another, got a wandering telegraphist, who happened to be at the station, to give me about half a pint of neat spirit and as much hot tea as I could drink, and turned in with my back against the stove, trusting to the heat within and without to restore my circulation—which the ride had failed to do—and so save me from the consequences of my immersion.

In the course of the evening my men arrived, having saved most of the baggage, which had got loose from the unfortunate packhorse, and when I woke in the morning I found myself quite a hero for my swim, and, better than that, a hero with some moderately clean dry clothes to get into. In the night, nevertheless, the gallant Cossacks’ chivalry and respect had not prevented their stealing my watch and what remained of my sodden cigars. Having dried these in the oven, they had converted them into fine-cut tobacco, which, when I woke, had provided every loafer amongst them with a little store of cigarettes. But my throat warned me that it was no time to make a trouble of trifles, and that it was imperatively necessary to get back to DuapsÈ at once, catch the boat thence on the morrow, and get to Kertch in time for medical advice if I needed it.

In the night the sea had come up to the foot of the cliffs, thus barring the usual road to DuapsÈ, and obliging us to ride some forty versts, by precipitous and rugged bridle-roads, over the cliffs, during which ride the horses’ vile pace, the infernal machine called a Tartar saddle, and the ruggedness of the roads combined to inflict on my already aching frame unspeakable tortures. Worse than all, when the last jolt had been suffered, and the last writhing submitted to in fording the stream that separated us from DuapsÈ, we found that, owing to the bad state of the weather, the Odessa steamer would not touch there for a week, so that for seven days we might kick our heels and be miserable in that charming watering-place.

That week was too dark an era in my travels to say much about it. I prefer, if possible, to remember the Caucasus without DuapsÈ. Despondency took hold of my faithful Ivan, as soon as he had got his pay: like a true Russian, he took to drink, and all through my illness left me to my fate, in a drunken peasant’s cottage, while he wept and sang by turns in the only ‘duchan’ in the place. Day by day my throat became worse. The telegraphists were kind to me; but neither they nor the doctor (veterinary, I believe he was) knew what was the matter with me; and every night the steam that rose from the damp mud floor of my room only added to my illness.

Once the Governor came to see me; and as he, too, was a doctor, gave me some advice; but I doubt whether his prescriptions, had he left any, could have been made up in his government. However, he brightened half an hour for me with his chat, and that, doubtless, did as much good as any medicine would have done. He told me of some wolves which had gone mad, and were keeping a couple of villages in a state of panic by their attacks, having already bitten a man and several cattle, all of which had since died from hydrophobia. This madness of the wolves is not by any means unfrequent, I was told, and, strangely enough, generally takes place during the coldest part of the year. I had intended to have gone to the villages in the morning to see what I could do for the peasants with my ‘express,’ but was unluckily tempted into a wrestling match with a celebrated native wrestler; and the exertion of winning one fall out of three against him was the last straw that broke the camel-like back of my constitution. The fellow was a capital wrestler and extremely strong; he had acquired some of his best throws, oddly enough, in England; so that, though he threw me handsomely twice, I could console myself with the reflection that he had learnt to do it in my own country.

That night there was a wedding in DuapsÈ, and every one naturally got drunk; and whilst I was tossing in high fever on my bed a score of drunken moujiks in enormous boots were dancing and shouting in the next room. Two nights this lasted; at the end of the second, when I was very nearly beyond any further enduring power, Providence willed it that the steamer should arrive; and as the doctor insisted that I had nothing more than a bad sore-throat the matter with me, I was taken on board and landed at Kertch, in a critical stage of a violent attack of diphtheria.

So ended my shooting adventures in the Caucasus, and I may well be thankful that in the person of M. Bulberg, of the Russian telegraph service, I found a kind friend and attentive nurse, as I did also in my old friend the English Consul. After a fortnight’s careful nursing at M. Bulberg’s rooms by a clever German doctor—whose name I am ungrateful enough to have forgotten, though I am not the less grateful for his services—I tided over my illness. As soon as I was pronounced in a safe state to travel, both as regarded myself and others, I started for England, still wearing some of the rough gear in which I had travelled, and arrived at the station of the town in which I dwelt such a deteriorated specimen of the English race, that what with my rags and my beard, the first people I met on alighting—who were the ladies of my own family—cut me dead, and for quite a couple of minutes refused to recognise me.

THE END.

LONDON: PRINTED BY
SPOTTISWOODE AND CO., NEW-STREET SQUARE
AND PARLIAMENT STREET