THE compiler of sporting literature is usually a person of unfaltering purpose and unerring aim. All his stalks are conducted without flaw or mistake; his cartridges are loaded with the straightest powder only, and every bullet finds its proper billet. The pangs of disappointment and the mortification attendant upon baulked ambition are not his, for he never fails to attain his object. Personally I feel hardly entitled to express an opinion on the subject, never having tasted the sweets of such unvarying success; but I cannot help thinking that an occasional failure or two must enhance the flavor of a sport which owes much of its fascination to its glorious uncertainty. It must be so very tiresome never to miss; besides, if everybody were built that way, the game would soon be exterminated. In my own case, as far as my pet sport of stalking chamois is concerned, I fancy that the failures rank with the successes in the proportion of about four to one. But then I have always hunted over big mountains, where the game is not plentiful and the difficulties of the chase are materially increased, and I have no pretensions to be anything more than a fair average rifle shot. Moreover, on looking back over an experience of several seasons, I am inclined to think that most of the really interesting stalks which I can call to

ness.

mind have had an unsuccessful termination. 1 have hunted chamois at intervals during the last fourteen years, and my total bag only just tops a score. But those twenty beasts-more or lessrepresent the fruits of many days' hard work, many keen delights and many scarcely less keen disappointments. Happily the charm of the gemsjagd in the High Alps depends in but a small degree upon the mere gunning part of the busiIn that splendid air, and with those glorious and ever-varying scenes around you, it is enough to sit still and watch the game if a stalk is out of the question. Of course the pleasure is greater if you return home with a fine buck on your own, or, better still, on your guide's back; but the disappointment of a miss, even though momentarily keen, is soon forgotten. The number of chamois that one kills is to my mind quite a secondary consideration. Far be it from me to decry the sports of my native land; but I must say that I would rather slay one good buck, after a week's unremitting toil, than a whole hecatomb of pheasants at the end of a well-stocked covert between the hours of ten and five.

Now that I am on the subject of shooting, straight or otherwise, I may remark that, unless you are an exceptionally good shot, it is a very easy matter to miss a chamois at any distance

over seventy or eighty yards. Anyhow, that is my experience. In my armchair at home I can slay them in imagination with unerring accuracy, but on the actual mountains it is a very different matter. Owing in a great measure to the clearness of the atmosphere, the distances are exceedingly hard to judge, and the angles of depression and elevation are usually very considerable. Moreover, the mark is a small one. A chamois is little bigger than a roebuck, and, unless you hit him fair somewhere in the regions of the vitals, he will probably make tracks over the mountains, and leave you lamenting. Nature, too, who, in her solicitude for the preservation of types, always contrives that the plumage of her birds and the fur of her beasts shall harmonize with their surroundings, has made no exception in the case of the antelope of the Alps. He is by no means easy to distinguish against his background of rock, especially if he happens to be in shadow at the time. Then you are always afraid that the beast may see you, or that a puff of wind may give him your odor, and this is apt to make you hurry over the shot. Add to this that the work is very hard, and that buck fever, or some other form of nervousness, will occasionally overcome even the most experienced sportsman, and it will be seen that the ingenuity of ordinary humanity in inventing excuses for misses is quite superfluous as far as chamois-hunting is concerned.

All this by way of prelude to an account of one or two stalks which, partly owing to indifferent shooting, partly to a variety of other causes, were by no means uniformly successful. The place where I purpose taking up my parable is the Valpelline, on the Italian side of the Pennine Alps. Fortunately, perhaps, for the sportsmen of the district, this picturesque valley, owing chiefly to the absence of hotel accommodation, is less known or visited than it deserves, the natives of the Val d'Aosta preferring, as a rule, the no less beautiful Valtornanche for their excursions.

Lodgings can be obtained in the house of the curé of Bionaz; but we took up our abode in the chalets of Prérayen at the head of the valley. Here the traveler finds himself in the heart of the mountain world. Innumerable peaks of varying height and form, intersected by deep valleys and gorges, rise abruptly from the larch forests that clothe their lower slopes. The monarch of them all, the Dent d'Hérens, the near neighbor of the mighty Matterhorn, attains an elevation of fourteen thousand three hundred feet, and the ice scenery at its base, and on the

slopes of the adjoining mountains, is hardly to be surpassed in grandeur.

I should mention that the shooting in the Valpelline is all private, the sporting rights, as elsewhere in North Italy, being vested in the owners of the soil.

The greater part of our hunting was done on the south side of the valley, where the game was usually more plentiful, though it was scarce enough even in the best places. During the summer and early autumn months the chamois, in their endeavor to escape from the sun's rays, chiefly frequent such mountains as have a northerly exposure. Here the grass is longer and sweeter; the soil is less parched; and the rocks afford a grateful shade during the noontide heat. There was one mountain, however, on the northern side of the valley-I do not think that it has any name-which I was anxious to explore. The big herds usually deserted it until the late autumn months when the sun had less power. On account, however, of its inaccessible nature, for it was flanked on three sides by enormous precipices, it was said to be a favorite resort of sundry big solitary bucks: These selfish old bachelors lead retired lives as a rule, and during the greater part of the year shun the society of their fellow-creatures. With this end in view they frequent the summits of lofty peaks, or else lie hidden at the foot of inaccessible cliffs, where they are very difficult to get at. As Mr. Charles Boner poetically observes in his book, "Chamois-Hunting in Bavaria," in order to stalk them "the hunter must brave the intense cold as

femmes qui sont les plus méchantes!" Your old doe is always so horribly suspicious. She cannot even eat her dinner in peace, but between each nibble she must needs look round and sniff the air to see if anybody is coming. If a pebble trickles down the mountain side she pricks her ears, cocks her head sideways and seems to mutter to herself, "Dear me, I wonder what that noise can be." The most annoying creatures that I know are those outlying doe sentinels of the herd, who upset the best-laid plans and convert fair prospects of successful stalks into miserable failures. Many a time as you are stealthily creeping along some narrow ledge, fondly imagining that you are well screened from

region of snow and ice, for he will be led to spots where good nerves are required not to feel overcome with horror at the scene around."

On the other hand, being less timid than the does, they occasionally venture much lower down the mountains, but always in some out-of-theway place where they are not likely to be disturbed. He is a wary old stager, your veteran solitaire, and even more difficult to discover than he is to stalk. In the daytime he lies perdu in the shadow of some overhanging rock, only emerging in the early morning and evening to feed. Like his human congener, the elderly buck dines late-at his club, I was about to say, but at any rate in some sequestered nook where the ladies cannot bother him. Fortunately, too, he has a rooted and very proper aversion to being disturbed at his meals, and if you can only catch him at dinner-time he is so preoccupied that in my opinion he is then easier to approach than are his lady friends. As my favorite hunter, Jean Baptiste Perruquet, justly observes-and Perruquet is no misogynist, but rather a fervent admirer of the gentler sex-"C'est toujours les

AMONG THE SUMMITS.

view. a shrill alarm whistle from a lofty crag above you tells of some watchful guardian of the band which your telescope had failed to spy out. The remainder take the hint at once, and are gone in the twinkling of an eye.

In the late autumn the old buck grows less morose and unsociable, and evinces a taste for the company of the ladies. At this period he joins the large herds, and divides his time between love and war. He is of a pugnacious disposition, and his "cocky" appearance and air of bravado as he swaggers around are highly amusing. Desperate are the battles he fights, and those sharp curved horns of his inflict many a terrible gash upon the flanks of his rivals for the favors of the fair. When his honeymooning is over he quits the herd and returns once more to his crabbed and selfish bachelor habits.

My bedroom in our chalet was on the ground floor, and it was quite early morning when a goat

cracked bell on its neck in an aggressive fashion, as much as to say, "It's time to get up." I paid no attention to the summons until a cow came in and gazed at me with wonder in her great, sad, liquid eyes, and then, shaking her head reproachfully, sounded her deeper-toned and more musical instrument and disappeared. Day had already broken and the saffron light of dawn was stealing over the shoulder of the Dent d'Hérens, so I jumped out of bed and called Perruquet, and in half an hour we had boiled and swallowed our coffee and were ready to start.

There were three of us to-day, instead of two as usual, as my hunter had complained that once or twice previously, when fortune had befriended us exceptionally, I had brought him down chargé comme un âne with chamois. Accordingly he had brought along with him a brother-in-law, one of

STALKING UP A GORGE.

quinaz, who have furnished a large proportion of the best guides of the Valtornanche. He was an excellent fellow, with remarkably sharp eyes, but somewhat over-talkative for a chasseur. In the rather faint hope of entrapping one of the wily old solitaires we determined to try the mountain on the north side of the valley to which I have alluded. Following a rough goat path, which was also used by the athletic cattle of the district on their occasional visits to the higher pastures, we zigzagged up the steep face of the hill. There were hardly any trees on this side, though here and there amid the gray rock bowlders rose the stumps and fast-decaying trunks of what must, judging from their girth and appearance, have been giant larches. The bark had fallen off and most of the stems were rotting away, while others were riven and seamed and scarred all over by light

ning.

After a sharp burst of two or three hours' climbing we got upon an arête, or ridge, overlooking the Vallée d'Oren. On our left the sides of the mountain fell precipitously in a series of alternate cliffs and steep grass slopes. Far below, blending with the familiar music of the cow bells, we could hear the murmur of the glacier-fed torrent as it hurried down to mingle its waters with those of the Valpelline river, while above and all around reigned the solemn silence of the eternal snow. We halted on the arête, and, getting out the telescope, commenced spying the ground. Perruquet is an accomplished master of this most difficult art, but his efforts on this occasion disclosed nothing but three sheep-a black demoniacal-looking old ram and two white ewes-sitting upon a pinnacle of rock above us and calmly surveying the situation from their safe coign of vantage. They had evidently strayed far from