The equipment of the mountain-rifleman is characterized by simplicity
and a strict attention to business. The nature of the ground over
which he works inexorably prescribes this. The superfluities of the
fox-hunter or the partridge-shooter with his dog-cart cannot be his.
Hatchet, pouch, knife and knapsack, with alpenstock on occasion, about
comprise his kit. He may be attended by a hound or two, but not a
pack. He wants no yelling. He hears but

the Spirit of the Mist,
And it speaks to the Spirit of the Fell.

For little hollows and little hills Scott's dogs, that

raved through the hollow pass amain,
Chiding the rocks that yelled again,

may have been highly effective when his mediæval sportsmen, who
carried no guns, could keep within a furlong of them. But in the
depths of the great mountains, with point-blank range of six hundred
yards and long pops of nearly twice that, they would be preposterous.
Fancy the Quorndon or the Pytchley on the flanks of the Matterhorn!

Chamois-hunting, the sporting specialty of the Swiss and the Tyrolese,
appears to be dying out. The hunter of our day keeps it up rather as
a tradition than as a practical pursuit. He rarely bags a "goat,"
for goats are very few to bag, and those few even more supernaturally
fleet and sure of foot and keen of nose than their less-hunted
ancestors. Still, somewhere in that upper world of lilac-white that
melts into the clouds in vast but distance-softened chasms of viscid