ice and rifts of gray gneiss, there is an object for him. In some nook
or on some crag of the square leagues of desert that swell around him
a troop of the desiderated ruminants is grazing, if grazing it can
be called where grass is none. He is very sure of that. Even from the
door of his chalet he scans the slopes in the half hope of detecting a
flock or a single goat. His father and his grandfather before him had
looked forth from the same door on the same scene, snuffed the same
"caller air," mentally shaped the same pretext for yielding to the
same spirit of adventure begotten of the peaks and by going forth
to battle with the solitude, and hunted patiently, sometimes with
success, oftener without, the progenitors of the same quarry. So he
prepares himself anew for the wild and perilous tramp. A day--two or
three days--may pass without the compassing of a shot, or even hearing
the whistle of the sentinel goat as he shrills the alarm far out of
range and leads his fellows in twenty minutes to crags the hunter
cannot reach in as many hours. Death crouches in the treacherous
snow-crust beneath or the poised avalanche above. A false step or an
inch's miscalculation of leap may make him a waif for the lämmergeier
or land him among the buried villages of the last century. He toils
on until success or starvation sends him home. In the former case he
out-generals his shy game after a series of manoeuvres to which the
deepest stratagems of our Indians are straightforwardness personified.
He gets a long shot at a distance that would make the musket or
buckshot as useless as a sabre. The certainty may be apparent that the
animal, if hit mortally, must fall some hundreds of feet, perhaps into
an inaccessible chasm. There is no help for that. Now or never! The
short rifle, assisted by a portable rest, is called on for its best.
The concentrated energy of the whole chase is thrown into the long and
carefully calculated aim. A thin spurt of white smoke jets forth; a
sharp report echoes "from peak to peak the rattling crags among;" half