or breath and my
legs seemed like bars of lead, but the staccato yelps of the dogs sounding
closer and closer kept us going.

When we finally dropped on the summit of the hill I was absolutely done. I
lay flat on my back for a few minutes and got to my knees just as the goral
appeared on the opposite cliff. The sight of the magnificent animal
bounding like rubber from ledges which his feet seemed hardly to touch down
the face of a sheer wall, will remain in my memory as long as I live. He
seemed the very spirit of the mountains, a thing born of peaks and crags,
vibrant with the breath of the clouds. Selecting a spot which he must touch
in the next flying leap, I waited until his body darkened the sights and
then pulled the trigger.

The game little brute collapsed, then struggled to his feet, and with a
tremendous leap landed on a projecting shelf of rock four yards below.
Instantly I fired again and he sank down in a crumpled gray mass not two
feet from the edge of the precipice which fell away in a dizzy drop of six
hundred feet.

The dogs were on him long before we had worked our way down the canon and
up to the shelf where he lay. He was a fine ram nearly as large as the
first one I had killed. I wanted to rest the dogs for they were very tired
from their two days of hunting, so I decided to return to camp with the
men. On the way a second goral was started but it swung about the summit of
the wooded ridge instead of coming in my direction, giving one of the
hunters a shot with his crossbow, which he missed.

It was a beautiful day. Above us the sky was clear and blue but the clouds
still lay thickly over the meadow and the camp was invisible. The billowy
masses clung to the forest line, but from the slopes above them we could
look far across the valley into the blue distance where the snow-covered
summits of range after range of magnificent mountains lay shining in the
sun like beaten silver. There was a strange fascination about those
mountains, and I thrilled with the thought that for twelve long months I
was free to roam where I willed and explore their hidden mysteries.

CHAPTER XV

MORE GORALS

Both gorals were fine old rams with perfect horns. Their hair was thick and
soft, pale olive-buff tipped with brownish, and the legs on the "cannon
bones" were buff-yellow like the margins of the throat patches. Their color
made them practically invisible against the rocks and when I killed the
second go