of
following the dogs.

Wildfowl of every description swarm during the spring and autumn
migrations, for after nesting on the Siberian steppes they go down to
the Sunny South in winter. Swan, geese, mallard, teal and countless
varieties of duck literally cover the waters of the Yangtse for miles
at a stretch, and will hardly rise to avoid the river-steamers as they
pass, although extremely shy of approaching small boats, while every
little pond or creek affords the probability of a shot.
Wildfowl-shooting, however, is not largely gone in for, why, I can
hardly say, unless it is that they are so superabundant as to make
them seem hardly worth the powder and shot, that the distances to go
for them are too great and the work of stalking too cold and tiresome,
or that other kinds of shooting are more attractive.

Woodcock are often found in bamboo groves from which it is generally
hard to flush them, while the cover is so thick that it is impossible
to shoot until they come out, though be it only for an instant, when,
topping the bamboos, they alight again on the opposite side. I have
spent nearly an hour in killing a brace which, although I saw perhaps
twenty times, I had the greatest difficulty in getting a snap at. They
also frequent pine woods and heather on the hills, and are identical
in appearance with the woodcock found in England.

During a severe winter at Chinkiang, word was brought in by natives
that some children had been carried off by "dog-headed tigers," which
monsters, after making lengthy inquiries, we assumed to be wolves.

With a view to getting a shot at these brutes, a friend and I went out
overnight to the community bungalow, a distance of seven miles, and in
the morning ranged warily through the pines and over the snow-clad
hills, seeking for traces of the man-eaters, being joined towards noon
by the British Consul. Carrying my twelve-bore fowling-piece loaded
with a bullet in the right barrel and a charge of big shot in the
left, the latter being full-choke, I was passing along the side of a
steep hill at the foot of which, and some fifty feet below me, lay a
frozen stream, when my dog-coolie, pointing downwards, cried, "Look at
the fish!"

Beneath the clear ice, of perhaps a quarter of an inch in thickness, a
mass of fish was swimming with the current. Instinctively I fired the
left barrel at them, and was greatly surprised to behold a jet of
water, broken ice and fish shoot up two or three