ummit of the ridge and dashed forward hoping to cut them off
if they crossed below me. They did not appear, and we tried to drive
them out from the cover into which they had made their way; but we
never saw them again. It was already beginning to grow dark and too
late to pick up the trail of the wounded boar, so we had to call it
a day and return to the village.

One of our men carried my shotgun and we killed half a dozen
pheasants on the way back to camp. The birds had come into the open
to feed, and small flocks were scattered along the valley every few
hundred yards. We saw about one hundred and fifty in less than an
hour, besides a few chuckars.

I have never visited any part of China where pheasants were so
plentiful as in this region. Had we been hunting birds we could have
killed a hundred or more without the slightest difficulty during the
time we were looking for pigs. We could not shoot, however, without
the certainty of disturbing big game and, consequently, we only
killed pheasants when on the way back to camp. During the day the
birds kept well up toward the summits of the ridges and only left
the cover in the morning and evening.

Our second hunt was very amusing, as well as successful. We met the
same party of Chinese hunters early in the morning, and agreed to
divide the meat of all the pigs we killed during the day if they
would join forces with us. Among them was a tall, fine-looking young
fellow, evidently the leader, who was a real hunter--the only one we
found in the entire region. He knew instinctively where the pigs
were, what they would do, and how to get them.

He led us without a halt along the summit of the mountain into a
ravine and up a long slope to the crest of a knifelike ridge. Then
he suddenly dropped in the grass and pointed across a canyon to a
bare hillside. Two pigs were there in plain sight--one a very large
sow. They were fully three hundred yards away and on the edge of a
bushy patch toward which they were feeding slowly. Smith left me to
hurry to the bottom of the canyon where he could have a shot at close
range if either one went down the hill, while I waited behind a
stone. Before he was halfway down the slope the sow moved toward the
patch of cover into which the smaller pig had already disappeared.
It must be then, if I was to have a shot at all. I fired rather
hurriedly and registered a clean miss. Both pigs, instead of staying
in the cover where they would have been