n the hillside and emerged on the plain a hundred
yards from our camp. We mounted at once, and Ottley deployed the mounted
infantry, who were ready for parade, to head the beast from the hills.
The shao jinked like a hare, and crossed and recrossed the stream
several times, but the poor beast was exhausted, and, after twenty
minutes' exciting chase, we surrounded it. Captain Ottley threw himself
on the animal's neck and held it down until a sepoy arrived with ropes
to bind its hind-legs. The chase was certainly a unique incident in the
history of sport--a field of seventy in the Himalayas, a clear spurt in
the open, no dogs, and the quarry the rarest zoological specimen in the
world. The beast stood nearly 14 hands, and was remarkable for its long
ears and elongated jaw. The sequel was sad. Besides the fright and
exhaustion, the captured shao sustained an injury in the loin; it pined,
barely nibbled at its food, and, after ten days, died.

Sikkim stags are sometimes shot by native shikaris, and there is great
rivalry among members of the mission force in buying their heads. They
are shy, inaccessible beasts, and they are not met with beyond the wood
limit.

The shooting in the Chumbi Valley is interesting to anyone fond of
natural history, though it is a little disappointing from the
sportsman's point of view. When officers go out for a day's shooting,
they think they have done well if they bring home a brace of pheasants.
When the sappers and miners began to work on the road below Gautsa, the
blood-pheasants used to come down to the stream to watch the operations,
but now one sees very few game-birds in the valley. The minal is
occasionally shot. The cock-bird, as all sportsmen know, is, with the
exception of the Argus-eye, the most beautiful pheasant in the world.
There is a lamasery in the neighbourhood, where the birds are almost
tame. The monks who feed them think that they are inhabited by the
spirits of the blest. Where the snow melts in the pine-forests and
leaves soft patches and moist earth, you will find the blood-pheasant.
When you disturb them they will run up the hillside and call
vociferously from their new hiding-place, so that you may get another
shot. Pheasant-shooting here is not sport; the birds seldom rise, and
when they do it is almost impossible to get a shot at them in the thick
jungle. One must shoot them running for the pot. Ten or a dozen is not a
bad bag for one gun later in the year, when m