A SHOOTING TRIP IN CHAMBA. BY F. L. FARRER. IT was the middle of one of the hottest of hot weathers at Agra. Coming out of the mess after luncheon I glanced at the thermometer in the verandah. It registered 110°. As I walked across to my bungalow a wave of fierce heat as from a furnace blast seemed to strike up at me; the merciless white glare seemed to draw one's eyes out of one's head; the air danced and vibrated in the scorching sunlight. Thank heaven, I thought to myself, I have only got two more weeks of this ordeal by fire and then leave -leave for two whole months. It was too hot to sleep or read or even think. The only thing to be done was to subside under a punkah and get somebody else to think for me. I summoned my familiar in the person of Amir Khan, my Mahommedan servant, to my side. "Talk about cool things," I said. He took the cue at once. There was the pressing question of where the Sahib would spend his leave this year to be decided. Last year we had spent our leave in the jungles of the south. It was true we had had good sport and had escaped malaria, thanks be Allah, but it would not be wise to tempt Fortune in that direction again. The Sahib had spoken of Kashmir and Baltistan, but to achieve anything great in those far hunting-grounds three months' leave at least were required, whereas we had only got two. Without a doubt the place to go to was Chamba. He had visited this glorious mountain land before with a previous master; he knew of a shikari whose name was a household word throughout the countryside. In ten days from starting we should be in the land of black bear, gural, and scrow; in a fortnight in the haunts of red bear and tahr. Then he launched forth into a glowing eulogy of this heaven upon earth-a country of rushing mountain streams and smiling sunlit valleys; of majestic snow-clad mountains and cool forests of deodar, oak, and pine; of grassy flower-bedecked upland meadows; of fresh lifegiving air from the eternal snows; of rhododendrons and wild strawberries; of apricot and walnut trees. He wound up his panegyric with the words : "It's God's own country." The man was a wizard. I had forgotten the heat. I was drinking in great draughts of pure mountain air. I could smell the delicious fragrant scent of the deodar forests. I could hear the muffled roar of snow-fed mountain torrents. I could see range upon range of forest-clad mountains sweep We had rumbled over the Punjab and Sind Railway to Amritzar. We had jolted over the branch line that leads thence to Pathankote at the base of the foothills of the Himalayas. We had galloped in a tonga uphill and down dale to the accompaniment of rapid hoof-beats and the tuneful call of the horn echoing through the valleys as it gives warning for change ing up to and losing themselves twenty years he had been in the eternal snows and conducting British officers on glaciers. "You speak words of shooting expeditions during the honeyed wisdom," I said. "We leave season, sometimes makwill start for Chamba this day ing two trips in the summer fortnight." Of all the decisions months. He had a wonderful I have made, I have never collection of chits, from which made a better. I gathered that others had as high an opinion of his attainments as I formed after two months of the most delightful hunting with him. I have met shikaris good, bad, and indifferent. A few there are, finished masters of their craft, who have made a high science of the art of hunting. Moula belonged to this category. These men, while giving full value to the possible eccentricities of individual animals and the hundred and one different factors which can never be disregarded, seem to work on a theory of probabilities, the result of the accumulated experience of years, which ultimately can hardly fail to crown their efforts with success. When they have the requisite intelligence to enable them to analyse their actions-there are many who act from instinct, and are unable to give an explanation of the considerations which govern them in making a decision-and are sufficiently generous to give one an insight into their craft, then there are few more fascinating companions. the horses " 66 over the fifty odd miles of military road which separates the latter place from Dalhousie, perched picturesquely on its three mountainpeaks. From here onwards there are only pack-paths, and all baggage has to be carried either by pack - animals or coolies. My shikari, Moula, with his half-brother, Mardawar, who filled the joint rôle of understudy and gun-carrier, had come with a band of retainers from his village in the mountains to meet me and transport my baggage. I took a liking to the man at once. He turned out to be a firstrate shikari. As a boy he had been tiffin-coolie to that mighty hunter, Kinloch, for whom he had an unstinted admiration, regarding him almost in the light of a demigod. For When hunting with them one has the conviction that they are never working at haphazard, that when they draw blank their failure only stimulates them to greater efforts, and that in the end their systematised knowledge cannot fail to triumph over the most evasive of the animals they hunt. If one has the good fortune to obtain the services of one of these experts, then every hour, every day, of one's hunting is of engrossing interest. We left Dalhousie, and dropped down through beautiful forests of deodars to Kirjiah, a miniature gem of the Himalayas, where there is a charming little rest-house nestling snugly in a grassy cup of the forest-clad hills. A deep pool occupies the centre of this charmed circle of emeraldgreen turf, which sweeps up to an amphitheatre of dark hanging deodar woods. Next morning, continuing our march through the forest, we came to the edge of the highlands a few miles from Kirjiah, whence, looking down across the valley of the Ravee river, one gets one's first glimpse of the capital of Chamba picturesquely situated on a plateau, the only level area of any size in the state, with a background of mountains behind it. To the front of the town there is a wide expanse of lawn-like turf. Below that the cliffs of the plateau drop to the rushing river. The Rajah's white palace occupies the central position, and the houses of his subjects cluster around it. At the western end of the town there is a dak-bungalow, from the garden of which one sees, below the cliffs, the rush ing and tumbling river, carrying on its surface baulks of timber, which are floated downstream to the Punjab. The magnificent forests of oak, deodar, and pine are leased from the State by Government. Two of the five great Punjab rivers from which the province takes its name water the State, the Ravee and the Chenab. Arriving at Chamba at midday, I went in the evening to see the Mean Sahib Bhuri Singh, the Rajah's private secretary, a keen sportsman, who has extended a kindly welcome and given the benefit of his advice to many a British officer who has had the good fortune to visit that beautiful country. we The next three days travelled on well-kept bridle roads overlooking smiling cultivated valleys. It was harvesttime. Crops of wheat, barley, and maize were being gathered. The little flat-roofed houses nestled on the hillsides amidst their tiny cultivation terraces and orchards of apricot and walnut trees. On the rooftops golden Indian corn was spread out to dry, making, with the crimson of the millet now ripening in the fields, vivid splashes of colour in the landscape. Miniature mountain cattle grazed on the hill-slopes, their bells tinkling musically as they moved. Here and there a herd-boy, stretched beneath some spreading chestnut-tree, played merrily on his pipe as he watched his flock of sheep and goats. From below came the subdued roar of the snowfed torrent far down the valley. One day on the road we met gay parties of hillmen and women laughing and singing as they hurried on their way to a mela or country fête, a very popular form of entertainment in Chamba. The women wore bright-coloured little caps of red or yellow, which in some cases were adorned with roughcut turquoises. Many of them had necklaces of coral, to which were attached small silver charms. The younger women wore their hair in three plaits. Some of them were by no means unprepossessing in appearance. The men were dressed in loose tunics of puttoo, the homespun of the hills. Often a flower would be stuck jauntily above the ear under the turban. A jovial happy people they seemed to be. Other wayfarers we met were Mahommedan Gujars from Jammu, dark-bearded men of a strongly Semitic type of feature, driving their great water-buffaloes to pastures up on the mountain-side. There is an annual summer immigration of these people into Chamba, where they rent grazing on the upland meadows. Accompanied by their families, they seemed to lead a pleasant gipsy life encamped in some oak wood beside a mountain stream, watching their huge beasts grow fatter day by day on the succulent flower-bedecked grassy margs of the mountain-sides. Part of the Central Asian trade - route runs through Chamba. Wheeled transport is of course out of the question, and the merchandise, consisting for the most part of wool, borax, and brick tea, is carried on hardy little ponies and donkeys, sheep and goats being pressed into the service where the going is too bad for the larger pack - animals. In a country where newspapers are a minus quantity these traders are the natural purveyors of news. Moula, who had been up and down the country for many years on shooting expeditions, was well known to many of them. Most of the caravan owners that I met were Lahoulis, sturdy mountaineers of a pronounced Mongolian cast of countenance, an interesting and much-travelled class of men, and well worth talking to, for their business leads them over one of the most difficult and dangerous trade routes of the world. We would often rest on the way and spend half an hour chatting with them. A gift of molasses-sweetened tobacco, a luxury much appreciated amongst these mountain folk, served to pave the way for friendly intercourse. Strange tales they had to tell of their journeys over stupendous mountain passes, of avalanches, snow blizzards and glaciers, of pack-animals lost over precipices, of flooded rivers and dizzy mountain paths sometimes cut out of the sheer rock of the precipice, some times bracketed to its face, of forced marches to reach the passes before the snows of winter closed them. They travel annually to Leh, in Ladakh, which is an important trading entrepôt. Here they meet traders from Yarkand, on the other side of the roof of the world, with whom they exchange goods, buying and selling. Then in the latter part of the summer they bring their merchandise down to Kulu, Pathankote, and Amritzar, returning with loads of salt and grain to the interior. One that I talked to had been over the Karakoram Pass to far Yarkand. Two days' march from Chamba I had my first shot at mountain game. My camp was pitched above a rushing mountain torrent, which further down the valley passed through a narrow rocky gorge. We descended half-way down its precipitous slope. Moula gave a grunt of of satisfac tion. A gural, the chamois of the Himalayas, was feeding amongst the scrub that clothed the opposite side of the gorge. I could see nothing. Sitting behind Moula, I got him to align the rifle on the exact spot, and then taking the rifle, kept my gaze fixed upon the point indicated. Still I could not pick up the quarry. Then an ear flickered, and, as in a child's picture-puzzle, the gural's form stood out from its surroundings. I brought off the shot all right, but the animal fell headlong into the torrent below, and we never recovered him. We did two days' more marching, and then spent two or three days after gural before going on to tahr ground. Very fascinating sport I found the stalking of this wily little goat antelope. It is a good preparation for the pursuit of the larger goats, both from the point of view of training the eyesight to detect an extraordinarily elusive little animal and of cultivating a "head" for bad ground. I succeeded in getting a couple of them. One was an old solitary male very dark in colour, the other was a younger animal. We had left the lower valleys and the last village behind us, and were up on the mountain heights. Towards evening, following a sheep-path over the grassy margs, we arrived at our camping-place at the head of a nullah, whence we were to explore the adjoining nullah for tahr. Dusk was coming on, but while the coolies were pitching the tents the indefatigable Moula went off to spy out the precipitous slopes just over the crest. In a short time I saw him returning; there was a buoyancy in his step which convinced me that he was the bearer of good news. He had seen two fine male tahr on the khud-side below our campingground. Light was failing, and it would not be worth while to risk a shot, but tomorrow before dawn we would be in position. I suggested |