He hears but
the Spirit of the Mist,
And it speaks to the Spirit of the Fell.
For little hollows and little hills Scott's dogs, that
raved through the hollow pass amain,
Chiding the rocks that yelled again,
may have been highly effective when his mediaeval sportsmen, who
carried no guns, could keep within a furlong of them. But in the
depths of the great mountains, with point-blank range of six hundred
yards and long pops of nearly twice that, they would be preposterous.
Fancy the Quorndon or the Pytchley on the flanks of the Matterhorn!
Chamois-hunting, the sporting specialty of the Swiss and the Tyrolese,
appears to be dying out. The hunter of our day keeps it up rather as
a tradition than as a practical pursuit. He rarely bags a "goat,"
for goats are very few to bag, and those few even more supernaturally
fleet and sure of foot and keen of nose than their less-hunted
ancestors. Still, somewhere in that upper world of lilac-white that
melts into the clouds in vast but distance-softened chasms of viscid
ice and rifts of gray gneiss, there is an object for him. In some nook
or on some crag of the square leagues of desert that swell around him
a troop of the desiderated ruminants is grazing, if grazing it can
be called where grass is none. He is very sure of that. Even from the
door of his chalet he scans the slopes in the half hope of detecting a
flock or a single goat.
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