What has been said will show that, to become a successful stalker, practice and early training in mountain work are, if not absolutely essential, at least very desirable, and even the possessor of these advantages has cause to pray for perpetual youth. As years roll by, even the keenest stalker gradually becomes more and more reconciled to the assistance afforded by beaters and other extraneous aids to outwit this wary game, and more and more satisfied with the buck carefully picked from the band as it rushes past one’s post in headlong flight, or in cutting short the earthly career of a tricky old veteran whose oft-repeated practice of sneaking through the line of guns unobserved was attempted once too often.
The following account of a ‘Treibjagd’ in the Duke of Saxe-Coburg’s famous preserves in the Hinter Riss in Tyrol will give a comprehensive picture of driving chamois at its very best.
In this vast preserve, consisting of a great strip of mountain country, a very sea of jagged ranges, stretching from the Inn Valley to the Isar, driving is made a fine art, the experience of fifty years assisting to no little extent the efforts of as fine a staff of keepers as can be found in the Alps. Sport can be obtained there with a luxurious ease that is in striking contrast to the hard fare and rough times usually the lot of the stalker. To drive chamois over an exceedingly rough country in a given direction is a very much harder task, however, than appears on the face of it. Take a tract of mountains, the selection for that day’s drive, five or six miles square, connected with adjoining ranges by numerous passes by which the wary game can easily escape; take the extreme uncertainty of the wind in these elevated localities, now blowing in the desired direction, now suddenly veering round, carrying the alarm for many miles to the keen-scented game, and undoing in one minute the most carefully planned manœuvre, and it will be realised how many obstacles and contingencies, often of the most unforeseen nature, must be provided for to make a drive successful. Where such large areas have to be surrounded a whole army of beaters would not suffice to keep chamois in the drive, and the ‘lappen,’ or flags, one of the most important aids on such occasions, have to be employed. These consist of many miles of strong cord to which at intervals of every four or five feet bright-coloured pieces of linen about the size of a pocket-handkerchief are fastened. These cords, resembling a laundry line hung low, are drawn on two sides of the tract to be driven, and are kept in position about three feet from the ground by rods firmly fastened into the rocks. Swayed by the breeze these flags wave to and fro, and under ordinary circumstances serve their purpose of preventing the chamois escaping that way. As a rule they are strung along the knifeback backbone of the mountains to be enclosed, jagged ridges peculiar to a limestone formation, where apparently only flies with glue on their feet could find a footing. Great care has to be taken in stringing these cords, as the ever-busy breeze makes simultaneous action necessary; and even then, when everything appears to work like clockwork, some hitherto unknown gap in an apparently perfectly impassable wall of rock will afford escape, for where one chamois can get the whole band will follow, and the day prove a complete failure.