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Updated: June 4, 2025
Since the roebuck at the Tung Ling were in the same condition as the sika, they were useless for our purposes. The goral, however, which live high up on the rocky peaks, had not begun to shed their hair, and they gave us good shooting. One beautiful morning Smith killed a splendid ram just above our camp.
I was perfectly sure that the goral would try to steal out, and in two or three minutes his head appeared. I fired instantly, boring him through both shoulders, and he rolled over and over stone dead lodging against a rock not fifty yards from where we stood.
By signs Achi indicated that we were to climb up above and circle around the cliff to a ragged promontory which jutted into space within a hundred yards of the animal. It was a good three quarters of an hour before we peered cautiously between two rocks opposite the ledge where the goral had been asleep. The animal was gone.
I fired instantly and the noble animal, with feet wide spread, and head thrown back, launched himself into space falling six hundred feet to the rocks beneath us. As the goral leaped Hotenfa seemed suddenly to go insane. Yelling with joy, he threw his arms about my neck, rubbing my face with his and pounding me on the back until I thought he would throw us both off the cliff.
We had not gone a hundred yards when the hunter shouted that a goral was running in our direction. Hotenfa reached the edge of the ridge before me, and I saw him fire with the three-barrel gun at a goral which disappeared into the brush. His bullet struck the dirt only a few feet behind the animal although it must have been well beyond a hundred yards and almost straight below us.
They said that there were many serow, goral, muntjac and some wapiti in the forests above the village, and we could well believe it, for there was never a more "likely looking" spot. Although the men did not claim to be professional hunters, nevertheless they said that they had good dogs and had killed many muntjac and other animals.
When the hunters were carrying the goral to camp we met Yvette and Heller on their way to visit the traps just below snow line, and she returned with me to photograph the animal and to watch the ceremonies which I knew would be performed. One of the natives cut a leafy branch, placed the goral upon it and at the first cut chanted a prayer.
No dinner which I have ever eaten tasted like the one we had of goral steak that night and after a smoke I crawled into my sleeping bag, dead tired in body but with a happy heart. On October 22, we moved to the foot of the mountain and camped in the temple which we had formerly occupied.
One of the other hunters was standing there and his crossbow twanged as the goral passed only a few yards from him, but the wicked little poisoned dart stuck quivering into a tree a few inches above the animal's back. The goral dashed over the ridge almost on top of the second hunter who was too surprised to shoot and only yelled that it was coming toward us on the cliff below.
Our next day's hunt was for goral on the precipitous cliffs north of camp. Goral belong to a most interesting group of mammals known as the "goat-antelopes" because of the intermediate position which they occupy between the true antelope and the goats.
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