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Again we crawled like snakes among the rocks and again an empty slope of waving grass met our eyes. The goral had disappeared, and even Achi could not discover a sign of life upon the meadow. With an exclamation of disgust I got to my feet and looked around. Instantly there was a rattle of stones and a huge goral leaped out of the grass thirty yards away and dashed up the hill.
This invisibility, combined with the fact that the Snow Mountain gorals lived on almost inaccessible cliffs thickly covered with scrub spruce forest, made "still hunting" impossible. In fact, Baron Haendel-Mazzetti, who had explored this part of the Snow Mountains fairly thoroughly in his search for plants, had never seen a goral, and did not know that such an animal existed there.
I had not gone thirty feet, and Hotenfa was still sitting down, when I saw him wave his arm excitedly and throw up his gun to shoot. I leaped down to his side just as he fired at a big female goral which was sound asleep in an open patch of grass on the mountain-side. Hotenfa's bullet broke the animal's foreleg at the knee but without the slightest sign of injury she dashed down the cliff.
I had just ejected the empty shell when Achi seized me by the arm, whispering "gnai-yang, gnai-yang, gnai-yang, na, na, na, na," and pointing to the cliffs two hundred yards above us. I looked up just in time to see another goral flash behind a rock on the very summit of the ridge.
For the third I got a dead rest over a stone and as the crash of the little Mannlicher echoed up the gorge, the goral threw itself into the air whirling over and over onto the rocks below. The hunters, mad with excitement, dashed up the hill and down into the stream bed, and when I arrived the goral lay on a grassy ledge beside the water.
A slight wind was blowing and before long we had sand in our shoes, sand in our beds, sand in our clothes, and we were eating sand. Heller went down the river with a bag of traps while we set forty on the hills above camp, and after a supper of goral steak, which did much to allay the irritation of the day, we crawled into our sandy beds.
By mistake Hotenfa had discharged a load of buckshot and it was my bullet which had killed the goral but his joy was so great that I would not for anything have disillusioned him. It was a half hour's hard work to get to the place where the goral had fallen. The dogs were already there lying quietly beside the animal when we arrived.
The steady drum of rain on our tent shot a thrill of disappointment through me as I opened my eyes, but before we had crawled out of our sleeping-bags and dressed it lessened to a gentle patter and soon ceased altogether. It left a cold, gray morning with dense clouds weaving in and out among the peaks but, nevertheless, I decided to go out with the hunters to try for goral.
Our pleasure was somewhat dampened, however, when we went to recover the first goral for we found that when it had landed in the grass at the edge of the river it had either rolled or crawled into the water. We searched along the bank for half a mile but without success and returned to Hui-yao just in time for tiffin.
We would arrive to see the hounds dancing about the burrow yelping excitedly instead of having a goral at bay as we had expected. Some of the beautiful black and ivory white quills are more than twelve inches long and very sharp.
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