hear the bay, as the wind had become strong. After an hour or two, as it was getting late, and the dog was still absent, I determined to go home. As we were picking our way through a windfall, I heard stick crack in the forest, and unslung my rifle in a hurry, I was just in time to see the brushwood move as an elk trotted through it, and I had a glimpse only of horns which looked pretty good. Holding well forward, I got a snap¬ shot, as he passed across a slight opening only partly in sight, and fired. The elk ran on, and as the dog came up on his track we ran on, and found him dead with a bullet through his heart, a hundred yards below in a thicket. This was a fair bull of about five years old with ten points, and the best I had hitherto killed. Such chances rarely occur, but it taught me to make a rule which I have always adhered to since, which is that, however hopeless things might seem, I would never let anyone else carry my rifle, as stalkers so often do in Scotland.
As I was unable to talk to Larsen, and the local men seemed jealous of his success, I let him go soon after, and returned home on October ist without having got any more bulls, though I hunted over a lot of good ground and got two more elk.
The following season I returned to the same valley with Sir Frederick Carrington, who was at home on leave, and Mr. Staniland, and we had a fairly successful season in Tydal, though our sport was a good deal interfered with by the number of reindeer which were scattered over the upper part of the valley. It appeared that during the preceding winter a large herd in Sweden had been broken up and stampeded by some cause, and had crossed the fjelds into Norway followed only by one of the Lapp herders, who arrived half dead from exposure at Stuedal. Many of these deer were never recovered, and the Norwegian farmers, finding that they were pulling down the little hay-stacks which are put up at any little forest meadow where there is enough grass to be worth cutting, began to hunt them, and disturbed our ground so much that we had to give it up.
On one occasion I found two fine reindeer stags in a lovely valley between Stuedal and Roros lying under a rock on the shore of a little mountain lake. I stalked them successfully, but they bolted at the last moment and I fired a snapshot at one of them as they rushed round the rock. Running forward I came in sight of the shore, and got another shot at a stag running along it. He at once turned into the water, and I lulled him with a second shot twenty yards from the bank. Peter waded in and pulled him out, a splendid stag with white head and neck and in very prime condition. After gralloching him I went back to the rock to sec what had become of the other one, and found him also dead, close to where I had fired. We lived on the meat of these stags for a fortnight, and though I am not a great meat eater, I have never tasted anything to equal thin slices of really fat reindeer toasted or grilled, and eaten with cranberries and hot flat brod. It is often said that one’s appreciation of what one eats in camp or when in the wilds is due to appetite, but I brought a haunch of one of these deer home, and tried it against a perfect haunch of fallow buck at a dinner-party at Colesborne; when the unanimous opinion was that the reindeer was much the more delicate and tender meat of the two. What one generally gets as reindeer meat in Norwegian
