in fighting another dog, though he was not as quarrelsome as many of his sort often are. Elias said he never had had, and never again should have, such a dog, which had been at the death of, I think, forty-seven elk. The young dog he brought was never in really good condition, and failed me on one occasion when we found flesh tracks of a bear. Though I had seen a bear in the previous season, at no great distance, but too late in the evening to hunt him, and though it had always been my greatest wish to kill one, these animals are now so rare in Norway that very few Englishmen of my generation have been lucky enough to get one. Captain Gerrard Ferrand, probably the most successful amateur elk and bear hunter among our countrymen, had always told me that they were the most wandering and the hardest beasts to find, and that, without good dogs that would bring a bear to bay, it was only when snow was lying, and bears could be tracked to their winter dens, that one had any certainty of finding them. The Norwegians arc often by no means willing to follow bears alone, but Elias and his brother had both killed them, and told stories of how they had followed a she-bear with two cubs into a cave and shot them in cold blood. On this occasion the scent was too old and the dog not at all keen to follow it. Though he had never seen a bear alive or dead, he had an instinctive fear of bears as I afterwards proved.
I began to think that, like the Emperor of Austria, I should not find the Great Bear my lucky star; for as the story was told me in Styria, the Emperor, though a very keen sportsman, has not been able to shoot one, On one occasion a great magnate in Carinthia had reports from his keepers of a bear being seen on his property. He telegraphed at once to the Emperor to come and shoot. Keepers were posted in every pass by which it was possible for the bear to get out of the glen in which he was, and a cordon of men placed across the entrance to the valley. So sure was the noble sportsman of his game, that he had a dress rehearsal of the hunt the day before the Emperor arrived. Posting himself in the pass where the Emperor was to sit, he gave the signal to see if the different squads of beaters would start simultaneously. Everything went like clock¬ work; but long before the bear should have been moved, he came, The shot was so tempting that it was impossible to resist, and the bear fell dead almost before the magnitude of the crime was realised. The noble sportsman was in despair; but as only his own jager had seen the too successful shot, they determined to stop the beat, hide the carcase, and say nothing about it. The next day the Emperor arrived, and was con¬ ducted to a post a little lower down the pass. The beat went on as arranged, but nothing but deer came by, which were allowed to pass unscathed. Many apologies were made for the perversity of a bear which would not wait to be shot even by an Emperor, and after a drive for deer had been brought off in another valley the royal guest departed. But the head- keeper, who knew that if his stops had done their duty the bear could not have disappeared without leaving some traces, and disgusted at the failure, searched with his dog until he found the concealed body. After a year or two the story leaked out and came to the ears of the Emperor,
who determined to have a joke at the expense of his host, At the next
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