as near as I dared go, the stag was so restless and the light so bad that I missed him, We found another later, but as he was standing a good deal higher up and they calculated that by the time we got above him the cloud would be on the hill, we did not stay out late but went in at eleven to a good dinner and a snooze. This I found to be the regular plan here during the rutting season, as the stags rarely roar after nine or ten in the morning, when they retire to the shelter of the woods, coming out again and commencing to roar an hour or two before dark.
The estate was admirably provided with narrow paths along the sides of the forest-covered hills, these paths keeping very much on the same level. When the season begins, these paths are cleared of all fallen trees and sticks so that you can walk in perfect silence, and approach either from above or below any stag which may be heard roaring. I also found that the position of the sun determines whether the stalk is made from above or below, as when the hillside is in shade the air draws down the hill and, when in sun, upwards. And as the weather at this season is usually still and sunny with frost at night, one has little trouble with eddies and currents of wind, which so often spoil a stalk in Scotland. In fact, the system is quite different and consists rather in finding stags by their roar, and using the glass mostly to make out deer at a distance.
That evening we slept and dined very well in a keeper’s house to which our necessaries had been sent up. Next morning I went out alone with the head forester and soon after daylight heard a stag roaring in the forest. When we got within 200 yards I asked him to let me go in alone, as I feared that he might put me off my shot, and after a little manoeuvring I got sight of a hind walking slowly through the forest. The stag was not far behind and I killed him dead with a single shot, and found I had a good ten-pointer, Up ran the forester, who was very pleased, but he neither bled nor gralloched the stag. I found that this is never done here until after the body is carried down to the road, as it is supposed to make deer shy of the ground where any blood or entrails are left.
The next thing was to cut a sprig of silver fir, which he presented to me with great ceremony to place in my hat as a sign of success, and then to take out the two big teeth which are much valued by German sportsmen. We then went back to the house where my companion soon arrived and congratulated me. He had found a stag whose horns were abnormal and formed two knobs on the top of the head, and was more anxious to get it than if it had been a sixteen-pointer.
In the afternoon I went out again, and found five or six different stags moving about in a partly wooded hollow, but so restless and uneasy that I could not get a shot. During the six days I was here I never saw more than two or three hinds in company with a stag, and sometimes only one. But though hinds were nothing like so numerous as in a Scotch forest, the proportion of good stags was much greater, and I was told that about eighty are annually shot on the estate. The next day we had a drive in a place where my host told me he once shot eleven stags without moving from his post. Only three men acted as drivers, and they went a long way round before daylight, and walked towards us through the woods, tapping trees as they went.
