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S P O R T I N G C L A S S I C S • 111 The charm and difficulty of stalking Europe's shyest and rarest gamebird. By WILLIAM J. LONG T he charm of hunting—aside from the chase of dangerous game, which has a charm of its own—seems to lie partly in the difficulties met and overcome. When you want a woodmouse with all your heart (as bait, perhaps, for the biggest trout in the pool) and the tiny mouse, trained by much dodging of owls and foxes, keeps you watching and scheming for a week before you get him or lose him, there is more honest sport in that pursuit than in getting a deer for your table by simply paddling swiftly and silently around the alder point and taking him as he jumps from the lilypads. To me, the charm of hunting the auerhahn was that it offered so many difficulties. You had to get up early in the morning and depend upon yourself instead of a keeper. The auerhahn is the wildest and shyest of all feathered game, and I had never met anyone who had shot one. Furthermore, I was attracted by the chance to discover firsthand something about a rare bird, of which almost nothing is known. So when the Baron offered me my choice of a reh (deer) hunt, in which "we ought to get twenty, but we will probably get more," or a try at this wild bird, which we would probably not see and almost certainly not shoot, I chose the latter and went to bed early. The dictionaries call the auerhahn the mountain-cock. The Baron, however, said the dictionaries know nothing about it. Moreover, he has both birds in his preserves. After the AuerhAhn The mountain-cock is the berghahn, a large black pheasant, wild and hard to shoot. The berghahn is meant when one speaks of the capercailie in Europe. The auerhahn is much larger, dark brown in color, and wilder than a woods raven. Certain parts of Bavaria and the Black Forest are the only localities where one may still be reasonably sure of hearing the auerhahn in a week's hunting. One may sometimes hear its booming call from a bit of remote forest in other parts of Germany, but that is the exception. Only the birds' extraordinary wildness has saved them from extinction, for nothing is done, nor can be done, I think, toward artificial stocking. The young birds would simply die or beat themselves to death if confined in the presence of men. I t was one morning in late April, on the edge of the Black Forest region, that I tried my first hunt for auerhahn. We were off at three in the morning, four of us, each with driver and gamekeeper. The mists hung low in the sleeping villages as we rattled along on the winding roads, the air heavy with the night smells of the woods. Max, the keeper, in response to my questions, explained the nature of the hunt and of my own duties if I expected a shot. "You see, Herr Doktor, this is the only way you can hunt the auerhahn"—this in answer to my surprise at springtime hunting. "It's no use to hunt him in the woods with pointers. Donnerwetter! He has ears like a witch and also eyes. I have been keeper twenty years in these woods, and I never saw him except at this time and in this way. Sometimes I have heard his wings at a distance, but not often. He is a silent kerl and keeps to himself. "Only in April or May he falls in love— then he makes a fool of himself and sometimes gets shot. He flies into a big tree at daylight and makes a racket to rouse a policeman. While he calls, he knows nothing else; he is deaf and blind. Then you must run hard. But stop running before he stops calling, else you will lose him. If you stir, if a leaf stirs, he hears it and is off over the mountain." A half-hour's drive brought us to a footpath leading up the mountain, where the Baron and his friends left us with a cheery weidmansluck! as they disappeared in the darkness. For each hunter a separate carriage had been brought, for the birds are found singly and generally miles apart. We pushed rapidly upward, Max and I, till we reached the heavier mixed growth of the summit, where we stole on much more cautiously, stopping often to listen. It was curious hunting, this creeping through the still, dark woods in which not a bird had yet awakened, relying on our overstrained ears, as if we were stalking a camp of hostile Indians instead of a wild wood's bird. Every few minutes Max turned to whisper a caution against noise, though what with his heavy boots and his ignorance of stalking methods, he seemed to me to be making noise enough to alarm less sensitive ears than the auerhahn's. Certainly he could never have stalked a red deer that way—to Hunting Still life witH CaperCaillie, SHotgun and Hunter'S Hat by K. PochwalsKi