Often and often I come home without meat, tired, wet, and dispirited. Variable winds, an alert beast in another quarter altogether from those I am stalking, flat slopes where I creep and crawl in vain efforts to come within shooting distance of a herd, my own haste or breathlessness, make stalking a gamble and give it zest too. There is a great deal of satisfaction in dropping a nobber with the.22 at a hundred yards range. I feel less like a butcher after a difficult stalk. Of course when I see deer a couple of hundred yards away that I can in nowise approach I long for the .303. The little rifle is deadly enough if it is held straight at distances up to a hundred yards. Beyond that hitting and killing with it is a risk which I do not often take; I have no wish to wound beasts or merely frighten them, and many a time I have spent two hours grovelling in a slimy bog to discover that it was useless going farther. Then I turn my back on the herd I am stalking; they graze in peace while I snake back the way I had come.

Tired and vexed and footsore though I may be, I never draw near the place we have made our home without a feeling like ecstasy flooding over me. The surge of rock out of the great gorge, the loud wind amongst the gullies in that cliffy hill which overhang our cave, the blind expanse of the vacant world, spring’s colours in the sky and on the moor, change all my spirits.