[Sketches From My Life by Hobart Pasha]@TWC D-Link book
Sketches From My Life

CHAPTER XX
11/21

This I cannot account for; the natives, who had remarked this deer on several occasions feeding with the herd of fallow deer, called it the 'Cassic Boa,' which means 'straight-horned.' Some time after this I had some good sport with the fallow deer.

Having got more accustomed to their habits, I found that it was of no use trying to approach them, their scent being too keen, their eyesight too sharp; the only way to get them is by very careful, in fact I may say scientific, driving.
Good boar shooting may be had by going some little distance from Constantinople.

It usually is done either by beaters or with boarhounds; but I have had very good sport at boar while hunting for woodcocks and pheasants, in what may be called covert shooting--not exactly English covert shooting, in which almost every tree is known by the keepers, but in coverts of great extent, in which there are almost impassable thickets, made still more impassable by a well-known bramble called the 'wait a bit,' a thing that hooks on to your eyelids as you pass.
There it is that in these coverts spaniels, half-English, half country-bred dogs, do frequently the work of beaters, and it is a strange fact that while piggy starts at once from his lair at the approach of the boarhounds, he will not budge an inch for the little yapping spaniel, whom he treats with contempt.
I have known many instances when, on hearing a jolly row in the covert, I have crawled in on my hands and knees, and found a boar being bayed by my spaniels--in fact, I have killed more pigs in this way than in any other.

The danger is that you may have your dogs killed by the boar; this has happened to me on one or two occasions, more especially with young dogs.
I had once a cunning old spaniel dog (poor 'Dick,' well known to most sportsmen out here), who has frequently come out of the wood with his mouth full of pig's hair, he evidently having torn the hair off the animal while laying in his lair.

(Dick was never hurt by a pig.) I have often surrounded, with my brother sportsmen and myself, large bushes in which the piggies were securely hidden, driven them out, and shot them as one would do hares or rabbits.
I have heard a good deal of the danger of pig shooting, on account of the savage propensities of the animal; but I have found that, with very rare exceptions, the Anatolian wild boar always runs.


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