ran down the valley and into a heavily
wooded ravine where the dogs lost his trail only a short distance above
camp.

I returned to find that Heller had secured a rich haul from the traps. As
we supposed, the runways which Yvette and I had discovered above timber
line were made by a meadow vole (_Microtus_) and in the forest almost every
trap had caught a white-footed mouse (_Apodemus_). He also had several new
shrews and we caught eight different species of these important little
animals at this one camp.

Wu, the interpreter, hearing us speak of shrews, came to me one day in
great perplexity with his Anglo-Chinese dictionary. He had looked up the
word "shrew" and found that it meant "a cantankerous woman!"

The following day Heller went out with the hunters and saw two gorals but
did not get a shot. In the meantime Yvette and I ran the traps and prepared
the small mammals. While we were far up on the mountain-side, Baron
Haendel-Mazzetti appeared armed with ropes and an alpine snow ax. He was
about to attempt to climb the highest peak which had never been ascended
but the drifts turned him back several hundred feet from the summit. He
dined at our camp and as all of us carefully refrained from "war talk" we
spent a very pleasant evening. During his three years in Yuen-nan he had
explored and mapped many sections of the province which had not been
visited previously by foreigners and from him we obtained much valuable
information.

On the third morning we were up before daylight and I left with the hunters
in the gray dawn. We climbed steadily for an hour after leaving camp and,
when well up on the mountain-side, skirted the base of a huge peak through
a dense forest of spruce and low bamboo thickets, emerging upon a steep
grassy meadow; this abutted on a sheer rock wall at the upper end, and
below ran into a thick evergreen forest.

As we entered the meadow the big red leading dog, trotted off by himself
toward the rock wall above us, and in a few moments we heard his sharp
yelps near the summit. Instantly the pack was off stringing out in a long
line up the hillside.

We had nearly crossed the open slope and were standing on the edge of a
deep gully when the dogs gave tongue and as soon as the hunters were sure
they were coming in our direction we hurried to the bottom of the gorge and
began the sharp ascent on the other side. It was almost straight up and
before we had gone a hundred feet we were all gasping f