mb, and we
were glad to rest when we reached the summit. The old hunter placed
Smith opposite an almost perpendicular face of rock and stationed me
beyond him on the other side. Three beaters had climbed the mountain
a mile below us and were driving up the ridge.

For half an hour I lay stretched out in the sun luxuriating in the
warmth and breathing in the fragrant odor of the pines. While I was
lazily watching a Chinese green woodpecker searching for grubs in a
tree near by, there came the faintest sound of a loosened pebble on
the cliff above my head. Instantly I was alert and tense. A second
later Smith's rifle banged once. Then all was still.

In a few moments he shouted to me that he had fired at a big goral,
but that it had disappeared behind the ridge and he was afraid it
had not been hit. The old hunter, however, had seen the animal
scramble into a tiny grove of pine trees. As it had not emerged, I
was sure the goral was wounded, and when the men climbed up the
cliff they found it dead, bored neatly through the center of the
chest.

Gorals, sika, and roebuck are by no means the only big game animals
in the _Tung Ling_. Bears and leopards are not uncommon, and
occasionally a tiger is killed by the natives. Among other species
is a huge flying squirrel, nearly three feet long, badgers, and
chipmunks, a beautiful squirrel with tufted ears which is almost
black in summer and now is very rare, and dozens of small animals.
But perhaps most interesting of all the creatures of these noble
forests are the only wild monkeys to be found in northeastern China.

The birds are remarkable in variety and numbers. Besides the
Reeves's pheasant, of which I have spoken, there are two other
species of this most beautiful family. One, the common ring-necked
pheasant, is very abundant; the other is the rare Pucrasia, a gray
bird with a dark-red breast, and a yellow striped head surmounted by
a conspicuous crest. It is purely a mountain form requiring a mixed
forest of pine and oak and, although more widely distributed than
the Reeves's pheasant, it occurs in comparatively few localities of
north China.

One morning as Smith and I were coming back from hunting we saw our
three boys perched upon a ledge above the stream peering into the
water. They called to us, "Would you like some fish?" "Of course,"
we answered, "but how can you get them?"

In a second they had slipped from the rock and were stripping off
their clothes. Th