Chapter 25

CHAPTER XXV [Hunted by the Little Chamois]

Next morning we left in the train for Switzerland, and reached Lucerne
about ten o'clock at night. The first discovery I made was that the
beauty of the lake had not been exaggerated. Within a day or two I made
another discovery. This was, that the lauded chamois is not a wild goat;
that it is not a horned animal; that it is not shy; that it does not
avoid human society; and that there is no peril in hunting it. The
chamois is a black or brown creature no bigger than a mustard seed; you
do not have to go after it, it comes after you; it arrives in vast herds
and skips and scampers all over your body, inside your clothes; thus
it is not shy, but extremely sociable; it is not afraid of man, on the
contrary, it will attack him; its bite is not dangerous, but neither
is it pleasant; its activity has not been overstated--if you try to put
your finger on it, it will skip a thousand times its own length at one
jump, and no eye is sharp enough to see where it lights. A great deal
of romantic nonsense has been written about the Swiss chamois and the
perils of hunting it, whereas the truth is that even women and children
hunt it, and fearlessly; indeed, everybody hunts it; the hunting is
going on all the time, day and night, in bed and out of it. It is poetic
foolishness to hunt it with a gun; very few people do that; there is
not one man in a million who can hit it with a gun. It is much easier to
catch it than it is to shoot it, and only the experienced chamois-hunter
can do either. Another common piece of exaggeration is that about the
"scarcity" of the chamois. It is the reverse of scarce. Droves of one
hundred million chamois are not unusual in the Swiss hotels. Indeed,
they are so numerous as to be a great pest. The romancers always dress
up the chamois-hunter in a fanciful and picturesque costume, whereas the
best way to hunt this game is to do it without any costume at all. The
article of commerce called chamois-skin is another fraud; nobody could
skin a chamois, it is too small. The creature is a humbug in every
way, and everything which has been written about it is sentimental
exaggeration. It was no pleasure to me to find the chamois out, for he
had been one of my pet illusions; all my life it had been my dream to
see him in his native wilds some day, and engage in the adventurous
sport of chasing him from cliff to cliff. It is no pleasure to me to
expose him, now, and destroy the reader's delight in him and respect for
him, but still it must be done, for when an honest writer discovers an
imposition it is his simple duty to strip it bare and hurl it down from
its place of honor, no matter who suffers by it; any other course would
render him unworthy of the