The valley is hopeless from a zooelogical standpoint.  It is too dry for small mammals and the mountain slopes are so precipitous, thinly forested, and generally undesirable, that, except for gorals, no other large game would live there.  The bird life is decidedly uninteresting.  There are no cranes or sheldrakes and, except for a few flocks of mallards which feed in the rice fields, we saw no other ducks or geese.

On December 20, we turned away from the Mekong valley and began to march southeast by east across an unmapped region toward Ta-li Fu.  We camped at night on a pretty ridge thickly covered with spruce trees just above a deep moist ravine.  In the morning our traps contained several rare shrews, five silver moles, a number of interesting mice, and a beautiful rufous spiny rat.  It was too good a place to leave and I sent Hotenfa to inquire from a family of natives if there was big game of any sort in the vicinity.  He reported that there were goral not far away, and at half past eight we rode down the trail for three miles when I left my horse at a peasant’s house.  They told us that the goral were on a rocky, thinly forested mountain which rose two thousand feet above the valley, and for an hour and a half we climbed steadily upward.

We were resting near the summit on the rim of a deep canon when Hotenfa excitedly whispered, “gnai-yang” and held up three fingers.  He tried to show the animals to me and at last I caught sight of what I thought was a goral standing on a narrow ledge.  I fired and a bit of rock flew into the air while the three gorals disappeared among the trees two hundred feet above the spot where I had supposed them to be.

I was utterly disgusted at my mistake but we started on a run for the other side of the gorge.  When we arrived, Hotenfa motioned me to swing about to the right while he climbed along the face of the rock wall.  No sooner had he reached the edge of the precipice than I saw him lean far out, fire with my three-barrel gun, and frantically wave for me to come.  I ran to him and, throwing my arms about a projecting shrub, looked down.  There directly under us stood a huge goral, but just as I was about to shoot, the earth gave way beneath my feet and I would have fallen squarely on the animal had Hotenfa not seized me by the collar and drawn me back to safety.

The goral had not discovered where the shower of dirt and stones came from before I fired hurriedly, breaking his fore leg at the knee.  Without the slightest sign of injury the ram disappeared behind a corner of the rock.  I dashed to the top of the ridge in time to see him running at full speed across a narrow open ledge toward a thick mass of cover on the opposite side of the canon.  I fired just as the animal gained the trees and, at the crash of my rifle, the goral plunged headlong down the mountain, stone dead.

It fell on a narrow slide of loose rock which led nearly to the bottom of the valley and, slipping and rolling in a cloud of red dust, dropped over a precipice.  The ram brought up against an unstable boulder five hundred feet below us, and it required half an hour’s hard work to reach the spot.