When we arrived at the road on the rim of the gorge I was dismayed to find that Achi was not there with my clothes.  The wood cutter did not appear to be greatly worried and indicated that we would find him farther up the road.  I walked on dubiously, expecting every second to meet some person, and sure enough, a Chinese woman suddenly appeared over a little hill.  I dived into the tall ferns beside the road, burrowing like a rabbit, and from the frightened way in which she hurried past, she must have thought she had seen one of her ancestral spirits stalking abroad.  We eventually found the boy, and, decently dressed, I faced the world again with confidence and happiness.

On the way back to camp we saw a goral on the cliffs across the river.  It was high up and fully three hundred and fifty yards away but, of course, quite unconscious of our presence.  My first two shots struck close beside the animal, but at the third it rolled over and over down the hill, lodging among the rocks just above the river.

Our entry into camp was triumphal, for fully half the village acted as an escort to the serow, an animal which few had ever seen.  It was a female, and probably weighed about two hundred and fifty pounds.  The mane was short and black and strikingly unlike the long white manes of the Snow Mountain serows; the horns were almost smooth.  Getting this specimen was one of the lucky chances which sometimes come to a sportsman, for one might hunt for weeks in the same place without ever seeing another serow, as the jungle is exceedingly dense and the cliffs so steep that it is impossible to walk except in a few spots.  The animal had been feeding on the new grass just at the edge of the heavy cover and probably had been sleeping under a bush when she was disturbed.

Besides mammals and birds we made a fairly good collection of reptiles and lizards at Hui-yao, but in all other parts of the province which we visited they were exceedingly scarce.  In fact, I have never been in a place where there were so few reptiles and batrachians.  We obtained only one species of poisonous snake here.  It was a small green viper which we sometimes saw coiled on a low bush watching mouse holes in the grass.  Several species of nonpoisonous snakes were more common but were nowhere really abundant.

We left Hui-yao the day after I killed the serow for a village called Wa-tien where there was a report of sambur.  None of us had any real hope of finding the huge deer after our former unsuccessful hunts, but we camped in the early afternoon on an open hilltop five miles from Wa-tien where the natives assured us the animals often came to eat the young rice during the night.

We engaged four men with three dogs as hunters, but awoke to find a dense fog blanketing the valley and mountains.  It was not until half past nine that the gray mist yielded to the sun and left the hills clear enough for us to hunt.  We climbed a wooded ridge directly behind the camp and skirted the edge of a heavily forested ravine which the men wished to drive.