STRANGE HUNTING ADVENTURE.

Evening Post, Volume XLIX, Issue 16, 19 January 1895, Page 1 (Supplement)

STRANGE HUNTING ADVENTURE.

The Duna Zeitung describes an extraordinary hunting incident. Baron Vieitinghoff and Prince Hohenlohe went together to shoot stags, and agreed to decoy the animals by imitating their call on a special kind of horn. When they reached the hunting ground, therefore, the two hunters^ separated, and each accompanied by a gamekeeper went off in different directions. During the course of the day they unknowingly approached each other, and each heard the other's decoy call, and believed that a stately stag was before him. They, imitating as usual the heavy steps of the animal, noisily drew still nearer, and the imitation of step and call was so well done that they finally arrived within ten' paces of each other. They both stood still, repeating the challenge from time to time ; neither perceived any difference in the natural challenge, and each still firmly believed that he was within a few paces of a real stag. At last Prince Hohenlohe got tired of waiting, and fired thrice rapidly in the direction where he believed his game to stand. The first bullet glanced off the cartridge belt of Baron Yieitinghoff, the supposed stag; the second struck his watch and sprang off to a distance ; the third fell dead from a pocket-book well filled with papers, and the young Baron, though hit three times, stood unwounded. He was so convinced that, not his fellow hunter, but a stag was before him, that he attributed the three shots to explosions of the cartridges in his belt, and was busy unfastening the belt, and throwing it away. The astonishment of both comrades when at last they found out what had happened must have been great, and their joy at the happy ending of what might have turned out a tragedy equally so. The Prince Hohenlohe, of this curious adventure, is the son of the new Imperial Chancellor.