Note 32 — ROSENEGG

Mattli was right. According to Bruhin’s “Wirbelthiere Vorarlbergs” (1868) the last wolf was shot at the Hanging Stone about 1830, though he does not mention this fact in his interesting paper on the fauna and flora of this cliff. The last lynx, he says, was killed about 1820; a certain Rüf, a well-known chamois hunter of the Bregenzerwald, told me that when he was a youngster he frequently came across old Lynx-traps in the woods. There are woodcuts both of lynx and wolf in Schlee’s “Rhetia”; he speaks of them as being very troublesome in the Bludenz district (p. 61). The wild boar, long since extinct, he mentions among the game animals of Bregenz and Dornbirn. I myself found the tusk of one during some drainage works in the fields between Bludenz and Rungalin. Bruhin says that a bear was killed near Nenzing in 1828 and that another one frequented an alp there for a whole summer season in 1867. Bears were passably common when Tschudi wrote his “Thierleben der Alpenwelt”; Berlepsch (about 1860) says that twelve to twenty of them were still annually killed in the Alps; soon enough, I shall be one of the few persons left who have tasted the flesh of a genuine Alpine bear. This was at Nauders in the Tyrol in May, 1897; the beast had probably come over from the Grisons.