Wolves are numerous, and their packs are at times a positive danger to life, particularly in hard winters. Solitary travellers are known to have been pulled down by them; and the local sheepdog is of necessity a powerful and savage brute, though he has little of the sagacity of a Scotch collie. We have known a case in which a pack of wolves (driven by hunger, of course) actually entered the suburbs of the city of Van, and sent in a crafty old she-wolf as decoy. She brought a pack of rash street-dogs out at her tail, and the ambush was a great and shining success. The wolves got a good meal for once, and the nights in that quarter of the city were more peaceful for some time after. In the same winter (that of 1905-6, which was of exceptional severity) a pack of hunger-driven wolves actually invaded an Armenian village, and remained in possession of it for a matter of an hour. All human beings were driven to take cover in the houses, and every dog in the place was killed, while the middens were cleaned up as they had not been for many a day. The folds could not be entered, nor could the houses--else a grim tragedy would have been enacted--and, after a while, the enemy withdrew, after a strange temporary reversal of the normal condition of things. Leopards are still to be found in the mountains, but very rarely. We have, however, seen a cub in captivity, and he was certainly not imported into the land. Lynx and marten are rare now; and the foul-eating "ghoul," which is apparently a type of hyæna, is found on Mosul plain, as mentioned above, in company with the equally disreputable jackal. The lion which, on the evidence of Assyrian sculptures, was once common on the Mesopotamian plain, is extinct now; though old men among the Arabs still look back fondly to the days when a youth was expected to prove his manhood by killing one as a gift to his bride. If the lion is extinct, however, another great beast that figures with him as royal game for the King of Nineveh would seem to be not quite exterminated yet. This is the aurochs, which appears repeatedly on the carvings in the British Museum.