Warwick Woodlands: Things as they Were There Twenty Years Ago

by Henry William Herbert

THE MORNING'S SPORT

It was not yet broad daylight when Harry Archer, who had, as was usual with him on his sporting tour, arisen with the lark, was sitting in the little parlor I have before described, close to the chimney corner, where a bright lively fire was already burning, and spreading a warm cheerful glow through the apartment. The large round table, drawn up close to the hearth, was covered with a clean though coarse white cloth, and laid for breakfast, with two cups and saucers, flanked by as many plates and egg-cups, although as yet no further preparations for the morning meal, except the presence of a huge home-made loaf and a large roll of rich golden-hued butter, had been made by the neat-handed Phillis of the country inn. Two candles were lighted, for though the day had broken, the sun was not yet high enough to cast his rays into that deep and rock-walled valley, and by their light Archer was busy with the game-bag, the front of which he had finished netting on the previous night.

Frank Forester had not as yet made his appearance; and still, while the gigantic copper kettle bubbled and steamed away upon the hearth, discoursing eloquent music, and servant after servant bustled in, one with a cold quail-pie, another with a quart jug of cream, and fresh eggs ready to be boiled by the fastidious epicures in person, he steadily worked on, housewife and saddler's silk, and wax and scissors ready to his hand; and when at last the door flew open, and the delinquent comrade entered, he flung his finished job upon the chair, and gathered up his implements, with:

"Now, Frank, let's lose no time, but get our breakfasts. Halloa! Tim, bring the rockingham and the tea-chest; do you hear?"

"Well, Harry, so you've done the game-bag," exclaimed the other, as he lifted it up and eyed it somewhat superciliously--"Well, it is a good one certainly; but you are the queerest fellow I ever met, to give yourself unnecessary trouble. Here you have been three days about this bag, hard all; and when it's done, it is not half as good a one as you can buy at Cooper's for a dollar, with all this new-fangled machinery of loops and buttons, and I don't know what."

"And you, Master Frank," retorted Harry, nothing daunted, "to be a good shot and a good sportsman--which, with some few exceptions, I must confess you are--are the most culpably and wilfully careless about your appointments I ever met. I don't call a man half a sportsman, who has not every thing he wants at hand for an emergency, at half a minute's notice. Now it so happens that you cannot get, in New York at all, anything like a decent game-bag--a little fancy-worked French or German jigmaree machine you can get anywhere, I grant, that will do well enough for a fellow to carry on his shoulders, who goes out robin-gunning, but nothing for your man to carry, wherein to keep your birds cool, fresh, and unmutilated. Now, these loops and buttons, at which you laugh, will make the difference of a week at least in the bird's keeping, if every hour or so you empty your pockets--wherein I take it for granted you put your birds as fast as you bag them--smooth down their plumage gently, stretch their legs out, and hang them by the heads, running the button down close to the neck of each. In this way this bag, which is, as you see, half a yard long, by a quarter and a half a quarter deep, made double, one hag of fustian, with a net front, which makes two pockets-- will carry fifty-one quail or woodcock, no one of them pressing upon, or interfering with, another, and it would carry sixty-eight if I had put another row of loops in the inner bag; which I did not, that I might have the bottom vacant to carry a few spare articles, such as a bag of Westley Richards' caps, and a couple of dozen of Ely's cartridges."

"Oh! that's all very well," said Frank, "but who the deuce can be at the bore of it?"

"Why be at the bore of shooting at all, for that matter?" replied Harry --"I, for one, think that if a thing is worth doing at all, it is worth doing well--and I can't bear to kill a hundred or a hundred and fifty birds, as our party almost always do out here, and then be obliged to throw them away, just for want of a little care. Why, I was shooting summer cock one July day two years ago--there had been heavy rain in the early morning, and the grass and bushes were very wet--Jem Blake was with me, and we had great sport, and he laughed at me like the deuce for taking my birds out of my pocket at the end of every hour's sport, and making Timothy smooth them down carefully, and bag them all after my fashion. Egad I had the laugh though, when we got home at night!"

"How so," asked Frank, "in what way had you the laugh?"

"Simply in this--a good many of the birds were very hard shot, as is always the case in summer shooting, and all of them got more or less wet, as did the pockets of Jem's shooting jacket, wherein he persisted in carrying his birds all day--the end was, that when we got home at night, it having been a close, hot, steamy day, he had not one bird which was not more or less tainted--and, as you know of course, when taint has once begun, nothing can check it."

"Ay! ay! well that indeed's a reason; if you can't buy such a bag, especially!"

"Well, you cannot then, I can tell you! and I'm glad you're convinced for once; and here comes breakfast--so now let us to work, that we may get on our ground as early as may be. For quail you cannot be too early; for if you don't find them while they are rambling on their feeding ground, it is a great chance if you find them at all."

"But, after all, you can only use up one or two bevies or so; and, that done, you must hunt for them in the basking time of day, after all's done and said," replied Frank, who seemed to have got up somewhat paradoxically given that morning.

"Not at all, Frank, not at all," answered Harry--"that is if you know your ground; and know it to be well stocked; and have a good marker with you."

"Oh! this is something new of yours--some strange device fantastical-- let's have it, pray."

"Certainly you shall; you shall have it now in precept, and in an hour or two in practice. You see those stubbles on the hill--in those seven or eight fields there are, or at least should be, some five bevies; there is good covert, good easy covert all about, and we can mark our birds down easily; now, when I find one bevy, I shall get as many barrels into it as I can, mark it down as correctly as possible, and then go and look for another."

"What! and not follow it up? Now, Harry, that's mere stuff; wait till the scent's gone cold, and till the dogs can't find them? 'Gad, that's clever, any way!"

"Exactly the reverse, friend Frank; exactly the reverse. If you follow up a bevy, of quail mark you, on the instant, it's ten to one almost that you don't spring them. If, on the contrary, you wait for half an hour, you are sure of them. How it is, I cannot precisely tell you. I have sometimes thought that quail have the power of holding in their scent, whether purposely or naturally--from the effect of fear perhaps contracting the pores, and hindering the escape of the effluvia--I know not, but I am far from being convinced even now that it is not so. A very good sportsman, and true friend of mine, insists upon it that birds give out no scent except from the feet, and that, consequently, if they squat without running they cannot be found. I do not, however, believe the theory, and hold it to be disproved by the fact that dead birds do give out scent. I have generally observed that there is no difficulty in retrieving dead quail, but that, wounded, they are constantly lost. But, be that as it may, the birds pitch down, each into the best bit of covert he can find, and squat there like so many stones, leaving no trail or taint upon the grass or bushes, and being of course proportionally hard to find; in half an hour they will begin, if not disturbed, to call and travel, and you can hunt them up, without the slightest trouble. If you have a very large tract of country to beat, and birds are very scarce, of course it would not answer to pass on; nor ever, even if they are plentiful, in wild or windy weather, or in large open woods; but where you have a fair ground, lots of birds, and fine weather, I would always beat on in a circuit, for the reason I have given you. In the first place, every bevy you flush flies from its feeding to its basking ground, so that you get over all the first early, and know where to look afterward; instead of killing off one bevy, and then going blundering on, at blind guess work, and finding nothing. In the second place, you have a chance of driving two or three bevies into one brake, and of getting sport proportionate; and in the third place, as I have told you, you are much surer of finding marked birds after an hour's lapse, than on the moment."

"I will do you the justice to say," Forester replied, "that you always make a tolerably good fight in support of your opinions; and so you have done now, but I want to hear something more about this matter of holding scent--facts! facts! and let me judge for myself."

"Well, Frank, give me a bit more of that pie in the mean time, and I will tell you the strongest case in point I ever witnessed. I was shooting near Stamford, in Connecticut, three years ago, with C--- K---, and another friend; we had three as good dogs out, as ever had a trigger drawn over them. My little imported yellow and white setter, Chase, after which this old rascal is called--which Mike Sandford considered the best-nosed dog he had ever broken--a capital young pointer dog of K---'s, which has since turned out, as I hear, superlative, and P---'s old and stanch setter Count. It was the middle of a fine autumn day, and the scenting was very uncommonly good. One of our beaters flushed a bevy of quail very wide of us, and they came over our heads down a steep hillside, and all lighted in a small circular hollow, without a bit of underbrush or even grass, full of tall thrifty oak trees, of perhaps twenty-five years' growth. They were not much out of gun-shot, and we all three distinctly saw them light; and I observed them flap and fold their wings as they settled. We walked straight to the spot, and beat it five or six times over, not one of our dogs ever drawing, and not one bird rising. We could not make it out; my friends thought they had treed, and laughed at me when I expressed my belief that they were still before us, under our very noses. The ground was covered only by a deep bed of sere decaying oak leaves. Well, we went on, and beat all round the neighborhood within a quarter of a mile, and did not find a bird, when lo! at the end of perhaps half an hour, we heard them calling-- followed the cry back to that very hollow; the instant we entered it, all the three dogs made game, drawing upon three several birds, roaded them up, and pointed steady, and we had half an hour's good sport, and we were all convinced that the birds had been there all the time. I have seen many instances of the same kind, and more particularly with wing-tipped birds, but none I think so tangible as this!"

"Well, I am not a convert, Harry; but, as the Chancellor said, I doubt."

"And that I consider not a little, from such a positive wretch as you are; but come, we have done breakfast, and it's broad daylight. Come, Timothy, on with the bag and belts; he breakfasted before we had got up, and gave the dogs a bite."

"Which dogs do you take, Harry; and do you use cartridge?"

"Oh! the setters for the morning; they are the only fellows for the stubble; we should be all day with the cockers; even setters, as we must break them here for wood shooting, have not enough of speed or dash for the open. Cartridges? yes! I shall use a loose charge in my right, and a blue cartridge in my left; later in the season I use a blue in my right and a red in my left. It just makes the difference between killing with both, or with one barrel. The blue kills all of twenty, and the red all of thirty-five yards further than loose shot; and they kill clean!"

"Yet many good sportsmen dislike them," Frank replied; "they say they ball!"

"They do not now, if you load with them properly; formerly they would do so at times, but that defect is now rectified--with the blue and red cartridges at least--the green, which are only fit for wild-fowl, or deer-shooting, will do so sometimes, but very rarely; and they will execute surprisingly. For a bad or uncertain rifle-shot, the green cartridge, with SG shot is the thing--twelve good-sized slugs, propelled with force enough to go through an inch plank, at eighty yards, within a compass of three feet--but no wad must be used, either upon the cartridge or between that and the powder; the small end must be inserted downward, and the cartridge must be chosen so that the wad at the top shall fit the gun, the case being two sizes less than the caliber. With these directions no man need make a mistake; and, if he can cover a bird fairly, and is cool enough not to fire within twenty yards, he will never complain of cartridges, after a single trial. Remember, too, that vice versa to the rule of a loose charge, the heavier you load with powder, the closer will your cartridge carry. The men who do not like cartridges are--you may rely upon it--of the class which prefers scattering guns. I always use them, except in July shooting, and I shall even put a few red in my pockets, in case the wind should get up in the afternoon. Besides which, I always take along two buckshot cartridges, in case of happening, as Timothy would say, on some big varmint. I have four pockets in my shooting waistcoat, each stitched off into four compartments--each of which holds, erect, one cartridge--you cannot carry them loose in your pocket, as they are very apt to break. Another advantage of this is, that in no way can you carry shot with so little inconvenience, as to weight; besides which, you load one-third quicker, and your gun never leads!"

"Well! I believe I will take some to-day--but don't you wait for the Commodore?"

"No! He drives up, as I told you, from Nyack, where he lands from his yacht, and will be here at twelve o'clock to luncheon; if he had been coming for the morning shooting, he would have been here ere this. By that time we shall have bagged twenty-five or thirty quail, and a ruffed grouse or two; besides driving two or three bevies down into the meadows and the alder bushes by the stream, which are quite full of woodcock. After luncheon, with the Commodore's aid, we will pick up these stragglers, and all the timber-doodles!"

In another moment the setters were unchained, and came careering, at the top of their speed, into the breakfast room, where Harry stood before the fire, loading his double gun, while Timothy was buttoning on his left leggin. Frank, meanwhile, had taken up his gun, and quietly sneaked out of the door, two flat irregular reports explaining, half a moment after, the purport of his absence.

"Well, now, Frank, that is"--expostulated Harry--"that is just the most snobbish thing I ever saw you do; aint you ashamed of yourself now, you genuine cockney!"

"Not a bit--my gun has not been used these three months, and something might have got into the chamber!"

"Something might not, if when you cleaned it last you had laid a wad in the centre of a bit of greased rag three inches square and rammed it about an inch down the barrel, leaving the ends of the linen hanging out. And by running your rod down you could have ascertained the fact, without unnecessarily fouling your piece. A gun has no right ever to miss fire now; and never does, if you use Westley Richards' caps, and diamond gunpowder--putting the caps on the last thing--which has the further advantage of being much the safer plan, and seeing that the powder is up to the cones before you do so. If it is not so, let your hammer down, and give a smart tap to the under side of the breech, holding it uppermost, and you will never need a picker; or at least almost never. Remember, too, that the best picker in the world is a strong needle headed with sealing wax. And now that you have finished loading, and I lecturing, just jump over the fence to your right; and that footpath will bring us to the stepping-stones across the Ramapo. By Jove, but we shall have a lovely morning."

He did so, and away they went, with the dogs following steadily at the heel, crossed the small river dry-shod, climbed up the wooded bank by dint of hand and foot, and reached the broad brown corn stubble. Harry, however, did not wave his dogs to the right-hand and left, but calling them in, quietly plodded along the headland, and climbed another fence, and crossed a buckwheat stubble, still without beating or disturbing any ground, and then another field full of long bents and ragwort, an old deserted pasture, and Frank began to grumble, but just then a pair of bars gave access to a wide fifty acre lot, which had been wheat, the stubble standing still knee deep, and yielding a rare covert.

"Now we are at the far end of our beat, and we have got the wind too in the dogs' noses, Master Frank--and so hold up good lads," said Harry. And off the setters shot like lightning, crossing and quartering their ground superbly.

"There! there! well done, old Chase--a dead stiff point already, and Shot backing him as steady as a rail. Step up, Frank, step up quietly, and let us keep the hill of them."

They came up close, quite close to the stanch dog, and then, but not till then, he feathered and drew on, and Shot came crawling up till his nose was but a few inches in the rear of Chase's, whose point he never thought of taking from him. Now they are both upon the game. See how they frown and slaver, the birds are close below their noses.

Whirr--r--r! "There they go--a glorious bevy!" exclaimed Harry, as he cocked his right barrel and cut down the old cock bird, which had risen rather to his right hand, with his loose charge--"blaze away, Frank!" Bang--bang!--and two more birds came fluttering down, and then he pitched his gun up to his eye again, and sent the cartridge after the now distant bevy, and to Frank's admiration a fourth bird was keeled over most beautifully, and clean killed, while crossing to the right, at forty-six yards, as they paced it afterward.

"Now mark! mark, Timothy--mark, Frank!" And shading their eyes from the level sunbeams, the three stood gazing steadily after the rapid bevy. They cross the pasture, skim very low over the brush fence of the cornfield--they disappear behind it they are down! no! no! not yet--they are just skirting the summit of the topped maize stalks--now they are down indeed, just by that old ruined hovel, where the cat-briers and sumac have overspread its cellar and foundation with thick underwood. And all the while the sturdy dogs are crouching at their feet unmoving.

"Will you not follow those, Harry?" Forester inquired--"there are at least sixteen of them!"

"Not I," said Archer, "not I, indeed, till I have beat this field--I expect to put up another bevy among those little crags there in the corner, where the red cedars grow--and if we do, they will strike down the fence of the buckwheat stubble--that stubble we must make good, and the rye beside it, and drive, if possible, all that we find before us to the corn field. Don't be impatient, and you'll see in time that I am in the right."

No more words were now wasted; the four birds were bagged without trouble, and the sportsmen being in the open, were handed over on the spot to Tim; who stroked their freckled breasts, and beautifully mottled wing-coverts and backs, with a caressing touch, as though he loved them; and finally, in true Jack Ketch style, tucked them up severally by the neck. Archer was not mistaken in his prognostics--another bevy had run into the dwarf cedars from the stubble at the sound of the firing, and were roaded up in right good style, first one dog, and then the other, leading; but without any jealousy or haste.

They had, however, run so far, that they had got wild, and as there was no bottom covert on the crags, had traversed them quite over to the open, on the far side--and, just as Archer was in the act of warning Forester to hurry softly round and head them, they flushed at thirty yards, and had flown some five more before they were in sight, the feathery evergreens for a while cutting off the view--the dogs stood dead at the sound of their wings. Then, as they came in sight, Harry discharged both barrels very quickly--the loose shot first, which evidently took effect, for one bird cowered and seemed about to fall, but gathered wing again, and went on for the present--the cartridge, which went next, although the bevy had flown ten yards further, did its work clean, and stopped its bird. Frank fired but once, and killed, using his cartridge first, and thinking it in vain to fire the loose shot. The remaining birds skimmed down the hill, and lighted in the thick bushy hedge-row, as Archer had foreseen.

"So much for Ely!" exclaimed Harry--"had we both used two of them, we should have bagged four then. As it is, I have killed one which we shall not get; a thing that I most particularly hate."

"That bird will rise again," said Frank.

"Never!" replied the other, "he has one, if not two, shot in him, well forward--if I am not much mistaken, before the wing--he is dead now! but let us on. These we must follow, for they are on our line; you keep this side the fence, and I will cross it with the dogs--come with me, Timothy."

In a few minutes more there was a dead point at the hedge-row. "Look to, Frank!" "Ay! ay! Poke them out, Tim;" then followed sundry bumps and threshings of the briers, and out with a noisy flutter burst two birds under Forester's nose. Bang! bang!

"The first shot too quick, altogether," muttered Archer; "Ay, he has missed one; mark it, Tim--there he goes down in the corn, by jingo-- you've got that bird, Frank! That's well! Hold up, Shot"--another point within five yards. "Look out again, Frank."

But this time vainly did Tim poke, and thrash, and peer into the bushes --yet still Shot stood, stiff as a marble statue--then Chase drew up and snuffed about, and pushed his head and forelegs into the matted briers, and thereupon a muzzling noise ensued, and forthwith out he came, mouthing a dead bird, warm still, and bleeding from the neck and breast.

"Frank, he has got my bird--and shot, just as I told you, through the neck and near the great wing joint--good dog! good dog!"

"The devil!"

"Yes, the devil! but look out man, here is yet one more point;" and this time ten or twelve birds flushed upon Archer's side; he slew, as usual, his brace, and as they crossed, at long distance, Frank knocked down one more--the rest flew to the corn-field.

In the middle of the buckwheat they flushed another, and, in the rye, another bevy, both of which crossed the stream, and settled down among the alders. They reached the corn-field, and picked up their birds there, quite as fast as Frank himself desired--three ruffed grouse they had bagged, and four rabbits, in a small dingle full of thorns, before they reached the corn; and just as the tin horns were sounding for noon and dinner from many a neighboring farm, they bagged their thirty-fourth quail. At the same moment, the rattle of a distant wagon on the hard road, and a loud cheer replying to the last shot, announced the Commodore; who pulled up at the tavern door just as they crossed the stepping-stones, having made a right good morning's work, with a dead certainty of better sport in the afternoon, since they had marked two untouched bevies, thirty-five birds at least, beside some ten or twelve more stragglers into the alder brakes, which Harry knew to hold-- moreover, thirty woodcock, as he said, at the fewest.

"Well! Harry," exclaimed Frank, as he set down his gun, and sat down to the table, "I must for once knock under--your practice has borne out your precepts."