Spare the Hens
Most gamekeepers hold the killing of a hen pheasant after Christmas to be a moral crime. And perhaps most genuine sportsmen feel a twinge of the conscience when they pull a trigger at a hen in New Year days—irrespective of the host's permission. Of course, when the orders are to spare hens, the man who kills or even tries to kill one does something that the keeper will not forget—he loses caste for ever in the keeper's eyes; whereas the man who is not greedy to take advantage of an impromptu permission to shoot hens ensures for himself a niche in the keeper's good graces.
It is true, there are hens and hens. Only a churlish keeper would not admire the man who stops one of those skyscraping hens, of the sort bagged by ordinary gunners about once in a lifetime. But the order, "Shoot hens if they are real tall ones," alarms a keeper—unless he has full confidence in the guns of a party. When the word has been given, it is wonderful how many hens are "real tall ones." There are excuses which must be accepted: for in certain conditions of light, when the golden moment for pressing the trigger is within grasp, it is almost impossible to distinguish hens from cocks—length of tail is then the most reliable evidence.
We remember a knowing old keeper who laid a plot to ensure at least a merry start to a Christmas shoot, when "Cocks only" was the order of the day. This worthy, when catching up birds for his pens, had gathered together some twenty superfluous cocks. These, a dishevelled and more or less tailless crew, he carried just before starting-time to a dell thick with spruce, chosen doubtless for decency's sake: and on a plausible pretext lined out his guns between the dell and a wood. But he forgot there was no natural inducement to the birds to fly in the face of evident danger—and all the birds broke away out of gunshot, and so suddenly as to make their recent history all too evident.
