Shooting black buck in the plains of Central India, with the Duke of Portland's party, in 1883, I had been out in a bullock-cart for hours. The method is to describe a wide circle round the black buck, and slowly driving round and round, gradually to diminish the circle. The sun was very hot; I was very tired of the business; and I determined to risk a shot. As I emerged from the cart into the open, a herd of black buck galloped past in the distance in single file, passing behind two tufts of high grass. Sighting between the tufts, I fired right and left, and heard the bullets strike. The shikari would not believe that I had hit anything at that range. But there were the bodies of two black buck; the distance from where I had fired to one of them was 220 yards, and to the other, 240 yards. The heads are in my collection of sporting trophies.
I had been twice round the world before I ever saw a really wild man. At last I met one when I was shooting grouse on my own property in Cavan. His voice was a squeaky, husky whisper, like the creaking of an old wooden frigate in a gale of wind. If I hit a bird hard and it passed on, the wild man would say:
"Well, that fellow got a terrible rap anyway!"
If I killed the bird, he would say, "Well well, he has the fatal stroke, with the help of God!"
And if I missed a bird, he would say, "Never moind, Lord Char-less! Ye made him quit that, annyhow."
The incident of the Glenquoich stag occurred many years ago, when I was staying at Glenquoich with the Duke of Marlborough. We had had a hard day, without sighting a warrantable stag, when the stalker spied, far on the skyline of the opposite hill, the grandest head he had ever seen. We stalked up to him until we came to the edge of a valley. There was the noble head scarce fifty yards away. We could see the stag's ears moving. But he did not rise. We lay on that hill-top for an hour and a half; the midges were eating me in platoons; and still the stag did not get up. I could stand it no longer; and I said to the stalker:
"Either you must get him up or I must shoot him through the heather."
The stalker begged me not to shoot; he whistled; then turned upon me a face of utter bewilderment, for the stag lay where he was, moving his ears to keep off the midges. The stalker whistled again. Still the stag lay quiet; and the man looked at me with a countenance of such amazement that I can see it before me as I write. It must have struck him that here was the supernatural; for never in his life had he seen a live stag which would stay to hearken to his whistling.
Then the stalker shouted; then he stood upright and shouted again; and still the stag lay where he was; and the man stared at me in silence with consternation in his eyes. I delayed no longer. I shot the stag through the heather, and he leaped up, and fell dead.