“Snipes!” echoed the captain, “I see no snipes.”
“No, sir! why, what are these?” I asked, holding up one of my snippets by the bill; “aren’t these Bengal snipes?”
“Bengal snipes! no! nor snipes at all; miserable snippets; but with you, I presume, all long bills are snipes?”
“No, not exactly,” said I; “but allowing for difference of latitude and longitude, I thought these might very well be snipes.”
“Ah! I see,” said the captain, “I must put you in the way of managing matters. I have long relinquished the gun, for I found I was getting too fond of it, and, after a few years, the sun tells; but I must resume it for a day or two, in order to initiate you a little into the proper nature of Indian sporting, and to show you where real snipes and game are to be found. All this is mere waste of powder and shot (which you will find a very expensive article, by the way, in India), and will get you, if you continue it, dubbed an egregious griffin or greenhorn. A jackal, too! what made you shoot him?”
“He bolted from a bush, and I thought he was a wolf and floored him beautifully; as I rolled him over ’twas fine fun to see the courage with which Teazer and the bull attacked him when in his last agonies. However, I should not have spared him, had I at first been aware of what he was, for I owe the whole race a grudge for their infernal yellings. I was kept awake for some hours last night by a troop of the fiends close under my bolio window.”
“Ah!” said Belfield, “you have destroyed a useful scavenger; never kill without an adequate purpose; if we have a right to slay, it is not in mere wantonness; ‘shoot only what you can eat’ is a good maxim.”
“Mr. Gernon,” said Miss Belfield, “though my brother undervalues your sport, it may be some consolation to you to know that I do not; I want to sketch all the curious birds and animals I see, for a very dear friend of mine at Long Somerton, who exacted a promise from me, at parting, that I would do so. Will you, therefore, bring them all on board to-morrow, the poor jackal included, and you shall group whilst I sketch them?”
“Capital!” said I; “with the greatest pleasure; and we’ll have Nuncoo as the Indian huntsman in the foreground: we shall,” I added rather wickedly, “in this little dedication to the fine arts, be working out the captain’s utilitarian principle, as applied to sporting.”
Captain Belfield was as good as his word; he put his double-barrelled Manton together, after a long repose apparently, in its case, where, in dust certainly, if not in ashes, it had mourned its state of inaction, mustered several of his servants, and out we sallied in the afternoon of the following day.