Suddenly Shammie stops dead; so do, for an instant, my heart and pulses. Kaplya and Bruce back instantly, stiff as marble. Carlow is coming in at racing speed, but sees the others when fifty yards away, and lies down automatically. Shammie's tail wags slightly, and we feel that there may be a disappointment before us; but he turns and looks at us; and observing that we are taking him seriously, stiffens into a dead point. It must be business.
"You take first shot," says generous Jemmie; "if it's a covey, your birds are on the right and mine on the left."
The first shot of the season! how absurdly my heart is beating. I wonder the birds do not hear it and get up wild.
Suddenly, twenty yards from us, there is a rustle and a flutter of strong wings, and a grey hen rises without clucking, and lifting herself gracefully over the young birch saplings, floats away over the moor.
"Matka!" (Hen!) shouts Hermann, and to the surprise and disgust of the dogs, no cartridge explodes. Shammie smiles and pants, and looks round at us in a pained though kindly manner; he hopes it is all right, but reflects that they generally get their guns off in Scotland when he shows them the game. Jemmie declares that, if it were lawful, he would spare none of these old barren hens; he is convinced, he says, that they do great damage by bullying the younger hens and chasing them from the moor, in order themselves to monopolise the attentions of the gentlemen of the family.
Oh! the jealousy of the female sex. Jemmie may be perfectly right; and I fancy that he is; but what do the old blackcock, or (for the matter of that) the young blackcock, think of such proceedings? What would the marrying men of our branch of life think or do, if the old maids should succeed in banishing all that was young and beautiful in order to promote their own chances of mating?
But it is very hot, and Jemmie suggests that the birds will be lying at the edge of the moor beneath the shade of the pines, and thither we trudge through the heavy moss and heather. The going is always terribly heavy until the first bird is grassed: after which event, I have observed, the tramping loses much of its weariness and the shooting-boots their weight, and when a dozen brace or so have been secured, the feet that bear the delighted trudger are winged feet.
Nevertheless, we walk for a full hour and are still—as to our game-bags—as empty as when we started. We see no beauty in the lovely moor, at this period. The dogs, we feel, are failures, all four of them. Hermann, too, is a fraud, for did he not declare that there were eight fine coveys within a radius of a mile upon this very moor. Where are those coveys, Hermann? Did we submit to be shuttlecocked over your ghastly parody of a road in order to be humbugged by you at the end of it? Where are these coveys? I say. Such, or to this effect, were the remarks of Jemmie. I think during those first two hours of unremunerative trudging, he vowed to shoot all four of his dogs, sell his guns and his cartridges, give up shooting, and devote his entire energies to gardening and lawn tennis, with a little fishing and a trifle of archery; I rather think Hermann and the other keepers were to share the fate of the dogs; I forget whether I was to die, I think I was; but at the end of two hours the luck changed and Jemmie smiled, and dogs and keepers and I all breathed again.
It was Kaplya that stumbled upon the first covey. Carlow was being led just then and so was Bruce, and good Shammie had by this time formed unflattering opinions as to the Russian moors in comparison with those of Scotland; consequently he was cantering about scientifically enough, but half-heartedly, ranging in an unconvinced and unconvincing manner, ready to oblige by doing his share of this foolish work, but feeling that in his case it was time and talent wasted. Probably he was wondering when the next train started for Scotland, and deciding to take it and go hence to places where the moors were not dummy moors, but the bonâ fide habitations of grouse and blackgame, when he suddenly caught sight of old Kaplya at a dead point in front of his very nose, while perhaps that organ was at the same instant assailed by the unexpected evidence of the proximity of something better than heather and bilberry plants. At any rate, down went Shammie as if shot, in as correct a pose as a "backing" setter can assume.
Instantly, also, Carlow and Bruce sat down, the former so suddenly that Ivan, the under-keeper, who held him, tripped over him and measured his length, letting Carlow go, chain and all, to join the party of stiffened doghood at our knees.