It is often said that big bags have ruined the sporting spirit. That is not so: big bags are necessary proofs that the science of preservation of game is on the right lines, and their publication is also necessary on these grounds. At the same time, it is a fact that hard walking is not appreciated as much as it was thirty years ago, and ladies can now take just as forward a place in the shooting of game and deer as men can or do. This is not all because ladies are better trained physically, but because sports have been made much easier, than formerly they were. Bridle-paths enable ponies to traverse the deer forests with ladies on their backs, and where that can be done deer stalking is not quite what it was when a Highland laird declared that he saw no use in protecting the deer, since nobody could do them much harm. But the wonder to me is not that we do not like great exertion, but that we ever did like it for itself. But then I speak as a man in years, and one who has in the foolishness of youth killed a stag and carried home his head, cut low down, for sixteen miles, rather than wait for the tardy ponies to bring it in with the carcase.
I suspect that a change of ideas will take place when it is discovered that driven-game shooting can, more than any other, be learnt at the shooting schools, and that when the trick is known it becomes the easiest kind of shot. If it is true that the schools can teach it, then everybody will learn it, and what is common property will become as unfashionable as it is the reverse at present. I believe that half the difficulty in the driven bird is in thinking it is difficult. The fastest bird at 30 yards range one is likely to meet with in a whole season does not require a swing of the muzzle faster than, or much more than half as fast as, a man can walk. What is difficult in driven game is shooting often, the swerve of the game, the changes of pace and angle of different birds in quick succession, but distinctly not the pace. Before I had ever seen a grouse butt, I remember sitting down to watch another party of shooters on a distant hill, more than half a mile up wind of where I sat to watch. I saw their dogs point, and a single bird rise, which, with many a switchback as it came, I watched traverse the whole distance between us, and I killed it as I sat. That was my first driven grouse, but it is not by any means why I say that driven game offers the easiest kind of shooting; it is because the average of kills to cartridges are so much better than they are in other kinds of shooting. Take, for instance, double rises at pigeons, which are easy compared with double rises at October grouse, and it will be noted that the crack pigeon shots do not generally kill even their first double rise at 25 yards range, and that four or five double rise kills are nearly always good enough to win, as also very often is a single double rise with both birds killed. Very moderate grouse drivers can do better than that, and pheasants that are not very high are slain in much greater proportion. The fact is that all shooting is extremely difficult if one attempts to satisfy the most severe critic of all, namely the man who shoots. But at my age I would much rather think myself fit to do a day’s hard walking than a day’s hard shooting. I think there are a good many people of that opinion, otherwise dog moors would not make more rent per brace than the Yorkshire driving moors, but they do. The trouble is that places where birds will lie to dogs are limited, and it is childish to drive packs of birds away for the sake of thinking one is shooting over dogs when one is not shooting at all, but only doing mischief. Personally, I would not try to shoot over good dogs on Yorkshire grouse. Bad ones would not matter; but then they would give me no pleasure.
When it was a literary fashion to abuse covert shooting as butchery and grouse driving as no sport, it was not done by sportsmen of the other school; and later, when the literary genius of the period was turned in the opposite direction, and we were constantly being told that a walk with a gun and dog was pleasant but no sport, it was only done by those who were a little afraid of being out of the fashion. I have been so unfashionable as to defend both by turns, and I have always been of opinion that any sport which appeared to be growing unpopular was worthy of the little support I could give it. It will probably greatly surprise those who dare not, with imaginative pens, shoot at the tail of a bird, to be told that Mr. R. H. Rimington Wilson recently informed me, that if he were to back himself to kill a number of shots consecutively he would select driven birds in preference to walked-up game; and besides, that he preferred to be let loose on a snipe bog to his own, or any other, big driving days. My opinion has been that you can always make any sort of shooting a little more difficult than your own performance can satisfactorily accomplish to the gratification of your own most critical sense.
Driving game and big bags are often, but not always, acts of game preserving.
On this subject I had written a chapter, but fearing that I had not done that view justice, after a conversation I had with Captain Tomasson, who has Hunthill and is the most successful Scotch grouse preserver by the all driving method, I asked him to criticise some articles I had previously written in the Field, the sense of which I have tried to express again in the following pages. He very kindly did so, or rather stated the case for the Highlands, which I have substituted for mine. It only differs in one respect from the sense of my own suppressed chapter—namely, it does not remark on the difficulty of explaining why, if recent Scotch driving has partly defeated disease, even more Yorkshire driving, prior to 1873, nevertheless preceded the worst and most general Scotch and English disease ever known. However, everyone will argue for himself: I can only pretend to present a mass of facts to assist a judgment, but not a quarter of those I should like to give have I room for, and I regret that Captain Tomasson is even more restricted by space.
I have shot over spaniels in teams and as single dogs, but as I consider that I know less of them than Mr. Eversfield, who probably knows more than anyone else, I asked him to read and criticise my article, which he promised to do. But in returning it he has professed himself unable to criticise, and very kindly says that he likes it all, so I leave it, being thereby assured that it cannot be very wrong.
There is one subject connected with shooting, or the ethics of shooting, about which there is much more to be said than ever has been attempted—namely, that partridge preservers are now, and will be more in the future, indebted to the fox for their sport. This may appear a wild paradox, but before I am condemned for it I would, in the interests of the gun, ask those who disagree to read my chapters on partridge preserving, where, if they still disagree, they will find a partridge success described that will amply repay their good nature, unless they know a plan by which season’s partridge bags can be doubled, doubled again, and then again, in three consecutive years.
On the subject of dogs, I may say that thirty to thirty-five years ago I recommended to some American sportsmen three different sorts of setters. Either two of them had bred well together in England. These have been crossed together ever since in America, and no other cross has been admitted to the Stud Book devoted to them. They have been a revelation in the science of breeding domestic animals, for, in spite of all the in-breeding represented there, I was enabled to select a puppy in 1904 that in Captain Heywood Lonsdale’s hands has beaten all the English pointers and setters at field trials in 1906. I have more particularly referred to this in a chapter on English setters, and in another on strenuous dogs and sport in America.
I have already tendered my thanks, but I should like publicly to repeat my indebtedness, to those who have lent me the best working dogs in England for models, or have sent me photographs of them and other pictures. These include Mr. Eric Parker, Editor of The County Gentleman, Mr. W. Arkwright, the Hon. Holland Hibbert, Mr. Herbert Mitchell, Mr. C. C. Eversfield, Mr. A. T. Williams, Captain H. Heywood Lonsdale, Mr. B. J. Warwick, the Editor of Bailey, Mr. Allan Brown, and the President of the world’s oldest established, and National, Field Trial Society, namely Col. C. J. Cotes, of Pitchford Hall, who has sent me some photographs of his, and his late father’s, Woodcote pointers and retrievers, including an original importation of 1832, and founder of his present breed of the latter race, and in doing this he has been kind enough to say:—
“I have always considered you to know more about the breaking and breeding of setters than any man living, and that it was entirely through you that the apex of setter breeding was reached about twenty-five years ago, and through your recommendation I obtained the eight setters in 1881 that founded my present breed.”