IGHTFIELD ROB ROY (STANDING) AND IGHTFIELD MAC, BELONGING TO CAPT. H. HEYWOOD LONSDALE
The former was victor on Lord Home’s moors near Lanark, in July 1906, over all English-bred pointers and setters. The latter was winner of the puppy stakes at the same time.
It was late in the season, and we had been hunting all the morning and finding comparatively few grouse on a beat generally full of birds. At last Sable got a point from the top of a “knowie,” and with his head so high that it gave the impression that the birds must be a very long way off. In starting to go to him, the author happened to see the grouse in a large pack standing with their necks up on another “knowie,” about 400 yards away from the pointing dog. That explained the absence of grouse: they had packed upon a moor where they were supposed never to do so. More with the object of scattering them than expecting to get near enough for a shot, we formed single file, and two guns and a gillie, without going near Sable, started to circle the grouse and get ahead of them, so as to put them between the guns and the dog. Strangely enough, they gradually sank down and hid, and we did get quite close to them, and at the risk of being branded poacher, truth compels the confession that we picked up five brace for our four barrels, and besides, scattered the birds in every direction. Sable never moved until he was wanted to assist in finding the dead birds. Those who do not know what very bad eyes dogs have, might think he had seen the birds, but this was not so. The volume of scent made it recognisable at such a distance, and enabled not a speculative, but a certain, point. The author has many times seen such points obtained at 200 yards at a single brood of grouse, and at more than 100 yards at a pair of partridges. Nothing like this can ever be done by a dog that has not “class”; but field trials often have been won by dogs of no class. That cannot be helped, but it must always be regretted. The no class sort referred to are meetly called “meat dogs” in America, because sportsmen there think there is no object in using them except the requirements of the “pot.”
Since the above was written, it has become known that, when in America in 1904, the author selected a couple of unbroken puppies of eight and ten months old, of the straight-bred sort, for Captain H. Heywood Lonsdale, and that, in spite of quarantine for six months, which damaged them exceedingly, Scott, a capital breaker, has succeeded in perfecting one of them. This dog is known as Ightfield Rob Roy, and with much in hand he beat all the best pointers and setters in the country at the Gun-dog League’s Field Trials in July last, upon the grouse moors of Lord Home.
The author was very pleased with the great “class” shown by Rob Roy, not because the English dogs were beaten, but mostly because he has for some years been pointing out that America was assuredly ahead of us, because of our attempt to breed docility instead of to break it. The writer, in fact, got almost ashamed of comparing the dogs of the present to their disadvantage with the dogs of the past, and felt quite sure it would have been much more popular to have ignored old memories and been satisfied with the best of English field trial work. He was quite aware that this laudation of the days and dogs that are gone was held to be more or less what it so often is. But now that Captain Lonsdale’s fine setter has demonstrated that a single selection of the author’s in America, with every chance against him, has been able to establish the accuracy of his memory, he believes that crossing will result in bringing back all the old “class” vitality and energy, especially if we were, like the Americans, to establish real stamina trials, and, like them, evolve truer formation. Evolution of form is still in progress, just as it was when our ancestors first differentiated the setter from the spaniel by selection of the best workers.
The author is not concerned to make his experiences fit in with recent Mendelian or anti-Mendelian science. You can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear, nor will the crossings of plants, guinea-pigs, and mice conform to experiences with higher animals. If they would, Darwin’s pigeons would have taught the stud master. They did not. That there is this difference one statement of two first generation facts is enough to prove. It is that if pure-bred white fowls are crossed with another race, equally pure-bred, and black, the offspring will all be black chicks and white chicks, with no mixtures. On the other hand, “in spite of all temptations to belong to other nations,” no American pure negro has ever been able to call her offspring a white child.
STRENUOUS DOGS AND SPORT IN AMERICA
In all the countries in Europe pointers and setters are used, but there are districts in Hungary and Bohemia where partridges are so plentiful that this canine assistance is neither required nor employed. The style of shooting in these districts would make the use of any dogs except retrievers absurd, and the writer never has been able to detect the sportsmanship in employing dogs when they are in the way and hinder sport. The truest pleasure is to be derived from getting shots by means of dogs that one could have got in no other way. This feeling for and fellowship with pointers and setters is to be found in the wild Highlands and Islands of the west and extreme north of Scotland, and also in the greater part of the mountains of Ireland. To a great extent it is also felt in pursuit of the rype of Scandinavia, and of the partridge, wherever that bird is scarce enough to require much finding before it is shot. But throughout Europe there is more or less preservation, more or less boundary to be protected, with the growing demands for artificial methods first, and then, a little later, the substitution of men for dogs. There is also a kind of bastard shooting over dogs, in which a line of guns is formed as if for walking up the game, and then one or a brace of dogs is allowed to run down wind, or up, according to the requirements of the line of guns, and with no thought as to possibility of the wind serving the dogs. But under such circumstances canine assistance is in a false position, and it is distressing to see what happens. A pair of dogs could not adequately serve a line of guns, even if they had all the advantage of the wind, and it may be safely affirmed that when any attempt is made to walk up game, dogs are out of place, except as retrievers at heel. On a Scotch Highland hillside it may be a question whether a party of four guns can kill most game by all walking in line or by working in two parties and shooting over dogs, but in the former case there is a better way—that of driving the game to the guns, which saves the walking, and the shooting becomes more exciting because more frequent.
But dog work is conducted in such various methods, some of which are so little removed from treading up the birds, that an idealist must hesitate to affirm that it is always preferable to forming line and walking up the game. There is an idea that the place to loose off the dogs is where game has congregated, or been driven into good cover, so that points may recur at every 10 yards. This is when the heavy shooting occurs, but it is not when the dog is most indispensable. The latter happens when there is no more than one covey to every 500 acres, and you have to find it before you have any sport. Some people say that under those circumstances they would prefer no sport. This, however, is a decadent view. We all of us appreciate sport as its difficulty increases, and a bag that was good enough for the great Duke of Wellington and for Colonel Peter Hawker ought to be good enough for any of us if we desire to feel ourselves sportsmen. The author has no word to urge against big bags except this: they cannot form a feature of everyday life for many, if for any of us, and sport can—provided the anxiety to make big bags because they are the fashion does not destroy our love of sport for its own sake. The writer confesses to being one of those selfish creatures who is supremely happy if he has satisfied his own critical spirit, even in such trifles as a day’s unwitnessed sport over dogs, the stalking of a blackcock or of a stag, the capture of a reluctant trout, or the killing of half a score of driven grouse out of a pack without a miss. He is well aware that either of these may be the harder to accomplish according to circumstances, and his pleasure is based on the absence of anything that might have been done better. Once in his life he sent a stag’s head to a taxidermist, and then changed his mind and would not have it home; and once or twice he has counted his kills during a day, but never made a written note of them. It has always appeared to the author that sport is its own reward, and that records are rather sad reading, and trophies create memories of the noble dead, and not always pleasant ones. It seems easier to take an interest in other people’s records than in one’s own, and to admire trophies that one did not victimise.
Surely a true spirit of sport may be the possession of one whose whole household idols are his gun and rifle, and whose total impedimenta are a portmanteau and gun-case. The greater one’s belongings, and the more one grows to care for them, the less ready one becomes to go far afield for sport, and the more one is inclined to cling to old memories, even without the assistance of trophies and private written records.
Feats of sport that can be forgotten are not worth remembering, for if enjoyment depended upon the size of the bag or the grandeur of a trophy, every day in which the old record was not beaten would be a day lost, whereas, in sport for its own sake alone, every triviality is supreme for the time being, and one is as keen for small things or great at sixty as at sixteen, although—and more is the pity—a great deal more self-critical.