Warwick Woodlands: Things as they Were There Twenty Years Ago

by Henry William Herbert

"Hold there, Frank; hold hard there; I cannot concede the wilder, not the really wilder--seemingly they are wilder; for, as you say, the scenery is wilder--and all the game, with the exception of the English snipe, being wood-haunters, you are led into rougher districts. But oh! no, no!--the field sports are not really wilder--in the Atlantic States at least--nor half so wild as those of England!"

"I should like to hear you prove that, Archer," answered Frank, "for I am constantly beset with the superiority of American field sports to tame English preserve shooting!"

"Pooh! pooh! that is only by people who know nothing about either; by people who fancy that a preserve means a park full of tame birds, instead of a range, perhaps, of many thousand acres, of the very wildest, barest moorland, stocked with the wariest and shyest of the feathered race, the red grouse. But what I mean to say, is this, that every English game-bird--to use an American phrase--is warier and wilder than its compeer in the United States. Who, for instance, ever saw in England, Ireland, or Scotland, eighteen or twenty snipe or woodcock, lying within a space of twelve yards square, two or three dogs pointing in the midst of them, and the birds rising one by one, the gunshots rattling over them, till ten or twelve are on the ground before there is time to bag one.

"English partridge will, I grant, do this sometimes, on very warm days in September; but let a man go out with his heavy gun and steady dog late in December, or the month preceding it, let him see thirty or more covies--as on good ground he may--let him see every covey rise at a hundred yards, and fly a mile; let him be proud and glad to bag his three or four brace; and then tell me that there is any sport in these Atlantic States so wild as English winter field-shooting.

"Of grouse shooting on the bare hills, which, by the way, are wilder, more solitary far, and more aloof from the abodes of men, than any thing between Boston and the Green Bay, I do not of course speak; as it confessedly is the most wild and difficult kind of shooting.

"Still less of deer stalking--for Scrope's book has been read largely even here; and no man, how prejudiced soever, can compare with the standing at a deer-path all day long waiting till a great timid beast is driven up within ten yards of your muzzle, with that extraordinary sport on bald and barren mountains, where nothing but vast and muscular exertion, the eye of the eagle, and the cunning of the serpent, can bring you within range of the wild cattle of the hills.

"Battue shooting, I grant, is tame work; but partridge shooting, after the middle of October, is infinitely wilder, requiring more exertion and more toil than quail shooting. Even the pheasant--the tamest of our English game--is infinitely bolder on the wing than the ruffed grouse, or New York partridge; while about snipe and woodcock there exists no comparison--since by my own observation, confirmed by the opinion of old sportsmen, I am convinced that nine-tenths of the snipe and cock bagged in the States, are killed between fifteen and twenty paces; while I can safely say, I never saw a full snipe rise in England within that average distance. Quail even, the hardest bird to kill, the swiftest and the boldest on the wing, are very rarely killed further than twenty-five to thirty, whereas you may shoot from daylight to sunset in England, after October, and not pick up a single partridge within the farthest, as a minimum distance."

"Well! that's all true, I grant," said Forester, "yet even you allow that it is harder to kill game here than at home; and if I do not err, I have heard you admit that the best shot in all England could be beat easily by the crack shots on this side; how does all this agree!"

"Why very easily, I think," Harry replied, "though to the last remark, I added in his first season here! Now that American field sports are wilder in one sense, I grant readily; with the exception of snipe-shooting here, and grouse-shooting in Scotland, the former being tamer, in all senses, than any English--the latter wilder in all senses than any American--field-sport.

"American sporting, however, is certainly wilder, in so much as it is pursued on much wilder ground; in so much as we have a greater variety of game--and in so much as we have many more snap shots, and fewer fair dead points.