Shooting parties in the week following Christmas have a festive air. As at the hall, so in the keeper's cottage, the air is charged with the Christmas spirit. Ten o'clock on any morning soon after Christmas Day may find the keeper entertaining a crowd of beaters at the expense of his own private cellar, and the good things from the cellar are served hot and spiced. In hats and caps are seasonable tokens—sprigs of mistletoe and holly. The keeper himself does not wear button-holes, but should his children make a garland of holly for the collar of his old retriever, he will leave it for the brambles to pull away. The guns turn up late—they have been dancing through the night; when all are met, in the brief greetings, in the distribution of cartridge-bags, and in the inquiries about weather and the possible bag, there is a note of unusual cheeriness.
Woodcock Talk
At a Boxing Day shooting-lunch the talk among the guns was upon the ways and wiles of woodcock. One spoke of his long bill, with its sensitive nerves, which tell the bird what he has found when the bill forages among the dead leaves; speculating as to whether he lived by his powers of suction only. Another wondered if the eating qualities of woodcock legs were really improved by pulling out the sinews. The question arose: Is the man who shoots a woodcock entitled to its pen-feathers, or is the man who first finds and secures those delicate trophies best entitled to stick them in the band of his hat? Woodcock provoked many controversies. Is there any secret in the proper roasting of them? Would the law absolve a man who shot his fellow when shooting 'cock?—and would the fact that he shot his bird as well as his man make any difference? How many people could swear to have seen the mother woodcock carrying her young; and exactly how does she carry them? How many of the home-bred birds leave us in autumn? What proportion of woodcock comes in from abroad, and what is the difference between the foreigners and the genuine Britishers? In answer to the last question, a suggestion was made that the foreign birds were large and light in colour, but the British birds small and dark. Around this point arose a discussion, and the keeper was called in to give his opinion. "It ain't nothin' at all to do with Englishmen and foreigners," he said. "It be whether they be cocks or hens, and 'tis the large light uns that be the hens."
Spare the Hens
Most gamekeepers hold the killing of a hen pheasant after Christmas to be a moral crime. And perhaps most genuine sportsmen feel a twinge of the conscience when they pull a trigger at a hen in New Year days—irrespective of the host's permission. Of course, when the orders are to spare hens, the man who kills or even tries to kill one does something that the keeper will not forget—he loses caste for ever in the keeper's eyes; whereas the man who is not greedy to take advantage of an impromptu permission to shoot hens ensures for himself a niche in the keeper's good graces.
It is true, there are hens and hens. Only a churlish keeper would not admire the man who stops one of those skyscraping hens, of the sort bagged by ordinary gunners about once in a lifetime. But the order, "Shoot hens if they are real tall ones," alarms a keeper—unless he has full confidence in the guns of a party. When the word has been given, it is wonderful how many hens are "real tall ones." There are excuses which must be accepted: for in certain conditions of light, when the golden moment for pressing the trigger is within grasp, it is almost impossible to distinguish hens from cocks—length of tail is then the most reliable evidence.
We remember a knowing old keeper who laid a plot to ensure at least a merry start to a Christmas shoot, when "Cocks only" was the order of the day. This worthy, when catching up birds for his pens, had gathered together some twenty superfluous cocks. These, a dishevelled and more or less tailless crew, he carried just before starting-time to a dell thick with spruce, chosen doubtless for decency's sake: and on a plausible pretext lined out his guns between the dell and a wood. But he forgot there was no natural inducement to the birds to fly in the face of evident danger—and all the birds broke away out of gunshot, and so suddenly as to make their recent history all too evident.