CHAPTER X.
SUGGESTIONS TO SPORTSMEN.
The word “sport” has been more abused, ill-treated, and misapplied than any other in our language; of a high, pure, and noble signification, it has been debased to unworthy objects; of a restricted and refined significance, it has been extended to a mass of improper matters; from its natural elegant appropriateness, it has been degraded to vulgar and dishonest associations.
The miserable wretch who lives on the most contemptible passion in human nature, and with practised skill cheats those who would cheat him—winning by the unfair rules of games, so-called, of chance—or, with less conscience, converting that chance into a certainty, calls himself a sporting man. The individual who, having trained a horse up to the finest condition of activity and endurance, drives or rides him under lash and spur round a course to win a sum of money, although he may call himself a sportsman, is really a business man. The daring backwoodsman of the Far West, who follows the fleet elk or timid deer, and who attacks the formidable buffalo or grizzly bear, is less a sportsman than a mighty hunter; the man who shoots with a view of selling his game is a market-gunner; and he who kills that he may eat is a pot-hunter.
The sportsman pursues his game for pleasure; he does not aspire to follow the grander animals of the chase, makes no profit of his success, giving to his friends more than he retains, shoots invariably upon the wing, and never takes a mean advantage of bird or man. It is his pride to kill what he does kill elegantly, scientifically, and mercifully. Quantity is not his ambition; he never slays more than he can use; he never inflicts an unnecessary pang or fires an unfair shot.
The man who, happening to find birds plentiful in warm weather, and, after murdering all that he can, leaves them to spoil, is no more a sportsman than he who fires into a huddled bevy of quail, or who considers every bird as representing so much money value, and to be converted into it as soon as possible.
The sportsman is generous to his associate, not seeking to obtain the most shots, but giving away the advantage in that particular, and recovering it if possible by superiority of aim; for although to be a sportsman a person must naturally be an enthusiast, he should never forget what he owes to his friend, and above all what he owes to himself.
Boys and Germans need not imagine that killing robins or blackbirds on trees, no matter how numerously, is sport. Robins and blackbirds, the latter especially, if the old song is to be believed, make dainty pies, but do not constitute an object of pursuit to the sportsman. Diminutive birds shot sitting are as far beneath sport as gigantic wild animals shot standing or running are above it. The only objects of the sportsman’s pursuit are the game birds; not in the confined sense used in old times by the English, when the very prince of all—the woodcock—was excluded from the list, but embracing every bird, fit for the table, that is habitually shot on the wing. Many of these, perhaps the finest, gamest, and bravest, are shot over dogs, where the wonderful instinct of the animal aids the intelligence of the human; but whether followed by the faithful setter, or lured to bobbing decoy; killed from points where, prone in the reeds, the eager sportsman, insensible to cold or wet, at the grey of dawn or dusk of night, awaits his prey; or from the convenient blind which the deluded birds approach without suspicion, or pursued with horse and wagon on the open plain—these all are game birds, and he who follows them legitimately is a sportsman.
Wild birds, like the tame ones, are given for man’s use, and the best use that can be made of them is the one that will confer most health, nourishment, and happiness on mankind. Fanatics imagine that although birds may be killed, it must be done only to furnish food; as if there was nothing beyond eating in this world, and as if contribution to health were not as essential as supplies to the stomach. The two may and should be combined; a man who is hungry may kill that he may be satisfied, the man who is sickly may kill that he may recover—neither may kill in excess; and a third may kill lest he become sick, provided nothing is injured that is not used.
Death before the muzzle of a gun, in the hands of an experienced marksman, when the body of the charge striking the object terminates life instantly—and even when, in the hands of a bungler, the wounded bird is not put out of his pain till he is retrieved—is far more merciful than after capture in a trap, accompanied with agonies of apprehension and perhaps days of starvation, till the thoughtless boy shall remember his snare and awkwardly end life. The birds of the air and beasts of the field are given for man’s use and advantage, whether domesticated, or wild as they once all were; and if they serve to supply him with food or healthful exercise, and especially if they do both, they have answered their purpose. It is certainly no more brutalizing to shoot them on the wing or in the open field, when they have a reasonable chance to escape, than to wring their necks in the barn-yard, or knock them on the head with an axe.
To become a sportsman, the first thing to acquire—provided nature has kindly furnished the proper groundwork of heart and body, without which little can be done—is the art of shooting. A few, very few men become, through fortuitous circumstances of nature and practice, splendid shots; many shoot well, and some cannot shoot at all. The author of this work has handled a gun from his twelfth year, and been out with thousands of sportsmen, but he never yet saw a dead shot—one who can kill every time.