I ensconced myself in a bunch of high weeds surrounded by a pond of open water, and killed a few mallards. The birds did not fly well, however, and we moved from place to place in the hope of better luck, and with a restlessness that showed increasing dissatisfaction on the part of Henry; so that I was not surprised when, early in the afternoon, he told me that he must return to the club-house. I remained for some hours where he left me; but hearing rapid shooting near the Gap, I poled my way there through a broad field of lilies, known as the Pond Lily Channel, and there, to my surprise, found Henry.
Whether it was the desire to be alone, for his peculiarity of preferring to shoot by himself has been mentioned, or whether he was tempted by a favorable flight of birds, I never knew; when I appeared, he paddled hastily away as though ashamed, and made no answer to my inquiries as to what detained him, or how they could manage without him at the house. Unceremoniously occupying his place, I completed the evening, and the allotted hours of my stay, with some excellent shooting at flocks of mallards, widgeons, and blue-bills, that poured through the Gap in endless flights, till after dark.
Then, for the last time, I rowed through the darkness towards the well-known point; for the last time sat down at the groaning board which our kind-hearted landlady had furnished so liberally; played my last game with the euchre-loving son of Kentucky; smoked a farewell pipe of Killikinnick in the sociable circle around the air-tight; slept for the last time in the comfortable bed under the hospitable roof of the club-house; and next morning, having seen my associates depart, each in his little boat, and bid them all farewell, I set out, with my birds packed in ice, for the City of New York. My friends welcomed me and my birds gladly. Reader, had you been my friend, you would also have welcomed us both.
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.