Poor Ponto is much to be pitied.—Either having a cold in his nose, or having ante-breakfasted by stealth on a red herring, he can scent nothing short of a badger; and, every other field, he starts in horror, shame, and amazement, to hear himself, without having attended to his points, inclosed in a whirring covey. He is still duly taken between those inexorable knees; out comes the speck and span new dog-whip, heavy enough for a horse; and the yowl of the patient is heard over the whole parish. Mothers press their yet unchastised infants to their breasts; and the schoolmaster, fastening a knowing eye on dunce and ne’er-do-well, holds up, in silent warning, the terror of the tawse. Frequent flogging will cow the spirit of the best man and dog in Britain. Ponto travels now in fear and trembling, but a few yards from his tyrant’s feet, till, rousing himself to the sudden scent of something smelling strongly, he draws slowly and beautifully, and
“There fixed, a perfect semi-circle stands.”
Up runs the Tyro, ready-cocked, and in his eagerness, stumbling among the stubble, when mark and lo! the gabble of grey goslings, and the bill-protruded hiss of goose and gander! Bang goes the right-hand barrel at Ponto, who now thinks it high time to be off, to the tune of “ower the hills and far away,” while the young gentleman, half ashamed and half incensed, half glad, and half sorry, discharges the left-hand barrel, with a highly improper curse, at the father of the feathered family before him, who receives the shot like a ball in his breast, throws a somerset, quite surprising for a bird of his usual habits, and after biting the dust with his bill, and thumping it with his bottom, breathes an eternal farewell to this sublunary scene—and leaves himself to be paid for, at the rate of eight-pence a pound to his justly irritated owner, on whose farm he had led a long, and not only harmless, but honourable and useful life.
It is nearly as impossible a thing as we know, to borrow a dog about the time the Sun has reached his meridian, on the First day of the Partridges. Ponto by this time has sneaked, unseen by human eye, into his kennel, and coiled himself up into the arms of tired Nature’s sweet restorer, balmy sleep. A farmer makes offer of a colley, who from numbering among his paternal ancestors a Spanish pointer, is quite a Don in his way among the chirpers, and has been known in a turnip-field to stand in an attitude very similar to that of setting. Luath has no objection to a frolic over the fields, and plays the part of Ponto to perfection. At last he catches sight of a covey basking, and leaping in upon them, open-mouthed, dispatches them right and left, even like the famous dog Billy, killing rats in the pit at Westminster. The birds are bagged, with a gentle remonstrance, and Luath’s exploit rewarded with a whang of cheese. Elated by the pressure on his shoulder, the young gentleman laughs at the idea of pointing, and fires away, like winking, at every uprise of birds, near or remote; works a miracle by bringing down three at a time, that chanced, unknown to him, to be crossing; and wearied with such slaughter, lends his gun to the attendant farmer, who can mark down to an inch, and walks up to the dropped pout, as if he could kick her up with his foot; and thus the bag in a few hours is half full of feathers, while to close with eclat the sport of the day, the cunning elder takes him to a bramble bush, in a wall nook, at the edge of a wood, and returning the gun into his hands, shows him poor pussie sitting with open eyes fast asleep! The pellets are in her brain, and turning herself over, she crunkles out to her full length, like a piece of untwisting Indian rubber, and is dead. The posterior pouch of the jacket, yet unstained by blood, yawns to receive her—and in she goes plump, paws, ears, body, feet, fud and all—while Luath, all the way home to the Mams, keeps snoking at the red drops oozing through—for well he knows in summer’s heat and winter’s cold, the smell of pussie, whether sitting beneath a tuft of withered grass on the brae, or burrowed beneath a snow wreath. A hare, we certainly must say, in spite of haughtier sportsman’s scorn is, when sitting, a most satisfactory shot.
But let us trace no further, thus step by step, the Pilgrim’s Progress. Look at him now,—a finished sportsman—on the moors—the bright black boundless Dalwhinnie Moors, stretching away, by long Lock-Erricht-side, into the dim and distant day that hangs, with all its clouds, over the bosom of far Loch-Rannoch. Is that the pluffer at partridge pouts who had nearly been the death of poor Ponto? Lord Kennedy himself might take a lesson now from the straight and steady style in which, on the mountain brow, and up to the middle in heather, he brings his Manton to the deadly level! More unerring eye never glanced along brown barrel! Finer forefinger never touched a trigger! Follow him a whole day, and not one wounded bird. All most beautifully arrested on their flight by instantaneous death! Down dropped, right and left, like lead on the heather—old cock and hen singled out among the orphan’s brood, as calmly as a cook would do it in the larder—from among a pile of plumage. No random shot within—no needless shot out of distance—covered every feather before stir of finger—and body, back, and brain, pierced, broken, scattered! And what perfect pointers! There they stand, still as death—yet instinct with life—the whole half-dozen—Mungo, the black-tanned—Don, the red-spotted—Clara, the snow-white—Primrose, the pale yellow—Basto, the bright brown, and Nimrod, in his coat of many colours, often seen afar through the mists like a meteor.
[BLACKWOOD’S MAGAZINE.]
