"Shooting the outsides" is a sport by itself. Your one desire is to keep the birds off the land of your neighbours; the one desire of the birds is to seek that land. Your best covey gets up and pops comfortably into a lovely root-field a couple of hundred yards away, but you cannot go after it, for the field belongs to another property, and the derisive birds can chirp and run at their ease, while you tramp on, shotless, under a broiling sun. However, the outsides have to be made good, and now and then a slice of luck rewards you. For instance, if a neighbouring vicar has given notice that after a certain date he means to shoot over his own glebe, your delight is all the keener when you all but annihilate a large covey of birds whose home is on the glebe.
There is much humour in dogs. Your own retriever, whom you have broken yourself, is of course the quietest and best-behaved dog in the world. He also possesses the surest nose and the softest mouth. Why, then, does he choose a moment when everybody is looking to run in wildly and disturb every bird in the field? Or why, when you have sent him in pursuit of a runner, does he lie down and pant, while the keeper's dog, a tangled door-mat of the poodle species, solidly, and without ostentation, tracks down the wounded bird, and finally deposits it at the keeper's feet, just as you are assuring everybody that there is not a vestige of scent, and that no dog could possibly be expected to work in such weather.
Then, again, I want to know this about partridges. How is that, when they are driven to the guns, they always select a novice and unanimously fly over his head? There is an unerring instinct about them. Your novice may disguise himself in all the sport-stained paraphernalia of a veteran shooter. Bless his simple heart, he can't deceive the birds. They come to him and court the death that never comes with a heroic persistency. When he has attained to the status of a veteran, and the birds about him are scarcer, he will look back with a fond regret to the days of his bird-frequented novitiate.
The long and the short of it is that partridges possess a cunning amounting to genius. Under a soft and guileless exterior the partridge hides a store of deceitful wiles that might put Sherlock Holmes or any of his countless imitators to shame. His one object is not to be killed, and this he pursues with a ferocious pertinacity against which keepers, beaters, dogs and guns match themselves in vain. Here, then, is a ballad of the cunning partridge.
The partridge is a cunning bird.