Season 1868.
Of course, we let the grouse alone for this season, as well as in 1867. There were very few to let alone; but the disease was gone, and we comforted ourselves the best way we could with the low-ground shooting in October.
David Black had worked up the low ground well. When we first took the place there were very few partridges. The first season there was a covey of twenty-two birds close to the lodge. We let them alone, and they had multiplied, and in addition there were also a few odd pairs in other parts of the ground. We had shot none, and they had had three years jubilee and pretty good breeding seasons.
In these high, stormy countries, during heavy snows the poor things can get very little food, and naturally draw down into the stackyards for food and shelter, and, if not carefully looked after, get potted by the farmer, but are not of much good to him, as they are little better than skin and bone.
Black looked after them. I don't think that our former keeper troubled himself, or the stock would have got up quicker; and there was now a fine stock of all sorts of low-country game, pheasants excepted. Of course, by a fine stock I mean a fine stock for a wild stormy country.
We had a most enjoyable fortnight's shooting over dogs. In the twelve days we managed to make a mixed bag of 600 head—partridge, snipe, plover, brown hares, rabbits, &c.
The grouse we let alone, except a stray old cock now and again that had survived through the epidemic—very handsome to look at, but, like the monarch of the glen, very tough, and unsavoury on the table.
Of course, on that wild ground the covies of partridges were, looking at the extent of ground, few and far between.
The dogs hunted the small turnip fields and the ground round the edges of the oat stubbles, say, for a hundred yards about. It might be wooded burn sides, or deep feg or heather, and, perhaps, whins and broom. The birds took a lot of finding. Of course, we got other stuff, meanwhile, on the way; and the covey once found, and flushed again and again in neaps, brackens, heather, or what not, the dogs kept pegging them until the covey was pretty well cleared up. Sometimes a covey would utterly beat us by settling into heavy patches of gorse that the dogs would not face—at any rate, not work properly; and as to walking them up with a retriever, they would run about, but knew better than to flush.
After that very naturally we went down every October until the end of the lease, and the last season we had 190 brace of partridges alone.