He hardly say were chances. shot very quickly; and often fired without stopping or breaking his stride. It may be said very emphatically of snipe that on any particular day they represent an unknown quantity; in hard frost they may not be found near apparently suitable springs; when cold searching winds are blowing, and you look for them in rough warm cover, it is perhaps only late in the afternoon that you find they are sitting well on bare "mountain." On a Monday each rushy swampy field gives its contribution, and when, next morning high in hope, the sportsman beats the same ground, he finds nothing but the everlasting starling. This is provoking enough, but worse things may happen: with little or no reason, as far as you can see, they vanish altogether, and only a meagre percentage of yesterday's ample stock of birds are to be found anywhere. Woodcocks are fickle, but all other kinds of game act on well-defined lines; grouse and partridges may be wild, but you can at any rate see them if you take the trouble to go after them; pheasants, when well looked after, are always to be met with; wildfowl do not desert their lakes and ponds without good reason. No doubt it is this uncertainty of finding them, and their evasive, elusive habits, which make the pursuit of snipe so fascinating; nothing can be done to tempt them or attract them; no expenditure can keep them here they are to-day, and to-morrow who can say how many hun dreds of miles of land and sea separate you from them. The snipe is one of the swiftest birds that flies; it is nothing to him to show himself to anxious men on a muggy evening in the west of Ireland, and the following morning be rising out of shot before indignant trampers over Welsh or Norfolk marshes. Now and then a day stands out prominently before a sportsman, to be looked back on and remembered for many years, marked with the whitest of stones: there is no need to refer to a shooting diary; every little incident comes back clearly defined to the participator in it. The place where he lunched, the way the wind blew in the afternoon; the fortune which led him to the right place, and gave him a second chance at the best stag of his life after he had miserably thrown away the first; which befriended him when the heaviest salmon he had ever had to do with seemed certainly going to be the conqueror in a long uphill fight: you can repeat the very words with which Norway gaffer or Highland stalker parted with you at night. And of all this the reverse is equally true, though the average man is happily more prone to look back on pleasant things. One particularly unfortunate day in this season will long remain in my memory. There was on the shooting a lake about half a mile long, narrow, twisting, bordered by acres of tall bulrushes and reeds. This was the home of many ducks, mallard, widgeon, shovellers, the baffling serenity of the and I daresay rarer birds. winter weather-for some five There were often geese on it, weeks before the scheme could and many teal. A hundred or be put in operation. Our plan more teal would sweep round was to shoot snipe on the open it when disturbed, wheeling mountain in the morning, bewith rapid precision, every bird ginning some miles away from showing his white breast and the lakes; then, after an early brown back in unanimous and lunch, my companion was to wonderful regularity at the continue his pursuit of the same instant of time. Half a scolopax, while I tried my formile away there was a wide tune in the ambush. We made flat, more or less flooded ac- a mistake at the very outset, cording to the state of the though this was not our weather, separated from the fault: the wind veered round lake by a little bit of rising to the south, and instead of ground. We used to move the having it, as we expected, on duck from one place to the the flank, a side wind, we had other, hiding in blinds, and to fight against it all the generally got a few shots, but morning. It was blowing the space to be covered was more than half a gale, and the wide, and I never had enough experienced snipe-shooter will guns to work it properly. On know what this meant: the stormy days the duck were birds got up wild, and gave unwilling to leave the lakes, poor chances, and the bag at and for some time they would midday was a small one. But fly backwards and forwards long before twelve o'clock the between them. I thought, if first of our misfortunes fell a boat could be got on to the upon us. On this flat mounlarger of the two lakes, and tain beat I always had a man well hidden among the bul- with me, carrying a big gun; rushes, that the man in it there were often geese resting might get a good deal of shoot- on, and occasionally, for some ing. The idea was to put the reason I have never been able duck up quietly without firing to explain, they would fly over a shot, get into the right place, the snipe-shooters, though genand then spend a few hours erally too high to be of any watching for birds which would service: perhaps they took the come in of their own accord, little company for harmless and for others which the men people concerned about their might move from the small turf. This particular morning pools and flashes scattered here I was not sure if I could get and there among the bogs. In hold of the gun-bearer, and I a high wind the shots fired let the eight-bore go on to the would be little heard. rendezvous near the. lakes. So with some trouble a flatbottomed kind of a punt was conveyed to the scene of action: then I had to wait-such was We were struggling up against the wind with bent backs and eyes full of tears, when suddenly I heard a cry of "geese!" and we saw a small lot coming straight for us-there might be a score of them they came on and flew over my head, too high for the small gun though within range of the eight-bore. This was provoking enough; but while I was watching them unconcernedly beating up against the storm, and thinking what a stupid mistake I had made, the warning shout was repeated, and there, to leeward, the sky was thickly lined with geese. There must have been well over a hundred in this second lot, and they too came on and passed about fifty yards from me, going slowly, well bunched together: a blind man could have done something with them if he had had the proper weapon. That was a chance that might hardly occur again, in such an open place, for many winters. I fired my miserable little cartridges at the nearest bird, and watched the flock disappear with a disgust I cannot set down on paper. Then we struggled on to the lakes, and it was a sore and angry and chilly man, ready to quarrel with any one who gave him a chance, who bolted his sandwiches there behind a peatstack. "Faith, your honour'll make up for it yet; it'll be scores of ducks you'll be getting this afternoon. He's a grate baste, the goose." were the consolations of the men. The plan of campaign was settled on: one Coleman was to move the duck on the flooded flat, another to go round the lake proper and try and put Such up what settled on it. Then I and the faithful Hall embarked in the boat, with big gun and little gun, and cartridges enough to kill half the wildfowl in the parish if they were rightly used. The mover of the far-away duck was to give us plenty of time to get to our hiding place; he was out of our sight owing to the rising ground. Within five minutes of leaving the shore we ought to have been well hidden in the cover, and I should, I think, have had an interesting and profitable afternoon's work. When the straggling lots of mallard and widgeon began to come in over the lake, it was little wonder that they swerved swiftly with one accord to the right or the left of what they saw. We ran aground; the lake was very shallow; though the punt only drew a few inches, it would not float over the hardly submerged tufts of grass; we did not know the channel, if channels there were in that nightmare of a place; far away from the friendly shelter of the reeds we sat hopeless and helpless, and, I suppose, gnashed our teeth. No shoving or pushing, no coaxing or trying to trim the boat, was of any use; we sat there and watched ducks and widgeon come straight for us and then turn aside, and great flocks of teal flash past a hundred and fifty yards away. Nothing came near us; the most confiding and unsophisticated of birds would hardly venture within shot of two men hunched up in a flat bottomed punt, surrounded by open and undisguised instruments of slaughter. The courts of wildfowl in that district must have resounded with anserine laughter as its members went over and related to each other the incidents of the afternoon: it was indeed a humiliating experience. This was, I think, the most disastrous day I have ever had with a gun; and no one was to blame for it but myself. The change of wind could not have been foreseen; but I should have had the eight-bore with me at any cost, and an experimental expedition with that punt ought certainly to have been made. The bag that day was some half-dozen snipe and a couple of mallard, and I did not like to think what it might have been. The country was so very flat that driving was the only way by which duck could be got: I did not, during this whole season, get a shot at either them or the geese by stalking. During the last week of the season we experimented with a "kite." For partridges and wild grouse this apparatus is sometimes useful, but I had never flown one over snipe. It was a little difficult to manipulate on the enclosed ground, but on the bog and mountain it worked satisfactorily, and on one occasion it did not touch the ground from ten in the morning till we stopped at dusk. Kept far and high in front of the gun it certainly made the wild birds lie, and we, of course, had the great advantage of always coming on them downwind: they sat to dogs, then sometimes on perfectly bare places; when the kite was flown low they often rose out of shot. But we hardly gave it a sufficient trial. I believe that during the little winter frosts this artificial bird would have enabled us to come to terms with many snipe which then easily outwitted us, though possibly those which escaped might have been chary of returning to ground over which it had been worked. It would be interesting to know if shooting snipe under a kite has ever been tried on a large scale and has been successful. Unless in very exceptional weather-after some days of snow-our district was not a good one for cock. This is little to be wondered at; for there is no wood-not half a dozen acres on the whole shooting. We picked up a few on the heather and from the straggling fences on the "land." But they were to be met with in great abundance not far away. I shot with one of my landlords in January, and found that longcontinued snapping at snipe was not good practice for his tall pheasants. We got thirty woodcock one day, chiefly out of a curious hazel covert growing on a great ridge of limestone rock. The first time this place was shot this season sixty-two cock were killed before luncheon, and twenty afterwards. There was not, as far as I could see, a square foot of ground here into which a bird could get his bill; but it lay well, and the soft rocks kept the warmth of the sun. There they spent the day, and at night flighted out to the wet country round about to feed. Primroses grew here in great abundance, and some were to be gathered even so early in the year. The country in which we lived for some five months is not without its troubles, but our part of it was "quiet." I made the acquaintance of a good many farmers, large and small, and they treated me with the greatest hospitality. The Englishman, always wet, often cold, who nightly invaded their houses and soiled their floors with his muddy boots and dripping dogs, was sure to meet with a kindly welcome. I shall long remember the huge roaring turffire by which I changed soaked stockings, and the interest invariably shown in the doings of the day. And I owe a real debt of gratitude to the feminine portion of these households for their attention and for the good humour with which they put up with the trouble and inconvenience I must often have caused. seldom had anything I could leave behind me in the shape of game: their geese were much better than mine to eat; I hares and snipe none of the country-folk cared for, and I did not kill a dozen rabbits during the whole season. Many a pleasant chat I had with these Clare people-on sport and farming and horses and local superstitions; we sometimes even touched on the dangerous subject of politics. All the men I had more immediately to deal with the keepers and watchers and cardrivers (I spent very many hours on the road)-were keen and willing and hardworking, and invariably hopeful under the most depressing circumstances. I remember once standing with a companion gun on a bare bit of green Scotch mountain in the dusk of a drenching winter afternoon. Sport had been extremely bad that day, and we were only anxious to get home and forget the weary tramp we had been engaged in. Sweeping his arms towards the useless, hopeless-looking country before him, the keeper tried to cheer us. "If we're living and spared," he announced, "we'll have some good shooting herenext season. I often thought of that Highlander's well-meant bit of encouragement for which we nearly shot him at the time. But hopefulness at all times is a good fault. |