In sporting parlance, I was "knocked clean out of time;" this was the inveterate six-days-a-week man.
"But you shoot?" I asked, seeing it was necessary to say something.
"Oh yes! I shoot, and fish occasionally, when the May-fly is up--anything but hunting. There, what do you think of that bull?"
Shooting, too, is wonderfully changed. Where are the high stubbles we so eagerly sought on the first of September?--gone, gone for ever. The reaping-machine cuts it off now as close as the cloth on a billiard table.
It has often been said the birds are wilder at present than they were: admitting this to be the case, the cause probably is the high state of cultivation, and nothing more. There is not the cover there was formerly to hold them, and therefore they are more difficult to get at. Turnips are now sown in drills, and not broadcast, as grain usually was. If you work down the drills, the birds see you, and are off the other end: the only way is to take them across. Yet there are thousands of places where the cover is good and plentiful; and where this is the case the birds lie as well as ever.
Game is scarcer than it was, except on manors that are highly preserved: it must be remembered that where there was one shooter formerly, there are twenty now. It is a difficult matter at present to rent a shooting, for directly there is anything good in the market it is snatched up at once.
The general style of shooting of the present day is odious--large bags are "the go." In some countries it has done away with the noble pointer and setter altogether; nothing but retrievers are used. The guns, beaters, and keepers are all in a line: a gun, then a keeper with a retriever, a beater, another gun, and so on. The word is given, and away they go, taking a field in a beat. As you fire--possibly there are two or three guns popping at the same bird--a keeper falls out, and finds it with his retriever, whilst you are going on. Can this be called sport? It is nothing more than pot-hunting, wholesale butchery. Give me my brace of pointers and setters, and let me shoot my game to points; there is some pleasure in that. What can be a more beautiful sight to the shooting man than to see a brace of well-bred dogs, ranging and quartering their ground like clockwork, backing and standing like rocks, steady before and behind, and dropping to fur and wing, as if they were shot? Working to hand, and obeying your slightest word--beautiful, intelligent creatures--there is some pleasure in shooting over such animals as these.