Chapter IV. 



SNIPE. 



At anj' time during the last days of March or the first 

 few of April may be heard the welcome intelligence that 

 "The snipe have come." "Snipe," old English "snite," and 

 "snout" are the same word, Grimm's law intervening. Dray- 

 ton writes of "The witless woodcock', and his neighbour 

 snite." It would be hard to tell exactly why the sport-loving 

 British people have picked out certain birds, the woodcock 

 and snipe, for instance, for particular attention, to the entire 

 disregard of so many others. The snipe is very good eating, 

 it is true, but so are several others of which little is said. 

 Something must be allowed for the mystery attaching to 

 them, but probably the chief reason is the difficulty of bring- 

 ing the common snipe to bag when he is in really good form 

 and a wee bit wild. Then his movements are of the zig-zag, 

 "greased lightning" tj^pe, and rights and lefts are very, very 

 rare indeed. A friend of mine once watched an attack by a 

 hawk on a snipe in mid-air. Two or three times the swoop 

 was made but each time the snipe's speed was enough to 

 save his skin. Again, he is here to-day and gone to-morrow. 

 He may be seen in wisps or he may not be seen at all. 

 Essentially he is a bird of the swamp or marsh, not of the 

 too fluid sort, but of that kind which provides a sufficiently 

 soft upper crust to suit at once the worms and his delicate 

 bill. Then, under suitable conditions, he disposes of double 

 his own weight of these long red delicacies in one day. Im- 

 agine a 20-stone man eating fifty four-pound loaves, ten legs 

 of mutton, a picul of potatoes, half a picul of vegetables, and 

 something over a hundredweight of accessories within the 

 24 hours! That would be his task were he to try to rival 

 Scolofyax Gal/iiiago, otherwise known as the common, or 

 full, or whole snipe, and sometimes as the heather-bleater, 

 h'om the so-called "drumming" made by his wings or tail in 

 spring in his efforts to charm his mate. There are many 

 square miles of the province of Kiangsu which form almost 

 ideal snipe grounds. So it is in the delta of the Nile, and in 

 various Indian deltas where a bag of a hundred couple a day 

 to a single gun may be got at times. Mud. slush, chilly 

 water, cold winds, wet feet, numbed hands, slipping, sliding, 



