WILDFOWLING WITH THE STANCHION-GUN. 149 



turns up during favourable seasons, and especially in severe 

 weather, an abundant incursion of shore-shooters and small- 

 boat gunners, all keenly on the alert to secure any spoils 

 from the punt-guns that may fall to their share. The shore- 

 men are mostly farm-hands, temporarily thrown out of work 

 by the frost and snow, to whom a pair or two of ducks, or a 

 fat goose, form no small addition to the res angusUe dumi. 

 As to the boat-sailers, one perhaps entertains less charitable 

 feelings. The waters are infested with them — every idle loafer 

 who can beg, borrow, or steal a boat and gun, or even a boat 

 alone, with which they are nothing loath to run in right 

 before the puntsman's eyes and pick up his "droppers." 

 Notwithstanding, however, the nefarious tendencies of this 

 latter class, these small-gunners do at least minimize the 

 chance of any badly-wounded bird being left long in pain ; 

 and, on the whole, I am inclined to question whether any 

 considerable number of such fowl ever really escape. Cer- 

 tainly no more proportionately than inevitably do so in field 

 sports, and I have witnessed them all. 



Even those few which at first may succeed in escaping, are 

 unlikely long to evade the scrutinizing eye of the Great Black- 

 back and Glaucous Gulls, ever keenly on the look-out for the 

 flotsam and jetsam of the waves, and whose ravenous maws 

 speedily put any sufferers out of pain. 



I now come to the second part of my subject, " the pound 

 of shot and unsuspecting masses" theory. Much of what 

 has been written in this connection is closely akin to those 

 foolish diatribes so often penned against modern covert- 

 shooting by those who never in their lives negotiated a 

 " rocketer." Both are pure and simple appeals to popular 

 ignorance. It is the blind leading the blind ; but to the 

 cognoscenti alone is the full depth of error and prejudice to 

 which they plunge clearly apparent. Place one of these self- 

 confident critics below the wind at a covert-end, or send him 

 afloat, single-handed, in a gunning-punt: half a day's practical 

 experience will then silence for ever both the cant about 

 "tame, stupid, hand-reared, domestic fowls" in the one 

 case, and the flow of cheap invective in the other. As regards 

 the latter, the critic will find that " dense masses" of wild 



