22 GAME-BIEDS OF INDIA 



" The dogs huat this valley {or about 600 yards down to the 

 bottom, but there is no sign of anything till I am just coming out of 

 the wood, when I hear a flutter to my right, and the orderly shouts 

 he has put up a bird. 



" I push my way through the grass, cobwebs and bushes, and 

 ask if he has marked it down. 



" He says he has, so we walk it up, I see a small brown shape 

 flitting through the undergrowth, and the second cock of to-day is 

 added to the bag; we then come out and rejoin the sepoys on the 

 road and march home, the result of the morning's work being a 

 march of seven miles up and down about 1,100 feet over fairly rough 

 country, with a brace of Partridges and two Woodcock to show at the 

 end of it, all done within two and a half hours." 



It will be seen from what Colonel Wilson writes that we do not in 

 India get birds in the numbers they are obtained at home. In 

 Shillong and its vicinity four or five birds in a day's tramp must be 

 considered fair sport and six to eight birds something quite out of 

 the common. Colonel Wilson has shot eight to his own gun in a 

 day and Mr. Faichnie, of the Postal Service, once formed one of a 

 party who got nine, but I have heard of no bigger bag to one gun in 

 a single day's shooting. In the Nilgiris, Hume says " ten or twelve 

 birds to two guns in a morning is quite an unusually fine bag, so it 

 must not be supposed that they lie thick as a rule, and yet in parti- 

 cular parts of the hills five or six are sometimes shot out of one tiny 

 shola, not perhaps above thirty yards wide and not a quarter of a 

 mile in length." The largest bag recorded for India is that mentioned 

 by A. Grahame Young in Hume and Marshall's " Game-Birds of 

 India" twenty-eight years ago. This bag was made in the Tos 

 Forests in Kullu. Hume quoting him, thus records the bag. " The 

 end of January is about the best time for them. The largest bag 

 that I know of was thirty-three birds to two guns between Nuggur 

 and Ryson ; a good many others were missed. If the season be at 

 all favourable, one is pretty sure of flushing a dozen or so in the 

 course of a day in the favourite haunts." 



The biggest bag to a single gun for all India is undoubtedly that 

 obtained by Mr. S. L. Whymper, who describes in a letter to me 

 how he got them. 



"It was late in January, 1908, and there had been heavy and 

 continuous snow in the higher hills, and this no doubt had driven 



