28 GAME-BIRDS OF INDIA 



up three or four cock only and get but one, though we add a couple 

 of rabbits and one more pheasant to the general stock. Leaving 

 this wood we work through a scarp facing the sea and covered with 

 bracken, gorse and brambles, whilst every few yards a cheerful little 

 cascade goes tumbling down into the sea below us. Both rabbits 

 and cock are very numerous here, but the walking is terrible and, 

 having but one arm both to shoot and climb with, I frighten a great 

 many more birds and rabbits than I kill, indeed I emerge at the other 

 end of the scarp with but one cock and two rabbits, a result exactly 

 doubled both by H. and B., the latter adding a brace of partridge out 

 of a covey put up on the fields above him by some labourers. 



Yet another scarp succeeds this one, but the walking is better, 

 and out of the seven birds collected here I claim three, having only 

 missed one. This beat brings us up to the farm where we have 

 lunch, a Welsh lunch of cold birds, apple tart and Devonshire cream 

 washed down with draught beer. Half an hour more for a smoke 

 and our host makes us turn out again to take full advantage of a day's 

 shooting of a kind that does not come too often. 



Walking down the lane, a small boy says he has seen a cock pitch 

 in some brambles by a pond in the field to our right, and, sure enough, 

 the dogs turn him out, and B. adds him to the fast-swelling bag. 

 From here we make for three small spinneys, divided from one 

 another by about a hundred yards or so, and themselves covering 

 only two or three acres each. Our host and B. each take one corner 

 and send me on ahead to shoot the gaps, and very pretty shooting 

 I get. They have hardly got into the first spinney before a couple of 

 shots are heard, and a few seconds after a cock comes flitting towards 

 me out of the last few trees, and as he passes I bowl him over ; a 

 little fluff of feathers rises into the air, a soft thud on the grass, and 

 before we can pick him up, a second bird is dropped almost on 

 the top of the first, and no sooner are my cartridges home than a 

 third follows. Then I have two long shots and misses, and, whilst 

 reloading, another passes over me before I can shoot. Both B. and 

 H. are in sight now, and I prepare to move on to the next gap, but 

 as I turn round a cock flies almost into me and, giving him a little 

 law, he too finds his way to grass. 



The second gap is a repetition of the first, but here I put in six 



