68 GAME-BIRDS OF INDIA 



he would not get ninety. Mr. Cornish got up to his fiftieth bird 

 without a miss, and eventually failed by exactly four birds to get his 

 hundred birds in a hundred shots. On this occasion the walking, as 

 might have been expected, was as near perfection as possible, and 

 the birds so numerous that it was never necessary to take difficult 

 shots. Even under these circumstances the shooting was wonderful, 

 and it will be long before it is beaten. 



As to what constitutes a good bag, this depends entirely on the 

 locality. In Upper India bags of 100 couple to two or three guns 

 are always possible, but to a single gun bags of anything over fifty 

 would be considered good. In Southern India such bags would be 

 quite exceptional, and in Ceylon even more rare. In Assam a bag of 

 thirty couple is good, though in Sylhet, and sometimes in Cachar and 

 Goalpara, much bigger bags are obtained. In Bengal, however, it is 

 every snipe-shot's ambition to get 100 couple to his own gun, and 

 though few ever realize this ambition, many get very close to it 

 and some do even better. The same thing occurs in Burmah, and 

 100 couple to one gun has two or three times been beaten in that 

 province. 



The honour of making the biggest bag on record belongs to 

 Mr. W. K. Dods, who, on the 18th February, 1900, shot 131 couple 

 of snipe and a quail. In epistold Mr. W. K. Dods writes to me : — 



" On the 17th February, 1900, information reached me that there 

 were a considerable number of snipe on a particular jheel of immense 

 extent about 100 miles from Calcutta, where 1 had already made 

 some good bags. I accordingly started off that night, well provided 

 with cartridges, in a slow, jolting train that eventually deposited me 

 at dawn within an hour's tramp of my destination. 



" Some miles' walk took me through cultivated country until the 

 landscape, getting gradually more open, brought me to a large swamp 

 tract of country covered with about the worst kind of ' ponk ' it has 

 ever been my fate to shoot in — a black reeking mud composed entirely 

 of decayed and decaying vegetable matter, in which one frequently 

 sank to one's thighs. Growing in this ooze were dense clumps of 

 hoogola reeds interspersed with fairly open glades, where birds could 

 feed, and with other patches of thin null jungle in which snipe delight 

 to rest during the day, secure from the too pressing attentions of the 

 numerous hawks that infest these marshes. 



" Though good for snipe, thin null does not make things any easier 

 for the shooter, already heavily handicapped by the soft and insecure 



