154 LETTERS TO YOUNG SPORTSMEN. 



disadvantages attaching to a very large number of his elders — 

 not those who were lucky enough to have served their 

 sporting apprenticeship before that fatal autumn of 1914, but 

 the class to whom the war has brought various advantages 

 which open up the prospect of a shooting career. To these 

 fortunate standers on the threshold a few hints, it has been 

 suggested, would not come amiss. 



Shooting, though a pastime, is also a science and an art. 

 But when undertaken in company it is a species of game ; and, 

 in common with other games, is conducted under rules, some 

 of which are traditional, others, arising from modern conditions 

 are added to or modified from time to time as these conditions 

 change. These rules, based largely on considerations of 

 safety to one's fellow-sportsmen, fairness to the quarry, 

 and unselfishness all round, are unwritten and unwriteable, 

 but they are nevertheless rules. He who would master them 

 after his boyhood ought not to be above putting the 

 clock back and doing as boys used to do half a century ago, 

 viz., accompanying a shooting party in the role of observer 

 only. To anybody gifted with ordinary powers of observa- 

 tion, without which a shooter is a private nuisance and 

 a public menace, a few days spent thus will be worth 

 a library-full of instructions. 



Shooting, as a pastime, or even as a business, may be 

 undertaken by the shooter alone, divested of any particular 

 moral obligations save the care obviously necessary to avoid 

 firing shots which might injure men or stock, seen or unseen ; 

 the object being usually to secure the game, no matter how 

 little consideration is wasted on the nature, sporting or 

 otherwise, of such shots as may present themselves. The 

 question of meum or tuum does not arise. The shooter 

 educating himself solely thus will have learnt a good deal 

 about the habits of the game, but nothing of the etiquette 

 which differentiates the sportsman from the gunner. He will 

 have much to unlearn when he shoots in company. To begin 

 with, the " lardering " of beast or bird by his own particular 

 effort is a secondary consideration. He has ceased to be 

 solely responsible for the bag, which was all-important to 

 him as a solitary shooter. He is now one of a party, be it a 

 party of two or eight or any intermediate number, and his 



