ON SHOOTING. 171 



bird-hunting, observation would have served better than 

 advice. But " the years which the locusts have eaten " can- 

 not be recovered ; the receptive period has been passed : wasted, 

 from our point of view ; provided, however, you are keen 

 enough (and I rather think the " unkeenness " of a few years 

 ago is now unfashionable) and inclined to go in for dogging 

 either as a guest or on your own account, you could not 

 make a better start than by allying yourself with some really 

 good keeper or intelligent " handler " getting his puppies 

 into form for work or field trials. Such a course will serve 

 a double purpose, giving you a fair idea of the methods to 

 be employed when handling dogs (for, although you are 

 unlikely to handle your own later on, you must know whether 

 your own man is efficient) and also enabling you to figure 

 to yourself what your behaviour should be when armed with 

 a gun instead of a walking-stick. It is to be hoped that 

 what you see may create in you a desire to embark on a 

 dogging moor of your own. 



Hired dogs, if they come from the kennels of an owner 

 with a reputation at stake, are sometimes a thorough success. 

 It is advisable to see them at work if possible with their own 

 handler, unless you intend to hire him too ; this is better 

 still. But hiring is only a makeshift ; it implies missing the 

 absorbing interest of " continuity " in your kennel, e.g., 

 watching the puppies coming on and developing their parents' 

 idiosyncrasies, virtues and, perhaps, faults; studying the 

 eradication of the latter by judicious breeding, and so on. 

 This will come later. You must make a start somehow, 

 and this I advise you to do with " made " dogs, not merely 

 spring-broken puppies, of which you would require a greater 

 number, for it is unwise to run a puppy for more than a 

 short turn, or when tired, or nervous, or on a bad scenting 

 day. Four really fit dogs per diem should see you through. 

 With a kennel of six, excluding bitches likely to require 

 seclusion, you will be fairly safe, and able to rest sore feet 

 or strains. The weather is unlikely to allow you to shoot 

 more than four days a week. But the six dogs must be 

 honest and reliable, selected with due regard to the nature 

 of the ground on which they are to run. Before the war 

 such dogs could be picked up at prices ranging from £10 to 



