344 LETTERS TO YOUNG SHOOTERS LETTER 



As you gain experience and confidence, you will 

 find you are able to select two birds for your gun just 

 before they come within shot, and that, after you 

 have dropped the nearer one of the two, you can at 

 once turn your second barrel on the other as it arrives 

 within distance. Be careful, however, not to choose 

 a brace of birds that, as they approach, are equally 

 distant from you, else, when you have killed the one, 

 the other may be too close to fire at in front of your 

 shelter. This habit of making up your mind in good 

 time, as to which birds of a number flying to you 

 will offer the fairest and nearest chances on reaching 

 the range of your gun, is of the greatest assistance 

 in killing them. 



the shooters fire into the packs of grouse, and cruelly kill and wound 

 many birds at one shot ! Placing such twaddle on one side, I do 

 not myself believe that it is possible to kill several grouse at a shot, 

 out of however large a number flying past, even supposing a shooter 

 tried to accomplish such an unsporting feat ! Driven grouse always 

 fly three yards or four yards apart (though, at a distance, they may 

 look as thick as a flock of starlings), and are never to be seen bunched 

 together like a covey of partridges rising from a field of roots. A 

 shooter may day after day constantly aim and fire at grouse in the 

 centre of passing flights, and, if he kills his right and left, he will 

 very rarely drop more than the ones aimed at, and stranger still, if 

 he misses these, their companions do. not suffer. Though I have 

 shot several thousand driven grouse, I have only once killed two at 

 one shot, and these (as recorded in my diary at the time) were out of 

 half a dozen only that were flying low at one side of my shelter, and 

 at the same height above the ground. Various friends whom I have 

 questioned and who have shot driven grouse for years on some of the 

 best moors, have told me they cannot call to mind having ever killed 

 two birds at one shot, whilst others assert they have done so once or 

 at most twice. 



