404 THE FOWLER IN IRELAND. 



outside the deck, and be made fast to a bolt under 

 the barrel, as before described, you then have the 

 gun raised upwards, a space the diameter of the 

 rope above the gunbeam, instead of almost touch- 

 ing it, as it should do. The higher a gun is lifted 

 from this beam in a right-built punt, the less steady 

 it will be, and the more will your head show to the 

 fowl when about to aim. A gun laid too high will 

 plunge the shot and prevent its glancing level with 

 the surface. If a gun is laid too low the charge 

 will, on striking the water, bound high up over 

 even the head of a swan. About ten to eleven 

 inches from sight to water answers best* 



Manilla is not favourable for breeching, as it 

 shrinks and expands too much in wet, and in frost 



* Even an ordinary shoulder-gun of good size will kill fowl, if it be 

 fixed to shoot low and parallel to the water, with more than twice 

 the effect it would were it put to the shoulder ; that is, should the 

 birds, of course, be swimming or resting on land. It is impossible 

 to fire a shoulder-gun lying prone in a boat or punt. It could not 

 be held in such an attitude with safety to the collar-bone ; but in 

 the position advised it will often do treble the execution it would 

 have effected were it fired in the usual manner. You cannot 

 possibly set to birds when lying down and then pop up and fire 

 with good effect. You should scull up and take your shot without 

 rising. As a proof of this, I may say that I have known a single 

 four-bore gun, rigged low in a punt so as to rake the surface well, 

 bag a score of Wigeon and Teal in one shot. I write thus as swivel- 

 guns are not easy to get, but small light punts can always be cheaply 

 built at foreign stations, or on board vessels in distant ports, where 

 wildfowl may happen to abound. Setting forth to shoot duck (as I 

 have many times seen attempted) in ordinary ship's boats on open 

 waters with twelve-bore guns is a waste of time. To fix a heavy 

 shoulder-gun in a low flat boat or punt, you can make a hole in the 

 centre of the stock to take a three-quarter inch rope (diameter) and 

 fix it to the stem post, balancing the gun in a spur. For a small gun, 

 a strap round the heel of the gun and lashed across the hand of the 

 stock answers well, its loose ends buckled through a ring in the stem. 



