io8 BIG GAME SHOOTING 



but this, like stalking, no tiro should venture on, and permis- 

 sion to do so is often difficult to obtain. 



As some adjoining country is to be driven on the morrow, 

 the night is passed in one of the many delightful shooting- 

 boxes, simply furnished chalets with wainscot interiors, dotted 

 about on the timber-line regions of the Duke's shoot. The 

 entire month of October is thus devoted to driving, and never 

 is ground beaten twice the same year, so that some idea can 

 be formed of the extent of the shoot. Fine weather does not 

 always, however, attend these occasions, for October in the 

 Alps can make itself very disagreeable, with snowstorms and 

 fierce gales that drift the snow in great heaps round one on 

 one's post, turning one's body into an icicle, and cramping 

 the fingers, so that aim at even the shortest distances, as the 

 mistily outlined game flits past one in the driving snowstorm, 

 becomes strangely uncertain. 



In conclusion, a hint or two to those participating for the 

 first time in a large drive may be of use. In the first place, if 

 not expressly told to the contrary, it is wiser not to open the 

 ball by firing the first shot. Such a premature warning may 

 possibly spoil the whole laboriously laid out drive by causing 

 the chamois to break back at a moment when the beaters 

 have not yet been able to reach those points where their 

 attempt could be frustrated. The writer has known more 

 than one instance when a big shoot, which otherwise might have 

 been entirely successful, has been spoilt by a shot fired very 

 soon after the beginning of the drive by an impatient gun. 



Another and last hint is always to find out from the 

 keeper who posts one, not only the exact position of the 

 next guns — information he usually volunteers — but also, if 

 they are invisible to one, the limits of one's own field of 

 fire. Nothing is more disagreeable than at the end of the 

 drive to find out that, by shooting perhaps a little further 

 than was expected, one has shot beasts really belonging by all 

 rules of venery to one's neighbour. Such an oversight, arising 

 from ignorance respecting these limits, once caused the writer 



