NATURE AND SPORT IN BRITAIN 



driving. Driving, which nowadays claims so many 

 ardent votaries, has of course much to recommend it. 

 It appeals to busy men who cannot afford time to be 

 pottering quietly about, and to be content with small 

 bags. A few big shoots in the season, with heavy 

 bags at the end of them, suit the multitude, in these 

 days of stress and hurry, far better than sport more 

 evenly distributed and moderate bags. Yet it is un- 

 questionable that the modern shooter who waits under 

 hedges for driven birds, or, a mere unit in a line of 

 gunners or beaters, walks up his birds without the aid 

 of setters or pointers, misses a great deal of the purest 

 essence of sport and woodcraft. Shooting is becoming 

 far too much a cut-and-dried pastime, a mere machine- 

 like process for slaughtering game. It is a somewhat 

 melancholy sign of the times, when one peruses recent 

 books on partridge-shooting and finds no reference 

 whatever to pointers and setters. 



Who that has seen dogs work in the field can ever 

 forget the thrill of pleasure and expectancy with which 

 one notes the staunch setter, after a careful range, draw- 

 ing stealthily upon his game? Who can forget the 

 attitude, motionless as a statue of bronze, of a pointer 

 close upon the covey? Who can measure the feeling 

 of delightful expectancy with which the gunner ap- 

 proaches the setting or pointing dog, or that supreme 

 moment when at last the birds rise and he gets in his 

 two barrels? Such episodes add fifty-fold to the charm 

 of shooting. Those old-fashioned gentlemen who went 

 into the stubbles on the first with their Dons and their 

 Pontos had a far better time of it, in reality, than the 

 sportsman who drives to his shoot, kicks his heels 

 under a hedge, bags his driven birds now and again 

 for a few breathless minutes with the mechanical pre- 

 cision (or otherwise) of a Carver or Bogardus, and, as 



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