Books on Shooting. 257 



VIII. THE LITERATURE OF BIG-GAME SHOOTING. 



Perhaps the greatest incentive to young men is the 

 reading of accounts of travel and adventure in far-off lands, 

 and there is no doubt that if we Britons did not possess a 

 very large and interesting collection of such literature, not 

 nearly so many young fellows would leave comfortable 

 homes and go to wild countries, where they often have to 

 suffer hardship and discomfort. 



Mr. F. C. Selous has mentioned how the reading of 

 Gordon Cumming's and Baldwin's books fired his imagina- 

 tion long ago, and the reading of the same books and those 

 written by Mr. Selous himself, did the same to me. 



How well I remember the long winter evenings on the 

 East Coast of Scotland, when it used to get dark about 

 four o'clock in the afternoon, and how I used to sit near a 

 roaring fir-log fire, with a red-shaded lamp near me, and 

 pore over such books. 



One of the earliest books I remember was a volume 

 entitled " Ungava," all about the fur traders on Hudson 

 Bay, in Canada. This story appealed to me so much that, 

 with the help of my brothers and sisters, I built a little log 

 cabin in a plantation of fir trees not far from the house. 

 An old iron pipe served for a chimney, and my bed 

 was made of fir needles covered with two blankets. 

 Then I used to sally out, first with an air gun, and then 

 with a rook rifle, shoot blackbirds and thrushes, and 

 roast them on a spit. In the way of big game, many 

 is the fine torn cat that fell to my -220, and I have often 

 wondered if the owners had any suspicion as to where 

 their pets got to. Later on, I shot much wildfowl on the 

 estuary of the River Tay, and sometimes I would cross 

 over to the Fife coast and shoot there. 



I managed to shoot some very rare birds on the coast, 

 and among them I can mention the following : Little stint 

 (rare so far north), red-breasted snipe (an American species, 

 then having been shot only once or twice before in Britain), 



S 



