87 



BLACKGAME. 



OF all seasons, the period from the end of August, to about 

 the middle of October is, on the Border moorlands, the 

 most difficult to kill Grouse. They have been so harassed 

 and driven about by the August shooting, that they have 

 really no fixed haunts or flights, but go flocking about, seek- 

 ing safety in numbers. They sit in packs of fifty or sixty, 

 hidden among shaggy heather, always in open unapproach- 

 able places, though not " showing " at all as yet. The 

 weather at this season is often broken, and heavy gales and 

 rain prevailing about the equinox, tend to increase their 

 wildness. Later on, with fine sharp weather in October, 

 these packs break up, and they are then, though no less wild 

 (but being scattered about in twos and threes, and sitting 

 bare) more possible to negotiate. 



During September the young Blackgame are much more 

 attractive than the impracticable Grouse. Indeed, their 

 presence, especially at this season, largely compensates for 

 the comparatively much smaller bags of Grouse attainable in 

 those districts where both these sorts of game-birds are found 

 together. Easy as young Blackcocks are to shoot, yet their 

 pursuit possesses many very delightful features, both in the 

 variety it affords after the August Grouse-shooting, and also 

 in the changed scenes amidst which it is carried on. Whilst in 

 August one's eye rests day after day upon an almost unvarying, 

 unbroken sea of purple heather, glorious in its fullest bloom, 

 with its golden pollen streaming away in a little cloud to lee- 

 ward of the course of dog and man ; now our sport lies amidst 

 widely different scenes, no less wild and hardly less beauti- 

 ful. Stretches of rolling prairie-1. nd, of rough grass, rush, and 

 bracken, interspersed here and there with straggling patches 

 of natural birch and hazel, take the place of the heather ; 



