WILDFOWLING WITH THE STANCHION-GUN. 149 



turns up during favourable seasons, and especially in severe 

 weather, an abundant incursion of shore-shooters and small- 

 boat gunners, all keenly on the alert to secure any spoils 

 from the punt-guns that may fall to their share. The shore- 

 men are mostly farm-hands, temporarily thrown out of work 

 by the frost and snow, to whom a pair or two of ducks, or a 

 fat goose, form no small addition to the res angustcs domi. 

 As to the boat-sailers, one perhaps entertains less charitable 

 feelings. The waters are infested with them every idle loafer 

 who can beg, borrow, or steal a boat and gun, or even a boat 

 alone, with which they are nothing loath to run in right 

 before the puntsman's eyes and pick up his " droppers." 

 Notwithstanding, however, the nefarious tendencies of this 

 latter class, these small-gunners do at least minimize the 

 chance of any badly-wounded bird being left long in pain ; 

 and, on the whole, I am inclined to question whether any 

 considerable number of such fowl ever really escape. Cer- 

 tainly no more proportionately than inevitably do so in field 

 sports, and I have witnessed them all. 



Even those few which at first may succeed in escaping, are 

 unlikely long to evade the scrutinizing eye of the Great Black- 

 back and Glaucous Gulls, ever keenly on the look-out for the 

 flotsam and jetsam of the waves, and whose ravenous maws 

 speedily put any sufferers out of pain. 



I now come to the second part of my subject, " the pound 

 of shot and unsuspecting masses" theory. Much of what 

 has been written in this connection is closely akin to those 

 foolish diatribes so often penned against modern covert- 

 shooting by those who never in their lives negotiated a 

 " rocketer." Both are pure and simple appeals to popular 

 ignorance. It is the blind leading the blind; but to the 

 cognoscenti alone is the full depth of error and prejudice to 

 which they plunge clearly apparent. Place one of these self- 

 confident critics below the wind at a covert-end, or send him 

 afloat, single-handed, in a gunning-punt: half a day's practical 

 experience will then silence for ever both the cant about 

 " tame, stupid, hand-reared, domestic fowls " in the one 

 case, and the flow of cheap invective in the other. As regards 

 the latter, the critic will find that " dense masses" of wild 



