PHEASANT SHOOTING 



' Our readers will hardly require to be told that to kill five 

 hundred pheasants in the season admits of nothing like regular 

 battue shooting, at which nearly four times that number have 

 been ere now killed in a day. But they will give a man ten or 

 a dozen days of good sport, and, combined with running game, 

 will afford as much shooting as a reasonable man can desire. 

 A party of four guns, killing their thirty brace of pheasants, 

 forty or fifty couple of rabbits, half as many hares, and two 

 or three woodcocks, will have had more than fifty shots apiece. 

 If they began at eleven and left off at four, deducting an hour 

 for luncheon, they will have fired thirteen shots an hour, or 

 more than one every five minutes ; so that something very 

 much less than this would be fairly entitled to be called an 

 excellent day's sport. Twenty brace of pheasants, with hares 

 and rabbits in proportion, is, considering the shortness of a 

 winter's day, ample for any four men who do not differ as much 

 from a true sportsman as a glutton differs from an epicure. 



' To one who cares for natural scenery, the best time of the 

 year for covert shooting is November, when the foliage is 

 thinned sufficiently to give you a fair chance at the pheasants, 

 while the woods have not yet doffed their rich autumnal robes 

 of gold and purple and crimson. A more utilitarian reason for 

 the same preference exists likewise in the fact, that the weather 

 in November is still tolerably warm, and that you are able to 

 stand still without such a coldness arising upon the part of your 

 toes and your fingers, that you seem to have lost all acquaint- 

 ance with them. Moreover, in many parts of England, 

 November is the best month for woodcocks. But if your only 

 object is to make as good a bag as possible, it is better to wait 

 till the leaves are quite off the trees ; when the pheasants loom 

 large and black between the bare poles athwart the dead 

 December sky. 



' A certain knack is required in shooting pheasants, as in 



shooting everything else, which until a man has mastered, he 



will go on missing what seem to both himself and lookers-on 



the easiest shots imaginable. There ought certainly to be no 



o 105 



