120 THE COMPLETE SHOT 



by. On the other hand, the author has noticed that when he 

 can smell a fox strongest hounds cannot smell him at all, and 

 consequently there is more confirmation that what the canine 

 race hunts by the human nose cannot always detect in any 

 degree whatever. 



It has often been affirmed that game birds lose their scent 

 during incubation, and there is no doubt they lose a good deal 

 of it. Hares and vixens heavy with young are said to have a 

 similar protection from their enemies. But in all cases there is 

 scent, only it is different, and not easily recognised by the dogs 

 kept for hunting it. On the other hand, the nests that the 

 pointer and setter cannot find, the terrier, with a worse nose, 

 often does discover, much to the gamekeeper's grief; and the 

 foxes find great numbers of these nests also, and they do not do 

 it by sight. 



A study of the matter is greatly complicated by the fact that 

 game birds give out no scent when crouching, fearful, under a 

 falcon, and this hawk most certainly does not rely upon 

 his nose to help him discover his prey. To understand why 

 the power of retaining the scent should have been evolved, 

 by the survival of the fittest, it is necessary to go back to the 

 wilderness stage of our islands. Probably the first gamekeeper's 

 duties were performed by the slayers of wolves, at any rate in 

 historic times, and we have no occasion to try and take a peep 

 at the cave bear in his British den. The country was much more 

 wooded than it is now, and it is clear that those falcons that 

 only kill in the air would go hungry in woodlands had it not 

 been for the earth-crawling vermin that flushed game for them. 



The falconers are now proud of teaching a hawk to " wait on " 

 in the air while a pointer is at work, but if falcons ever hunted 

 in a brushwood country in a state of nature, that is exactly 

 what they would have had to do for their friends the wolves, 

 since they could not flush for themselves, and could not kill 

 until a flush had occurred. It is consequently quite likely that 

 waiting on is a latent instinct in the long-winged falcons, and 

 equally, therefore, retaining the scent was a protection against 

 beast and bird alike. 



