BRINGING PHEASANTS TO THE GUNS 295 



they dare not face the spirit world, or the unknown quantity, 

 the more they are frightened by the advancing beaters the 

 better for their flying. It is one of the few cases where noise is 

 better than silence in driving game. The more the noise the 

 closer the birds will lie, and the closer they lie the higher they 

 will rise, in order to get back over the heads of their mortal 

 enemies, whom they hold dangerous in exact degree to their 

 proximity. Then, when the pheasants have gone straight up 

 and turned back over the noisy beaters, they see the guns 

 between them and home, which has the effect of keeping them 

 from sinking as they go homeward, and often makes them rise 

 higher still. 



If, besides making use of this plan, including driving the 

 birds away from home on their feet and back to headquarters 

 on the wing (which is the recognised principle), the last opera- 

 tion can be performed down wind and in a breeze, the success 

 of the scheme will be enhanced, but it does not depend for 

 success upon those conditions. 



Every shooter professes to despise pheasant shooting unless 

 the birds are converted into good " rocketers." But there is a 

 little doubt what this term conveys to different sportsmen. The 

 author has seen sportsmen professing the faith of the rocketer, 

 already mentioned, supremely happy when standing 50 yards 

 outside a covert and slaying the birds that rise in the corner 

 no farther away. Possibly the term might originally have been 

 used to imply a bird that had risen straight up, but the author 

 does not remember its use in that sense. For thirty years it 

 has meant to sporting ears a bird which has risen high a long 

 way in front, and comes with the impetus gathered in long flight 

 over the head of a shooter. If at that moment the bird is 

 sinking slightly on outstretched motionless wings, it is none the 

 less a rocketer. The late Bromley Devonport's chaff about the 

 sportsman who preferred to seek the rocketer in its lair has 

 doubtless lost its meaning, but all the same those who surround 

 the corner of a covert in order to shoot just risen or just rising 

 pheasants are truly cornering the pheasant, but not the 

 rocketer. 



