BRINGING PHEASANTS TO THE GUNS 299 



calculating trick, but it was one requiring physical strength 

 and snap shooting. 



Often it has been said that our ancestors knew nothing of 

 the rocketer. But the hardest pheasants the author has ever 

 had to kill have been Welsh pheasants flushed by a team of 

 wild spaniels, and these birds often came a couple of hundred 

 yards before they got within range, and all down hill. That is 

 to say, there still exists shooting done in the same way in which 

 it was managed before the battle of Waterloo, and that shooting 

 is infinitely more difficult than any that can be obtained in a 

 flat country. 



The author has arrived at a time of life when he has no 

 particular ambition to enter into competition with his dead 

 ancestors, but he believes that their skill in shooting the few 

 birds they had was quite as great as that of their descendants. 

 They were flight shooters, and if they could hit flighting ducks 

 and teal in the dusk of evening, they could do anything with 

 the shot gun, except that they knew nothing of getting off their 

 guns at the rate of 200 shots in 20 minutes. 



This is quite a demoralising rate of shooting at first, but it 

 is attainable by everyone, now that every gun-maker has a high 

 tower and clay birds to put over the shooter in streams. 



Fashion in shooting always seems to go by contraries. That 

 which is most difficult becomes most fashionable, and now that 

 anyone may learn how to hit driven game and " let off" quickly, 

 by means of the shooting schools, it is doubtful whether fashion 

 will not turn round and favour that which is less attainable, and 

 not to be acquired by school teaching. This sort of shooting 

 education cannot help a man to shoot straight at the end of a 

 long day in hot sun and over the roughest peat hags. Only 

 practice in the thing itself will do that : there is no royal road 

 to high form, as there is for the butts. 



In big shoots the tendency is to have two parties of beaters, 

 to avoid a loss of time. One party gets into position while the 

 other is beating, so that often guns have only to face about after 

 shooting the game of one covert in order to receive pheasants 

 driven into the beaten covert from another one. 



