348 THE COMPLETE SHOT 



shoot straight quick enough ; that of shooting driven game is 

 to wait long enough and shoot straight. For the first, there is 

 an individual limit for each of us, which no amount of practice 

 seems to improve. There is, for the second, no limit to the 

 cultivation of patience. 



But this only applies to the single shot of each kind. The 

 difficulty of driving is not in the shot, but in the shots. There 

 is no limit to the number of possible chances, and for this 

 reason one cannot exercise patience and let the game get 

 very near, lest other chances should be lost. The real diffi- 

 culty, then, in shooting driven game well is to shoot the 

 far-off birds as soon as the gun will kill them, in order to 

 change guns quickly and be ready again. 



In pigeon shooting the double rise is the most difficult. 

 Few kill half their birds at 25 yards rise, and still 

 folk will talk of the difficulty of driven game as compared with 

 flushed game. The author does not believe there is any 

 pigeon shooter who can, even occasionally, kill a dozen blue 

 rocks in double rises at 30 yards. He knows there are 

 plenty of people who can frequently kill a dozen grouse, 

 pheasants, and partridges driven overhead. And yet a rising 

 blue rock is not " in it " with the spring of an October grouse, 

 partridge, or snipe for quickness. A ten-year-old boy has been 

 coached at the shooting school to kill driven game well, but 

 nobody ever saw or will see a ten-year-old walk after October 

 grouse and kill them well. An old man of eighty has made 

 quite as good work as the rising generation at driven game, 

 but not at shooting over dogs. 



Still, pigeon shooting from traps is only now regarded as 

 a test of skill by a very small and decreasing minority, and 

 the reason is that the coming game has been invested with a 

 difficulty that does not properly belong to it, and one that 

 will grow less each year as the prejudice against going to 

 school to learn skill with the gun decreases. At present it 

 is not the townsman who finds driven game difficult, but the 

 countryman who has learnt his shooting on game, but only a 

 little of it, and who is " above " going to school again. 



