PUNT SHOOTING. 103 



produced by your piece of wildfowl artillery at a 

 time when dead silence prevails all around. There 

 is something very grand in the boom produced by 

 sixteen ounces of shot, with three ounces of powder 

 behind it, on a still night, as the said sound echoes 

 along the shore, and gradually dies away in the dis- 

 tance, till all again is as still as death itself. The 

 professional gunner and the amateur gunner are 

 two distinct species of animal. The former always 

 uses a single-handed punt, and by which means he 

 can work himself up to his birds as he likes. The 

 amateur gunner generally uses a double-handed punt, 

 and is always more or less at his punter's mercy, 

 and is dependent upon him I may say in everything, 

 except the actual manipulation of his gun. It is 

 seldom that the man working the boat sees the same 

 line of birds in the same light as the man who is 

 lying down to his gun. The saying that " two heads 

 are better than one " does not, in my humble opinion, 

 always apply to a gunning punt, and many is the time 

 that I have wished my man dead and buried because 

 I could not make him understand which line of birds 

 I wanted to loose off at, he from his position seeing, 

 perhaps, only half as many in a line as I could. The 

 line of fowl, though they may not be very near each 



