66 TEN YEARS OF GAME-KEEPING 



my game-keeping career, not only to organize, but 

 to carry out, partridge-drives over ground that made 

 things difficult more on account of its conformation 

 than its extent, I will give some of my experiences. 

 I had about thirteen hundred acres of partridge 

 fields, and if only they had lain together, without the 

 intervention of permanent obstacles, I could have 

 wished for no better scope for that part of my work, 

 which I grew to regard more in the light of a 

 hobby. 



The village lay in the middle, the effect of which 

 was that you could not get a to-and-fro drive on any 

 of the divisions, unless it were early in the season 

 and cover happened to be in exactly the right parts. 

 And when, as more often than not was the case, 

 there was no cover in which to concentrate the 

 birds at the business-ends of the divisions which, 

 by reason of boundaries, made the drives wider 

 than they were long either one had to arrange the 

 guns much too wide apart, or run considerable risk 

 by squeezing the birds enough to get them over the 

 frontage which the conventional party of guns could 

 cover properly. Here is a point which many hosts 

 of shooting-parties do not seem to understand. 

 They fail to see how too few guns can spoil a 

 partridge-drive, though they know well enough that 

 if the guns at a covert shoot are too far apart, 

 pheasants will escape between them without even 

 rising. They argue so many birds, so many guns ; 



