THE DUCKS AT LAST. 113 



I remember one little hot corner with the Chief on number four and 

 I on number five. We were about forty yards apart, stationed between 

 two groves of trees and the birds driven from one had to pass over 

 us on the way to the other. A fold in the hill hid us until the pheasants 

 were very nearly overhead. 



They came high and very rapidly, and in large numbers. After about 

 ten minutes' shooting seventy pheasants w r ere picked up in front of 

 us and there was not one easy shot among them. All good, hard- 

 flying birds. Easily twice as difficult to hit as the same birds walked 

 up over a dog. 



At luncheon time we had finished the pheasant shooting. We took 

 this meal under some big pine trees and, having disposed of it, repaired 

 without unseemly delay to a little stream which had been the home of a 

 small lot of mallards, about seventy-five. These, when released from a 

 high hill, came to us on swift wings and at a great elevation. Fly as 

 high and as hard as they might the five guns eventually disposed of 

 practically all of them. 



Then we repaired to a little green meadow girt round by trees, in 

 the curve of a second stream where we waited the coming up of another 

 lot of ducks. There were three hundred odd of them and they gave 

 us many fine, high sporting shots. We had enough, but only just 

 enough when the horn signaled the news that the last of them had been 

 loosed. 



The next and last day of the whole British shooting experience was 

 devoted to a contest with the fast flying qualities and wily ways of the 

 Scotch partridge. We drove in a big automobile in the morning to a 

 point on our host's land some eight miles from the Castle. Here we 

 found Campbell with a long line of beaters waiting for us. 



The first field yielded only one small covey and that swung to the 

 side so that it lost but two birds from its ranks. The next beat was 

 rather a strange one. The wind was blowing from the southeast; we 

 were on the east margin of a turnip field; it was expected the birds 

 would go with the wind, so the guns were strung out in Indian file and 

 instructed to advance along the north line of the field, keeping such a 

 pace that the rearmost man would be fifty yards in advance of the line 

 of beaters, who, starting at the east margin of the field, were to come 

 through, sweeping it from the east to west by a line extended from its 

 north to its south boundaries. 



