208 TEN YEARS OF GAME-KEEPING 
silver and copper. The keenness of keepers is con- 
stant, and is prompted by a higher motive, as when 
a tired man voluntarily takes a long tramp in the 
late evening, after an arduous day’s work, on the 
remote chance of adding another head of game to 
the season’s tally. 
There is one point upon which all keepers are 
extremely sensitive—the bagging of a pheasant on 
an adjoining shoot, within sight or sound of the 
boundary. I must admit that such an event had a 
potent effect upon myself. When a keeper personally 
witnesses the various scenes leading up to the fatal 
shot, the effect is much aggravated. There is, 
however, no sight which pleases him more than to 
see a pheasant elude a neighbouring keeper and 
return to his own wood. Yet I know many keepers 
who will behold with equanimity various wholesale 
disasters to their pheasant prospects, yet regard the 
loss of an isolated bird during the season as a 
calamity. I have heard a keeper actually boast of 
the necessity of carrying a bucket, in which to 
collect the dead, at each round of the coops. 
Another would turn out hen pheasants with cut 
wings into the jaws of foxes without any more com- 
punction than is suggested by the remark that ‘he 
supposed they’d have the (whatever was his pet 
adjective) lot.’ 
A keeper who rears only a few score pheasants 
often will labour under the delusion that every 
