Editor's Introduction. xiii 



high in the air, swerving, crossing, swinging down wind, they 

 would pass over the hne of guns ; and that process provided 

 the finest and most exacting test of a man's skill with his 

 weapon. Driven grouse with a gale of wind behind them, 

 driven partridges late in the season, twisting as they top the 

 fence, make hard shooting ; but there is nothing more difficult 

 than a pheasant curling at his top speed over the roof of the 

 trees. 



It had been discovered, then, how to make the home- 

 bred bird supply first-class shooting. That was to the good ; 

 but, unfortunately, as it happens with good things, it was 

 overdone. Twenty, thirty, a hundred good birds at a stand 

 were thought not enough ; the numbers became multiplied 

 by ten. Bags went into four figures. Five figures almost 

 were needed to count the birds brought up and put into the 

 woods ; and almost because of those figures, the thing came 

 even to a kind of disrepute. Not that the shooting became 

 less difficult, but that there was too much of it. A man could 

 come home at the end of a big day, and be puzzled to remember 

 a dozen shots out of the hundreds he had fired. That was 

 less sport than mechanism, and already, at the height of what 

 may be called, perhaps, the pheasant era, which culminated 

 in the years before the European war, men were beginning 

 to turn from the " set piece " of pheasant-shooting to the 

 wilder, happier sport of the snipe-marsh and the saltings. 



Then came the war and stopped all pheasant-rearing ; 

 stopped pheasant-shooting as we knew it. Those who stayed 

 at home shot for the larder or the hospitals ; shot at birds 

 beaten out anyhow. And an unexpected thing happened, 

 for it had been prophesied that the stock of birds, without 

 the new blood of the rearing-field to augment it, would die 

 out. Instead, it multiplied. Wild pheasants learnt not only 

 how to elude the gun but how to escape from their enemies. 

 Even with EngUsh woods and fields filled fuller than any 

 gamekeeper within living memory had seen them with foxes, 

 stoats, weasels, magpies, and jays, the wild pheasant brought 



