so A YEAR OF SPORT AND NATURAL HISTORY. 



of the great bags that the local paper loves to chronicle we generally 

 find that rabbits make up 75 per cent, of the game enumerated. 



Rabbits are hard to hit wherever found. Even in the open 

 they do not give at all an easy shot if the ground be rough with 

 tussocky grass, or gorse and heather tufts. Particularly when the 

 rabbit is pressed by a dog does he cross the narrow pathway with 

 inconceivable rapidity, and all the shooter, thirty or forty yards from 

 him, sees is an instantaneous grey flash, and the Httle animal has 

 disappeared again into the wood beyond, a fraction of a second 

 before the gun has been raised and the discharge rung out. The 

 ignorant man who looks on is perfectly assured that the rabbit has 

 escaped, but he has not if the shooter knows his work ; the charge 

 has followed him, and he lies on his back stone dead, out of sight, 

 eighteen inches within the covert. Many men can kill five out of 

 six of these very difficult snap-shots, which seem so impossible to 

 the onlooker. Practice makes them perfect, and nothing but 

 constant practice would enable a man to attain to such certainty 

 of hand and eye as I describe. 



Rabbit shooting in England is the first serious shooting that a 

 boy gets after he has done the usual snapping at blackbirds and 

 fieldfare ; and, as the walking is mostly easy and much or little can 

 be done at the shooter's pleasure, rabbit shooting is also what the 

 aged sportsman can best enjoy. This fact and the abundance of 

 rabbits and the difficulty and variety of the methods of shooting 

 them make this sport the most popular, as it certainly is the most 

 common, of all forms of English sport. 



Of the various ways of killing rabbits the present writer loves least 

 the great rabbit battue, when no other game is shot, and where the 

 victims are to be counted by the hundred, and at times by the 



