THE BLACK PARTRIDGE OR COMMON FRANCOLIN. II 



single sportsman, and in past times 60, 70, and 80 brace have 

 been thus brought to book. 



Near Lalpur and Jewar-Sirsanuh in the Kadar of the Jumna, 

 close to where the Bulandshahr and Aligarh districts join, 

 Meyrick of the Canals, Home, later the Hero of the Kashmir 

 Gate (his bright career too early closed by the fatal explosion 

 of Malagarh) and myself, in six days bagged 177^2 brace, besides 

 nearly a hundred brace of Quail, Snipe, Ducks of sorts, Cranes, 

 Sand-Grouse, &c. 



In Upper India it is just before the wheat ripens in localities 

 such as I have indicated, and where the fields are all divided by 

 broader or narrower belts of lofty grass, that the best sport is 

 perhaps afforded. You drive with a good line of beaters all the 

 outlying patches, then beat the belts, and then work the stand- 

 ing corn slowly and quietly, as you would thick turnips. In 

 the dense wheat of these Kadar lands, the Black Partridge, never 

 much of a runner compared to the Grey or the Chakor, cannot 

 run at all, and will not rise until you are within easy shot ; and in 

 a plot of two or three acres you may kill a dozen brace. 



Or, again, they offer very pretty sport when shot from an 

 elephant. Around you is one waving sea of silvery-feathered 

 grass, in which you only here and there for a moment catch a 

 glimpse of one of your close line of beaters ; the dogs you 

 hear from time to time, but never see ; dotted about afe tiny 

 green islands, the tops of tamarisk bushes or little clumps of 

 these struggling up to the sunlight and fresh air through the 

 tyrannous, all over-powering grass. Every few paces, now 

 almost from under your elephant's trunk, now 20, 30, 40 yards 

 away, right or left, up springs a Partridge, perpendicularly till 

 he is about a yard above the grass, and then skims away with a 

 straight strong flight. Here and there a Quail is flushed ; a Parah 

 (Hog Deer,) as you guess, breaks, and firing by the waving of the 

 reed, perhaps you arrest his course, possibly, as once happened 

 to me, to find, horribile dictti, that you have shot a mighty boar. 

 Continually Black Buck and Chikara hurtle through the grass ; 

 at times a Pea- Fowl, or, happy chance, a brood of Pea-Chicks, 

 flusters up ; but these are all kickshaws, incidental and extrinsic 

 delicacies, the real pieces de resistance being the Francolins, who 

 go on all the while rising steadily, almost as if by clock-work, 

 till, weary with the slaughter, you cry " hold — enough !" 



Black Partridge are very easy to shoot under these circum- 

 stances, if you are used to howdah-shooting. I have known the 

 late Col. Congreve to kill six running with ball from a smooth- 

 bore ; but some people never can shoot with a gun off an 

 elephant. 



But though they prefer such localities, and the water and low- 

 lying lands do seem a great attraction to them, numbers may be 

 found in widely different localities, as, for instance, in the scrub 

 bush jungle about the bases of the Mewat hills (the northern 



