I38 THE COMMON OR GREY QUAIL. 



approach, and although they will, where the ground permits it, 

 run a good deal, they are not usually difficult to flush the first 

 or second time, but after having been twice raised, they are 

 very unwilling to fly a third time. 



No bird probably affords prettier shooting than do Quail 

 in some seasons in many parts of Northern India. A hun- 

 dred brace may be, and have been, bagged in a single day by 

 one sportsman ; but using full charges, as I did in the days 

 when I saw most of Quail, in the Meerut district, most men's 

 heads are splitting from the continual firing before they have got 

 much beyond half that number. With small charges, such as I 

 have already described, (p. 119) it is impossible to say what 

 bags might not be made. 



The best time, of course, is when about three-fourths of the 

 wheat and barley has been cut, the birds being then, at any rate 

 from 7 A.M. to 5 P.M., massed in the still-standing patches. 

 That the reapers are at work in these makes no difference ; they 

 may be making any amount of noise, but ten yards from 

 where they are cutting the Quail begin to rise, and thencefor- 

 ward the whole field seems converted into a gigantic Gattling, 

 discharging Quail in all directions to the front (they hardly ever 

 come back upon you), until, just at the very margin of the crop, 

 a final feu dejoie bursts along the whole line. 



The husbandmen do not mind one European or one or two 

 natives walking carefully through the standing corn (and when 

 Quail are very thick this is the best way of shooting them if 

 you have good retrievers), but they do most strongly object to 

 a dense line of native beaters trampling through their ripe 

 crops ; and when the birds are only fairly plentiful, the best 

 plan is to use a cord to beat with. You take a thin cord about 

 two-tenths of an inch in diameter, and forty or fifty yards in 

 length, and at every yard you insert a white feather through the 

 strands. One man walks on each side of you at a distance of 

 twenty or twenty-five yards, each holding one end of the cord, 

 which they strain pretty tightly between them. You walk about a 

 yard behind the cord, which just brushes the tops of the highest 

 ears, and which, at each step they take, the holders flap down on 

 to the corn. This does no harm (the rope must not drag 

 along the field), makes little noise, and yet suffices to flush 

 almost every bird. If, as is almost essential, you have good 

 retrievers, and your men have kept count of each bird that fell, 

 when you have completed shooting out the field your men, with 

 the dogs, take up the running, and should recover every bird. 

 Without dogs, Quail-shooting, excellent as it is, is most trying to 

 the temper. If, when a bird falls, you allow a beater to rush 

 to the spot, he probably flushes twenty others in recovering or 

 trying to recover that one. If you allow none to be picked 

 up until the line has passed, you lose certainly half your birds. 

 In the first place falling rapidly right and left at every step 



