THE PINTAIL SNIPE. 349 
tion of working on or off a wind, and really with Snipe massed, 
as ours sO commonly are, and lying as they do lie in the 
Indian noontide glare, and with the almost entire absence 
of wind during the middle of most cold-season days inland, 
it matters very little, if you only hold the gun straight, how 
you work them. 
But on one or two points a word of caution may not be out 
of place. 
As a rule men waste an incredible amount of ammunition 
and tire themselves out by using too heavy charges. In the 
old muzzle-loader days, with 12 and even Io bore guns, I have 
often and often, after completing my fifty couple wth difficulty, 
had to leave off, solely owing to the terrible headache 
induced by the repeated discharges of the gun, and that 
perhaps before 2 o'clock, whilst half the ground or more 
remained utterly untouched. Had I then known what I know 
now, and had the guns now available been so then, I could 
often have certainly bagged a hundred couple. A twenty or 
twenty-four bore breech-loader, with the left barrel half choke, 
rather heavy in metal, is best I think for Snipe. With this 
have two sizes of cartridges, one dram of powder and half an 
ounce of No. 10 shot, and one and a half drams of powder and 
three-fourths of an ounce of No.7 shot. With these charges, if 
the gun is a good one, you can kill Snipe as well, and as far as 
is ever necessary, and you may fire off such cartridges out of 
such a gun two or three hundred times in a day without the 
smallest inconvenience. 
Wild buffalo have grown rarer during the last thirty years, 
but when I asa youngster shot Snipe in the Dacca district, 
it was no very uncommon incident to be suddenly charged 
out of a mass of bulrushes by a cantankerous old Urna, 
and we always kept a rifle close behind us in localities where 
such mar-sports were rumoured to abide. Probably much the 
same is the case to this day in many parts of Assam. 
Once, when four of us had gathered together for a moment 
close to a dense clump of rush, without warning, from the 
very edge of the cover, not thirty yards distant from us, out 
charged an Urna. Our men were all with us; our rifles were in 
our hands in a second; six shots were fired almost. simulta- 
neously, and the great mud-coated brute fell on his knees 
almost within touching distance, and rolled over dead. The 
curious thing was, that only one ball had taken any real effect ; 
one had missed altogether, one had lodged in the right side 
of the neck, one in the ribs, and three had struck the forehead. 
All the balls, but one, had been about No. 12 round leaden 
bullets fired from six-groove barrels; the sixth was a clumsy 
three-ounce cone, hardened with type metal fired from a_ two- 
groove rifle,and this one had gone straight into the brain, the 
other two flattening themselves under the skin on the skull. 
