THE GUN AT HOME AND ABROAD 
concern to the older proprietors of deer forests was that deer, especially 
the best stags, invariably preferred the new places to the old and sour 
pasture, and so they lost the best of their stock, as it were, in a single 
season. I remember well when the sheep ground of Glencoe was cleared 
— -and in two years’ time became an excellent small forest — what war 
and bitter words it called forth amongst the old stalkers on either flank 
against the new forest makers. But words hurt little, and we may yet 
live to see the new place described as the “ grand old deer forest of Glen- 
coe,” when old enmities will be forgotten. 
With this new creation of dozens of forests, the new race of stalkers, all 
following the professional leader, are for the most part men who are 
little concerned with the sporting qualities of the stag, but more with 
securing numbers, weights and fine trophies. The sporting and local 
papers are half filled with accounts of the gory doings of people who like 
to see their names in print. So the desire to kill numbers of phenomenal 
weight and size has arisen, and the sport itself has greatly suffered in 
consequence. To this type of sportsman it is not sufficient that such 
and such a forest if properly shot is only capable of producing, say, twenty 
adult stags. He must have forty or fifty, at least, and the result is that 
all the young and growing stock, showing any promising horn-growth, are 
killed, whilst old stags with bad heads are neglected and — worse still — 
allowed to live and reproduce a race of bad -headed individuals. As an 
old sportsman, who had just completed a short tenancy of one of the 
most famous forests in Scotland, where he had not seen a single good 
head, sadly remarked to me, ‘‘Three different tenants and three years of 
‘ Mannlichering ’ will irretrievably ruin the best forest in Scotland.” And 
this is true. The few good trophies that are annually killed in Scotland’ 
come from a few ‘‘new ” forests where the grass is good, the winters mild, 
and the tenants have long leases and shoot with intelligence. Quite nine- 
tenths of the Highland forests are overshot, generally out of good-natured 
ignorance on the part of the tenants. And this overshooting of stags is 
much encouraged by the proprietor, whose only desire is to say that 
his forest produces so many stags, naming a figure grossly in excess of 
what the ground can carry, because he will truly gain an increased rent. 
It is nothing to him if his tenant only kills rubbish, but everything that he 
shall be well paid for it. Wherefore year by year the trophies of the chase 
become smaller and smaller. Also, as if to make “ confusion worse con- 
founded,” nearly every forest is swarming with a plague of hinds, which 
66 
