BLACK-GAME SHOOTING 
their fine feathers, and recruiting their strength and pride after doughty 
deeds in the love tournaments of spring and summer; while the young 
cocks are still but half grown poults under maternal supervision, and 
fall the easiest of victims to the gun as they flutter up one by one out of 
the bracken patches on the moor, if indeed the services of the gun be re- 
quired at all, for a moderately active dog could catch most of them without 
any difficulty. 
Not thus should we treat the bird, which but a short two months later 
would prove as worthy an antagonist in the field as our country can show. 
So we may safely pass over black-game shooting in August and early 
September as a recreation — it cannot be called a sport — unworthy of 
record, at which the veriest tyro may — and does — easily glut himself 
with slaughter, probably reading afterwards with incredulous contempt 
the eulogy of the Blackcock as the wildest and wariest of game-birds, 
written by some one who has known this noble bird at its best. 
October is, beyond doubt, the month of all others for the pursuit of 
the Blackcock, and most of us who have once experienced its varied 
delights will give high place among our most cherished memories of 
sport to some late autumn day on the fringe of the moor. 
If uncertainty of what the day may bring forth lend an added charm 
to sport, then must such a day rank high among its fellows. For we live 
in a time when the methods of business are applied to every branch of 
human industry, whether work or play. There is no longer place for the 
old-fashioned keeper, who passed most of the summer months in social 
converse, accumulating that store of racy anecdote with which he was 
wont to delight us in the autumn, but who took the field on the “ twelfth ” 
or the “ first ” without the haziest idea as to how the birds had fared 
since last they were called on to face the guns. His room has been 
filled by some clever exponent of the higher preservation of game, 
and while the beneficial results of his science and skill are easily 
recognizable in the incomparably increased yield of the ground, at the 
same time there is the feeling, which cannot fail to be at times somewhat 
irksome to most of us, of knowing before we start in the morning that, 
given fair weather and fair shooting, these coverts should give us so 
many hundred Pheasants, or those farms or that beat of moorland so 
many brace of Partridges or Grouse. Nor is it hard, now that almost every 
nest on the ground has its place among the carefully tabulated records 
of the keeper’s notebook, to form such estimates with singular accuracy. 
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