THE GUN AT HOME AND ABROAD 
At least with black -game such exactitude of forecast can never exist ; 
here the glorious element of chance must ever play a very important part 
in the proceedings, nor can any man venture to hazard with confidence 
what the morrow shall bring forth. For black-game are born wanderers 
on the face of the earth, here in their scores to-day, yet vanished without 
rhyme or reason to-morrow. No change in the weather, or shortage of 
food supply on which to lay the blame ; only they have followed their 
own wayward fancy and betaken themselves elsewhere. 
A striking instance of this trait comes back to the memory. It was 
some winters ago, and I was among the guests bidden to shoot the 
coverts at a hospitable Scotch mansion, which lies in a pleasant valley 
among the Westland hills. One of the underkeepers, coming in from his 
distant moorland beat to lend a hand with the Pheasants in the policies, 
brought news of a pack of black-game, only to be reckoned by hundreds, 
all old cocks, with never a greyhen among them, seen daily for some 
little time past on the borders of the moor. 
The plans for shooting the home coverts on the following day were 
too far matured to admit of alteration — a covert shoot of any size takes 
no little trouble and time to organize, and cannot be postponed at will — 
so it was not till the second morning that we set off for the outlying beat, 
with high hopes of laying out in the evening such a row of fine old black 
fellows, as should be worth many thousand Pheasants. We had a pleasant 
enough day ; there were a few Woodcock and a sprinkling of wild Pheasants 
in the scattered wood of birch and alder that clung to the lower slopes of 
the hillside ; the moor above yielded a fair number of Grouse in the drives 
of the afternoon, but so far as the aim and object of the day was concerned, 
we might as well have stayed at home, for we hardly saw a Blackcock 
at all. To emphasize the already patent fact of their absence, fate ordained 
that there should be scarcely a minute of the day when a greyhen was 
not sailing over some part of the line. So numerous in fact did the grey- 
hens become in the moorland drives of the evening, that the keeper — 
rightly or wrongly— decided that it would be well to thin their numbers 
a little. The word to slay and spare not was given, and in the last double 
drive before dark, no fewer than fifty -two greyhens — most of them 
happily of uncertain age — had fallen by the butts, eventually to figure as 
a most respectable total in the game card, where distinctions of sex are 
fortunately suppressed. All this points to grasping the skirts of happy 
chance without delay, such time as the Blackcocks are reported to be “in.” 
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