BLACK-GAME SHOOTING 
you, to be followed by a wild moment of the “ scatters ”* as the pack 
sweeps round your butt, and on and away into the distance, leaving you 
ruefully to eject the empty cartridges from your gun, wondering how on 
earth it was possible to miss such a huge target, and feeling acutely that 
every one within sight — guns, keepers and flankers — has mentally set you 
down as a hopeless bungler. 
Apart from experience, the best palliative of this evil lies in a fixed 
concentration of purpose. If the gun choose one bird when they are still 
some little way out of shot, set his teeth, grip his gun, and decide that his 
quarrel lies with that particular individual and no other, he should find 
him easy enough to stop at ten yards’ range, and the confidence born of 
success may well bring down another to join the first. 
For, after all, the average Blackcock is not in itself a very difficult 
shot ; for the most part he flies straight ahead without swerve or curl ; 
only very occasionally — ^when they have been much shot at— -they have 
been known to dive on the shot, a well-known practice of Grouse. And so 
a really good performer with the gun soon learns enough of their ways 
never to be deceived by the apparent want of speed in their flight, and 
thereafter turns most of his chances into a fair certainty. His habitual 
accuracy stands him in good stead, for no bird requires to be more cleanly 
killed. And so it will always fare badly with the more casual sportsman, 
who^ has been accustomed, in shooting other game, to rest satisfied 
with every shot that brings a bird to the ground, indifferent whether 
the charge was lodged in front or behind. 
For no bird will take more shot in the wrong place without effect than 
the Blackcock; head and neck are as vulnerable as in any other bird, 
but elsewhere he will carry as much shot as would kill a Pheasant twice 
over; the shock may knock him all endways for the moment, but — if 
only wounded in the body — he will almost always manage to recover his 
balance and keep going somehow, gradually gathering strength as he 
goes, until he is lost to view. Therefore the hard hit birds of doubtful 
performers that just carried over the nearest skyline are rarely worth 
wasting much time looking for — they are probably in the next parish. 
It is far otherwise with the suicidal greyhen, which courts destruction 
at every turn. It is almost impossible to miss a greyhen — many of us 
have often wished it were less so when the damning corpse is produced 
*The writer makes no apology for the use of the noun “scatters,” although it finds no place in the dictionary. It 
suggested itself to a friend as he watched some startled coots departing across the water in the absurd manner peculiar 
to their kind, and is sufficiently expressive to require no explanation. 
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