522 
“Good Hunting 
55 
and fields, wading across luscious-smelling 
swamps, breaking through cat-brier thick- 
ets which tattoo our legs and would make 
English tweeds retire in shame to the rag- 
bag. There are no game carts to bear 
home the trophies of carnage, no game- 
keepers — and for that matter there is 
sometimes but little game. 
Yet I wonder if any of my fellow lovers 
of the most ancient and the most royal of 
sports is lucky enough to have a better 
time w'th a truer sportsman in a more 
delightful corner of the country than 
has been my portion almost every season 
since my host and I were boys together at 
college shooting clay pigeons on the gun 
club. 
I 
Except to those who kill to live, or live 
to kill, the game bag can no more gauge 
the joy of shooting than money-bags the 
success of life. Indeed, I know sports- 
men, good shots at that, who say they 
find more contentment in the lean bag 
than in the full one, basing this doctrine 
not upon the grim philosophy of the 
Stoics, but upon sound Sybaritic princi- 
ples of pleasure. More than enough for a 
feast dulls the fine edge of appreciation in 
the shooting of game as well as in the eat- 
ing thereof. 
For my part, except when on the West- 
ern plains, I’ve seldom had enough of 
either! But I agree that to get the keen- 
est zest out of shooting I must not only 
work but wait for my shots. As a mere 
matter of skill, it is more of a feat, of 
course, to execute a right and left on 
driven pheasants rocketing overhead 
than to score a double on “straight- 
away” quail flushed over dogs. But, for 
one thing, you miss the fun of the dogs. 
And so do the dogs, God bless them. If 
the object of shooting in the field is sim- 
ply to test your skill, why take the trouble 
to go into the field? Y ou may get muddy 
and tear your clothes. Why not slaughter 
live pigeons at the trap and be done with 
it? 
Not that we are of that modern breed 
of sportsmen who pursue game with the 
camera. We were trained in the old 
school. We have not learned to interest 
ourselves in the introspection of birdies 
and bunnies, nor to be thrilled by the left 
hind footprint of the skunk. We are still 
so incompletely evolved from savage an- 
cestry as to love the chase more than most 
of the joys of life — and for this I offer no 
apology and ask no palliation. I suppose 
we might try to tell you (and ourselves) 
that we carry several pounds of steel and 
lead all day through bush and bog until 
utterly exhausted, all for the beneficent 
purpose of bestowing a swift and painless 
death upon quail and woodcock which in 
the ordinary course of nature would meet a 
violent or a lingering end. That is one of 
the familiar sophistries of sport, and sport 
is one of civilization’s compromises with 
barbarism. There is still a good deal of 
the savage left in all of us, including those 
who will not admit it, and it might crop 
out in ways more harmful to society, less 
beneficial to the individual. (It has been 
known to happen.) Some men, perhaps, 
do not need a safety-valve in order to re- 
main social. Others do. 
But with equal candor I can say that 
although some seasons bring us “ big days” 
down there on the old place, days of bar- 
baric delight which stand out in recollec- 
tion like a crimson swastika on a white 
blanket, yet there have been still other 
days, failures according to the game book 
in the hall, which stand out like pure 
gold against the fading weave of happy 
memories. 
Good shooting, in fine, can help make a 
good day’s sport, but poor shooting can- 
not mar it, provided time, place, and com- 
panionship be perfect. ... So there may 
be hope for our descendants ! 
II 
To drain the quintessence of enjoyment 
from a shooting trip you should time it to 
come at the end of a long sentence of hard 
labor. It should loom up ahead of you as 
something to work for, to live for; a goal 
toward which you are struggling like a 
long-distance runner. Then with your 
holiday comes the voluptuous peace of an 
athlete breaking training. “Toil that is 
o’er is sweet,” but it is so much sweeter if 
followed by active indulgence in your fa- 
vorite form of play than by passive loafing, 
which kills so many vacations. 
And yet more important than all else, I 
