182 FRANK FORESTER’S FIELD SPORTS. 
kept down by painful instruction, and will dasb in and flush 
their game. 
When shooting in company, as one always should do, if pos¬ 
sible, especially in July, I have always made it a point, when 
the dogs were standing, so as to render it likely that the shot 
would be a ticklish one, to call up my comrade,—birds lie hard in 
summer, and a word or two, more or less, will not flush them,— 
to place him in the most commanding position, and then plunge 
into the brake, taking my chance for a snap shot, and up with 
the bird myself. Having always kept dogs, and having shot 
principally with friends who did not, it has always been my 
luck to have the gamekeeper’s work, and to be forced to drive 
through the thick of the tangle, while the others could pick their 
way along the outskirts, and get open shots. Somehow or other, 
however, I have generally managed to get about as many shots, 
and perhaps to bag about as many birds as my neighbors ; and, 
in process of time, I have got into the way of liking the rough- 
and-tumble inside-of-the-covert work. You see more of the 
dogs’ working, and get more, if harder, shots; and, above all, 
you acquire what is the knack of covert-shooting, the knack of 
tossing up your gun instinctively to your shoulder, and stopping 
your bird in the most tangled thicket, without knowing how you 
shot him, or whether you saw him at all when you fired, the in¬ 
stant you hear a flap of his wing. 
Even when alone, I invariably flush my own bird, never order¬ 
ing my dog to go on, even at the risk of losing a shot; though 
the chances are, that you can generally mark the bird down to 
lerably well. In this matter I never vary, and I do most strenu¬ 
ously urge it upon all sportsmen, who would have good dogs, 
and good sport, to neglect and sacrifice all individual shots, all 
individual, crippled, or killed birds, rather than do a wrong thing 
themselves before their dogs, or allow them to do a wrong thing 
uncorrected. 
By running in to catch one wing-tipped bird, racing away 
from your dogs, or by encouraging them to run in and fetch, 
before you have loaded, you will lose, in all probability, fifty 
