JfS WdHYSS-lfflg!® 7 iO 77 
Opening Day 
By W. R. 
I N no country in Western Europe is shooting 
so popular as in France. Thanks to demo¬ 
cratic institutions even “the man in the 
street” carries a gun. On the eve of the day 
—which is always a Sunday—that la chasse opens 
in the departments of the Seine, the Seine-et- 
Oise, Seine et Marne and Eure, the Paris rail¬ 
way stations are besieged by the weirdest mob 
of sportsmen imaginable. They are of all sorts 
and sizes, and of both sexes. In general appear¬ 
ance they are identical with that heterogeneous 
Parisian crowd that goes third class to the subur¬ 
ban race meetings, which includes excitable mid¬ 
dle-aged women dragging along children with 
bare legs, but in this case each individual has a 
gun and is accompanied by some kind of a dog. 
These dogs are as nondescript as their masters 
and mistresses. The entanglement is extreme; 
the mob surges in every direction, pushing and 
vociferating, yet the spirit of joyousness reigns 
over all. 
These sporting family parties are quite as 
much bent upon rustic merry-making as upon 
shooting birds. Many extra trains are run for 
their accommodation. Some good dogs of 
course may be seen in the crowd, led by sports¬ 
men whose allure is correct, and whose costume 
does not suggest the lame effort of a Sicilian 
brigand to disguise himself as a chauffeur, but 
these are the exceptions. On the whole the effect 
is motley and fantastic. Once inside the rail¬ 
way carriages the game bags— les carnassieres, 
large leather satchels strung from their shoul¬ 
ders and decorated with vari-colored network— 
are unbuckled and stocks of reeking provender 
extracted from them for immediate consumption. 
Let us follow a party of these sportsmen as 
far as Vernon, that ancient frontier town of 
Normandy, where game as a rule is plentiful. 
Every year the French Government issues 
about 500,000 permis de chasse, or gun licenses, 
each of which costs 28 francs. Of this sum 10 
francs goes to the commune where the shoot¬ 
ing is situated, and the rest to the State. The 
communes and the State profit from this tax in 
the annual proportions of about 5,000,000 francs 
and 9,000,000 francs respectively, and as to 
every licensed gun there are at least three 
poachers, some idea may be formed of the vast 
amount of game required to satisfy the popular 
demand. Fortunately the popular demand is 
satisfied with little. And the range is wide. As 
soon as the prefect of the department—in the 
case of Vernon, the department of the Eure— 
has fixed the date at which shooting may begin, 
partridges, pheasants, little birds of all kinds, 
hares, rabbits—the whole wild kingdom of fur 
and feather—are at the mercy of the sportsman. 
The date varies according to the department and 
depends, of course, on the state of the harvest. 
With so formidable an invasion of sportsmen 
every little town near Paris is en fete when the 
chasse opens. Vernon is beflagged as if for a 
public holiday. Its hotels are crowded to over¬ 
flowing, its cafes illuminated. Not a carriage 
can be had for love or money, all having been 
engaged for the chasse weeks before. Fierce- 
looking chasseurs in Tyrolese hats and heavy 
in Normandy 
GILBERT 
gaiters, many with the unmistakable red Norman 
look, parade its narrow streets. The welkin 
rings with the yelping of many hired dogs. At 
nightfall a strange and significant silence en¬ 
velops the place. Vernon, in order to be up with 
the lark, and to have a pot shot at him, has re¬ 
tired early, and long before dawn has fairly 
broken you may hear the rattle of the first gun. 
Soon the bells of the old church, which the 
English built in the time of the Anglo-Norman 
dukes, will ring merrily out to salute the festive 
morn, and then from all corners of the country¬ 
side you shall hear a banging away of guns that 
might make you think that the Germans had 
once more invaded Normandy as they did in 
1870. Supposing they had, the danger to life 
and limb would hardly be greater, for not un¬ 
commonly as many as forty Parisian and local 
sportsmen will club together to hire the shoot¬ 
ing over an estate which does not cover more 
than twelve acres, and then let the casual passer¬ 
by be wary; he must look out for himself. Ihe 
Frenchman has proved more than once of recent 
years that when he takes up a sport, whether 
it be motoring or aviating, or anything else in 
which there is an element of personal danger, 
he does so with a whole and impassioned heart, 
regardless of his own or others’ lives. Twice 
have charges of shot struck the ground imme¬ 
diately in front of me when leisurely proceed¬ 
ing along the highway on the outskirts of Ver- 
boars are plentiful, and as a rule are hunted: 
la courre, though an occasional animal falls : 
an outsider’s gun. These forests are also w 
stocked with deer, but so great a nuisance 1 
poaching become in France that the keeping 
of extensive game preserves is a task which d 
courages all but the wealthiest landowners. 
“It will be a fine moonlight night,” a gan 
keeper on one of the largest preserves near Pa 
remarked to me some years ago, “and there \ 
be at least 1,000 poachers in the forest. I si 
certainly not venture myself among them,” 
added most decidedly. “Why, only the otl 
night they caught my matd, disarmed him a 
took him to his cottage, and only on his wifi 
solemn promise to lock him up till morning <!; 
they let him go unharmed. Why don’t the r 
thorities protect us? Well, you see 1,000 poa^ 
ers represent 1,000 votes for or against the G< 
ernment—a pretty influential lot, these poache 
Where do they come from? Oh, from 
around. From Paris, too; in fact, I wonder 1 
railways in Paris don’t run special poache. 
trains on moonlight nights.” 
This gamekeeper had a sense of humor, 
he was not exaggerating. 
Pete Saucier’s Ocean Catch. 
Som’ tam Ah hear wan sailor-man 
Tell story, ’bout how she 
Shall catch beeg feesh in hocean; an* 
Dat soun’ lak’ lie to me. 
Ah catch beeg feesh hon riv’ an’ lak’; 
But no so beeg lak’ dat. 
By crimp, heem say, wan feesh shall mak’ 
Four hunder’ poun’ of cat! 
non, fired downward at some rabbit by an excited 
sportsman posted on the neighboring hillside. 
The shooting season in Normandy—as in other 
parts of France—is invariably saddened by a 
list, more or less long, of fatal accidents which 
are mostly to be attributed to carelessness (and 
here I may say that in our own States of Maine 
and Vermont this same carelessness is notice¬ 
able). Dogs are slaughtered by hundreds, but 
this is of small importance, as they are rarely 
of value. 
Of all the local sportsmen the dentist is per¬ 
haps the most reckless, if exception be made of 
the hair dresser, whom we last saw running 
across a field in pursuit of a winged robin whose 
brains he was prepared to dash out with the 
butt end of a gun. “Voila,” exclaimed—as I 
once heard say—a young farmer as he entered his 
cottage after a hard day’s shooting and angrily 
flung down on the kitchen table an empty game 
bag and his loaded gun, the latter going off and 
killing his aged grandmother. The average 
French sportsman refuses to subscribe to the 
adage that “a loaded gun is not a broomstick.” 
Of course with so large a concourse of sports¬ 
men spread over such a relatively small space, 
the slaughter of birds and game is enormous. 
Even swallows are not despised. 
Normandy, which is richly wooded, has, of 
course, great game preserves to which the gen¬ 
eral public cannot gain access by the simple 
process of taking out a gun license. At Bigry, 
overlooking Vernon on the north, where Baron 
de Schickler owns a magnificent forest in the 
forest of Vernon, the forest of Les Andelys and 
the national forest of Lyons, erstwhile the favor¬ 
ite hunting ground of Henry I., of England, 
But, wan day Ah mak’ hup ’ees min’, 
Mabbe dat shall be troo; 
So Ah shall gat som’ good beeg line, 
An’ it shall catch som’ too. 
Ah mak’ dose hook ’bout wan feet long, 
So she shall stan’ good pull— 
Dat hook, she been so tight an’ strong, 
She hoi’ wan hel’phant bull. 
She gat down to dose hocean groun’ 
’Bout half pas’ two, free, four— 
Dat fog so strong, it can’ most’ foun’ 
Som’ of dat hocean shore. 
'Ees flung dose hook wan ver’ beeg toss, 
An’ fas’ dat line hup tight; 
So ef it catch, she can’ be loss, 
Den wait fur feesh to bite. 
Prit’ soon dat line pull hofful tight— 
By crimp, by dat hook motion, 
Ah almos’ fink it mus’ gat bite 
From all feesh in dem hocean! 
W’at ef dose w’ale er sea-snak’ gat 
Dose hook? No deef’. You see, 
Ah’m no ’fraid wan han’mal lak’ dat. 
She mak’ it fon fur me. 
Ah’ll pull som’ more, but dat’s ver’ bad, 
Buccause, Ah mak’ hup min’, 
Dat ef dose han’mal mak’ me mad, 
Ah’m ’fraid, Ah’ll bus’ dose line. 
W’at Ah shall don’? Ah know, bagosh, 
Dose feesh shall not her fool. 
She’ll go to her fr’en’ Joe Malosh, 
An’ gat dose great beeg mule. 
Dose mule, she pull her magnifique; 
But jes’ on ’count dat fog, 
Dat hook mees all dose'feesh an’ steek 
Herself in wan beeg log. 
By gar, Ah tol’ you dis ri’now; 
Ah almos’ cuss ’bout dat; 
But hocean feesh no ’count, an’how; 
’Ees radder catch mus’rat. 
Frank Templeton 
