Читать книгу The Complete English Wing Shot онлайн

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At covert side it is difficult to be always quite awake; the first few birds may be slovenly taken, and so the shooter may go on until a difficulty rouses him to exertion, and he becomes fully awake without recognising the process of arousing. In grouse shooting over dogs the same differences of form are seen, and others also. One shooter puts up his gun at the bird fluttering at his feet, waits until it gets 30 yards away, and kills it dead, and he may be quick enough with the second barrel. Another waits with his gun down until the birds are a proper distance away, then his “crack—crack” takes the farther off bird with the first barrel and the nearer next, and they tumble on top of each other. The one is “form,” the other is equally good bag-filling; but then these are not the days of pot-hunting, and the difference between the two methods is as great as between the flint and steel and the modern single trigger.

There are more differences than the mere art of killing, and the manner of its doing. In walking up to a dog’s point, for instance, the sportsman and the mere gunner proclaim their different “forms” as wide as the poles apart. The one walks like the crack man across country rides, wide of the “dogs,” perhaps one will be 25 to 35 yards to one side or other; another man may walk right at the dog and level with his head as he draws on, until perhaps he consequently loses the scent; or turns and rodes the birds right between the gunner’s legs, or would if he opened them and failed to get out of the way. In such circumstances the dog needs no help in pointing out bad form in sportsmanship, although he will not pass an opinion on gunning. The dogs that turned tail and went home, because of the frequent missing, existed, it is said, in the early part of last century. But in those days they had not instituted spring field trials, in which dogs do their work as well as in the shooting season, and in the total absence of the gun and the slaying of game.