"You take first shot," says generous Jemmie; "if it's a covey, your birds are on the right and mine on the left."
The first shot of the season! how absurdly my heart is beating. I wonder the birds do not hear it and get up wild.
Suddenly, twenty yards from us, there is a rustle and a flutter of strong wings, and a grey hen rises without clucking, and lifting herself gracefully over the young birch saplings, floats away over the moor.
"Matka!" (Hen!) shouts Hermann, and to the surprise and disgust of the dogs, no cartridge explodes. Shammie smiles and pants, and looks round at us in a pained though kindly manner; he hopes it is all right, but reflects that they generally get their guns off in Scotland when he shows them the game. Jemmie declares that, if it were lawful, he would spare none of these old barren hens; he is convinced, he says, that they do great damage by bullying the younger hens and chasing them from the moor, in order themselves to monopolise the attentions of the gentlemen of the family.
Oh! the jealousy of the female sex. Jemmie may be perfectly right; and I fancy that he is; but what do the old blackcock, or (for the matter of that) the young blackcock, think of such proceedings? What would the marrying men of our branch of life think or do, if the old maids should succeed in banishing all that was young and beautiful in order to promote their own chances of mating?
But it is very hot, and Jemmie suggests that the birds will be lying at the edge of the moor beneath the shade of the pines, and thither we trudge through the heavy moss and heather. The going is always terribly heavy until the first bird is grassed: after which event, I have observed, the tramping loses much of its weariness and the shooting-boots their weight, and when a dozen brace or so have been secured, the feet that bear the delighted trudger are winged feet.
Nevertheless, we walk for a full hour and are still—as to our game-bags—as empty as when we started. We see no beauty in the lovely moor, at this period. The dogs, we feel, are failures, all four of them. Hermann, too, is a fraud, for did he not declare that there were eight fine coveys within a radius of a mile upon this very moor. Where are those coveys, Hermann? Did we submit to be shuttlecocked over your ghastly parody of a road in order to be humbugged by you at the end of it? Where are these coveys? I say. Such, or to this effect, were the remarks of Jemmie. I think during those first two hours of unremunerative trudging, he vowed to shoot all four of his dogs, sell his guns and his cartridges, give up shooting, and devote his entire energies to gardening and lawn tennis, with a little fishing and a trifle of archery; I rather think Hermann and the other keepers were to share the fate of the dogs; I forget whether I was to die, I think I was; but at the end of two hours the luck changed and Jemmie smiled, and dogs and keepers and I all breathed again.
It was Kaplya that stumbled upon the first covey. Carlow was being led just then and so was Bruce, and good Shammie had by this time formed unflattering opinions as to the Russian moors in comparison with those of Scotland; consequently he was cantering about scientifically enough, but half-heartedly, ranging in an unconvinced and unconvincing manner, ready to oblige by doing his share of this foolish work, but feeling that in his case it was time and talent wasted. Probably he was wondering when the next train started for Scotland, and deciding to take it and go hence to places where the moors were not dummy moors, but the bonâ fide habitations of grouse and blackgame, when he suddenly caught sight of old Kaplya at a dead point in front of his very nose, while perhaps that organ was at the same instant assailed by the unexpected evidence of the proximity of something better than heather and bilberry plants. At any rate, down went Shammie as if shot, in as correct a pose as a "backing" setter can assume.
Instantly, also, Carlow and Bruce sat down, the former so suddenly that Ivan, the under-keeper, who held him, tripped over him and measured his length, letting Carlow go, chain and all, to join the party of stiffened doghood at our knees.
This time there was no disappointment. After a moment or two of that intense waiting which every sportsman knows and loves—while the birds, hidden somewhere in the heather or greenery, are eyeing their human and canine disturbers, and wondering what is best to be done, whether to run or fly, or remain crouching—there came the usual pulse-fluttering rustle, and up and away went three superb young blackcock, nearly full grown, two to Jemmie's side, one to my own.
For all I know to the contrary, my blackcock may still be alive and entertaining his friends with the narrative of how a foolish and excitable Englishman once drew a bead upon him in his youth, and drew it awry. In a word, my too agitated pulses blinded my eye and unnerved my hand, and I missed that lordly youngling handsomely and entirely. Not so James and his brace of beauties. Jemmie is a deadly shot, and I would as soon sit on a fizzing bomb as play the blackcock to his unerring barrel; he grassed both his birds; and I knew that the dogs and keepers were now safe, and that the guns of my friend would not, yet awhile, be put up for sale.
But trusty Kaplya and Shammie still stood on; there were more of this interesting family to come. Recaptured Carlow pulled and strained at his leash; Bruce softly whined and trembled spasmodically, sitting on Stepan's foot.
Up started a fourth blackcock, accompanied by his mother; with bewildering suddenness they rose and hurtled away, the old lady dropping a last word of advice to the youngsters still remaining vacillating behind. I imagined her clucks to mean, "Oh, you foolish little creatures! why do you not fly when your mamma gives the lead? Fly always after a shot, when the guns are empty."
This time black death darted from my right barrel, calling to his last account a very beautiful young blackcock, nearly as large as his mother, who of course escaped scot free, triumphing—as she supposed—by reason of her wisdom. But the dogs still stood on.
This is the best, as it is the pitiful foolishness of the blackcock younglings. Their fathers are birds of great wisdom and cunning; their mothers are sagacious and experienced; but the little ones are headstrong and foolish, and love to act independently of their elders. Instead of flying altogether as grouse and partridges do, and thus enjoying each a chance of escape as well as participating in the common danger, they rise by ones and twos, and each bird becomes the sole objective for the charge of the sportsman, thereby immensely lessening his chance of flying between the pellets.
The first covey of the season was a grand one indeed, thirteen birds, including the mother, and of these we slew, without leaving the original spot, no less than nine. Jemmie beamed. He said sweet things to Hermann, the lately abused and condemned; he patted the dogs and "praised them to their face;" he declared that I had slain a full half of the dead birds, whereas I knew well that three only had fallen to my fire and six to his; he discovered that the walking was easy enough when one grew used to it; he liked the sunshine; in a word, my friend James had donned those spectacles whose glasses are of the colour of the rose.
It was now seven o'clock; the heather and bilberry plants were still "dew-pearled," and there were diamonds on every gossamer thread that ran from leaf to leaf and from plant to plant; but the sun was hot enough, by this, to dry up an ocean, and I knew these morn-gems would not last much longer. I was glad when Jemmie proposed a short rest (nominally for the dogs' sake), for there was all the beauty of the morning to take in, and that is best done in a sitting or lying posture. The panting of the dogs is almost the only sound—that and the indescribable evidence of teeming life which you may hear in the dead of the silence. Who makes that sound? What is it? Where is it? I think it is Nature in travail; it is growth and development, the never-resting activity of the spirit of life that moves upon the face of the land.
Our nine little victims lie upon the heather before us, and Jemmie weighs each in his hand and tries, very unnecessarily, their beaks in order to be assured of their youth, and admires their growth, and beams upon men and dogs in high good humour. I, too, criticise the birds and am conscious of a stifling feeling of regret. Here are nine beautiful little lives taken in as many minutes, taken so easily—alas! but who could ever give back to these feathered ruins the thing we have bereft them of? I know it is foolish to sentimentalise thus over the dead creatures I came to destroy, and will destroy again the very next time that I have an opportunity; but the triumph of the sportsman is always a little marred, I think, by this feeling of guilt—the guilt of having robbed mother Nature of some of her beautiful children. She does very well without them, I