Half a mile of barren trudging and then the forest begins to lighten; the young day sends golden smiles to greet us through the trees; wherever there is room for a ray or two of his glory to pass, he stretches a hand to us. "Come," he seems to say, "come out upon the moor and bathe yourselves in my full favour; my good, gigantic smile is over all this morning!" And here is the moor itself, a sight to set the heart a-beating on this first day of the season; stretching wide and rich before us; miles across; limitless, apparently, from end to end; and, as we believe and hope, teeming with game if only we can hit upon the coveys.
What a lot of trouble it would save, I suggest foolishly, if one had a divining-rod that showed the whereabouts of the birds! "Proh pudor!" says James, and rightly, "the dogs are our divining-rods." As to these dogs, Shammie and Carlow are setters—Shammie a red Irish, Carlow a blue Belton, and wild at that. The other two are Russian-bred pointers of English parentage—good animals both, and well trained, according to his lights, by Hermann. The setters both hail from a Scottish moor, and are to-day on their trial in this unfamiliar country. Their journey has lost them none of their keenness—look at them now! Shammie, cool and collected, businesslike, making no false move, but ardent and determined; Carlow, half a mile off, but back again in no time and hundreds of yards away on the opposite tack, the quickest and wildest dog, surely, that ever ranged. Kaplya and Bruce hunt close to their trainer—we are giving all four of them a breather just to settle their nerves; but presently two will be taken in while two do the work.
Suddenly Shammie stops dead; so do, for an instant, my heart and pulses. Kaplya and Bruce back instantly, stiff as marble. Carlow is coming in at racing speed, but sees the others when fifty yards away, and lies down automatically. Shammie's tail wags slightly, and we feel that there may be a disappointment before us; but he turns and looks at us; and observing that we are taking him seriously, stiffens into a dead point. It must be business.
"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,