My grouse shooting days are now past. Increasing years and rheumatic
muscles remind me that I have had my time, and a very good time too, so
now let younger men take my place and profit by my experience, if it
should so please them.
Let us look back on grouse shooting twenty-six years ago. Scotland, so
far as regards the sporting of the far north, was then almost a _terra
incognita_.
Railways ended at Inverness, and to get there needed a journey to
Aberdeen, and from there by the slowest of slow railways, but quick
enough--life was not run at so fast a pace as now.
The more remote districts of the north and west of Scotland were as
unknown as the wilds of Labrador.
Previous to that time grouse shooting was for the few; we were content
with our English shootings, and very nice and pleasant they were.
Every farmer, if the shooting was in his take, preserved his game; he
shot it or he let it. The stubbles were long and full of weeds, the old
pastures full of feg, and there was plenty of clover, but turnips not
so much grown as now, excepting in the eastern counties, about which I
know very little, the hedges and ditches not kept clean as they are now.
There was much less of hand rearing of pheasants; the hens were spared
certainly the second time through, and nice mixed bags were made
in covert with hares and rabbits and wild pheasants, hand rearing
partridges being scarcely known.
Hares are now gone consequent on the Ground Game Act, and without them
the farmer does not find it worth while to preserve, as the shooting
will not let without ground game.
The open shooting was mostly done by two guns shooting together over
dogs; in fact, you could not find your birds or fur without them.
How I made acquaintance with my first grouse was very funny; I will
tell the tale:
I was at Scarborough with my wife and family, and, talking shooting
in the smoke room of the hotel, I was told as a great joke about
the shooting on a moor of about 3000 acres near Pickering that was
commonage, and free to anybody; of course, that was nonsense, the only
parties having the rights of sporting were the commoners, and all
others were trespassers; but that did not now matter, anybody shot upon
it, but since then the commoners have been wise enough to join together
and let the shooting rights at a very handsome rent.
Well, I was fired with the desire of seeing a grouse on the wing. It
was rather slow for me at the seaside. I fancy that most paterfamilias
find it so. Saying nothing, and cogitating the matter over, I
determined to begin my first Twelfth, and accordingly I sent for a
brace of my dogs from the south.
The shooting being free, it was necessary to be on the moor before
daylight. Therefore I went over to Pickering by train in the afternoon
of the eleventh, had some dinner at the inn, and hired a trap and man
to drive me over, the driver to officiate as gilly or keeper, and, he
being a Yorkshireman, anything in the way of sport could not come amiss
to him. I found him keen as mustard to get me on the ground in good
time, and at a good starting point.
With the first gleam of twilight the moor was ablaze with the fire of
some thirty or more guns.
My first grouse was down before I could see him. Something fluttered
up, I shot in the line, down came a bird, and to my intense delight I
handled my first grouse--a fine old cock bird.
In three hours the whole thing was over, every bird not killed was put
off on to neighbouring ground.
I had managed to get two and a half brace, and thought myself very
lucky. I dare say a hundred brace were got off in that short three
hours.
I took myself away to Saltersgate Inn, a comfortable wash up, some
breakfast, and a nap, and in the afternoon quietly back to Pickering,
and home to dinner.
That finished my grouse shooting for that season, but I had caught
grouse fever.
The following season I joined some other men for a few days' shooting
over dogs on a small moor in the county of Durham, and had a few
pleasant enjoyable days, getting, perhaps, thirty brace in all. At that
time grouse sat very fairly well to dogs for the first ten days in the
English counties, as they now do in Perthshire and Aberdeenshire, but
there was nothing like the quantity of birds on the English moors that
there are now. One odd thing may be remarked: In all my sporting career
I never shot but one curlew, and that was on this moor. Of birds, they
are the wariest of the wary.