Among others whose days of sport end with the season are those little
considered sportsmen, the beaters. While making sport for others, they
find opportunities for themselves, and it would be a churlish host or
keeper who grudged the poor beaters the rabbits which occasionally
they knock over with their sticks. But their love of sport becomes too
marked when, in a gang, they creep along stealthily on the look-out
for crouching rabbits for their own bagging, instead of plying their
sticks with a will on the cover to drive forward game. They show some
skill of a rough sort, and considerable woodcraft. A man gives no sign
that he has seen a rabbit, his stride is unhalting as he comes up, and
it is without any flourish that suddenly a swift, deft blow of the
stick is delivered, aimed a little forward of the head. Too late, the
rabbit knows its fatal mistake in thinking that the slow eyes of man
had passed it over, as it crouched in its seat.
The law forbids any man to shoot either partridge or pheasant when
the last second has passed away of the last minute of the first hour
after sunset on the first day of February. No doubt the law-makers
were mindful that the light one hour after sunset at the beginning of
February would make it extremely difficult for a sportsman to hit a
flying pheasant or partridge. The law-makers wisely drew no distinction
between misses and hits--pheasant-shooting means, they held, shooting
at a pheasant with evident intent to kill. What is hard to understand
about the law is why the season does not end with the last day of
January. Remembering that February 1 is often the day when the keeper
goes from the old shoot to the new, we think it would be decidedly
better for game that the day should be put out of season. It would be
the worse for the poacher. As things are, February 1 is often a day
of anarchy. And it would be a good plan if dog licences and the game
season were made to end on the same day--the one expiration would
serve as a reminder of the other.
* * * * *