Most gamekeepers hold the killing of a hen pheasant after Christmas
to be a moral crime. And perhaps most genuine sportsmen feel a twinge
of the conscience when they pull a trigger at a hen in New Year
days--irrespective of the host's permission. Of course, when the orders
are to spare hens, the man who kills or even tries to kill one does
something that the keeper will not forget--he loses caste for ever in
the keeper's eyes; whereas the man who is not greedy to take advantage
of an impromptu permission to shoot hens ensures for himself a niche in
the keeper's good graces.
It is true, there are hens and hens. Only a churlish keeper would not
admire the man who stops one of those skyscraping hens, of the sort
bagged by ordinary gunners about once in a lifetime. But the order,
"Shoot hens if they are real tall ones," alarms a keeper--unless he has
full confidence in the guns of a party. When the word has been given,
it is wonderful how many hens are "real tall ones." There are excuses
which must be accepted: for in certain conditions of light, when the
golden moment for pressing the trigger is within grasp, it is almost
impossible to distinguish hens from cocks--length of tail is then the
most reliable evidence.
We remember a knowing old keeper who laid a plot to ensure at least a
merry start to a Christmas shoot, when "Cocks only" was the order of
the day. This worthy, when catching up birds for his pens, had gathered
together some twenty superfluous cocks. These, a dishevelled and
more or less tailless crew, he carried just before starting-time to a
dell thick with spruce, chosen doubtless for decency's sake: and on a
plausible pretext lined out his guns between the dell and a wood. But
he forgot there was no natural inducement to the birds to fly in the
face of evident danger--and all the birds broke away out of gunshot,
and so suddenly as to make their recent history all too evident.
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