Category: Ill-mannered Jackals

Rough shooting

As it turns out, I need a gun-bearer.

I’ve been reading a copy of Shooting By Moor, Field and Shore, an almanac of shooting in England, published 1929. It paints a portrait of a different time and a different world. Furthermore, it points out the inadequacy of my low brow ways. In the brief section on “walk up hunting” as opposed to shooting driven game, the authors point out the obvious burdens associated with “rough shooting.”

“In order to kill game on a rough shoot, you must either walk it up, or indulge in impromptu driving either with the help of a friend of friends. You have to carry your own gun all day, and most probably the game bag as well.”

Imagine the horror of having to “carry your own gun” and game whilst hunting. I should have flipped through this book before I logged a hundred or so miles to shoot only a handful of quail this season, carrying my own gun the whole time.

Zach

WSDG12

He was three years old when I bought him and he came with that name. He never found many birds, but one day (before lunch) he killed a baby goat, got sprayed by a skunk, and ate two bobwhites that he neither pointed or retrieved. He ran off the first six times I let him out of the box. On one of those jaunts he was gone overnight. The next morning I found him snoozing in a hog trap where he had eaten and rolled in a vile mixture of rotten feed corn, molasses, and catfish guts. I eventually traded him for a cast iron smoker pit on wheels.