On Shooting - Letters to Young Sportsmen - Part III

Angebote / Angebote:

TO sportsmen of riper years several seasons of almost total abstinence from social shooting may have meant a certain amount of inconvenience inseparable from the upsetting of crusted habits. Even those who took it thus were in a minority. Most of us had enough to do otherwise, and too much by far to think about. But to the youth of Britain those four years are a dead loss in the matter of sporting education and that the youth of Britain intends to shoot, the market for lets, and even for sales, is a sufficient indication. Even the boy of unmilitary age prior to the Armistice has lacked that experience which gocs far to shape his prospective qualifications, not only as a good shot, but also-and this is far more important-as a safe one, and, incidentally, as a welcome guest now and perhaps as a tactful host in the future. For such a desirable con- summation is the result of observation of the best models and imitation of their technique. Going out with a keeper may teach a boy the habits of game and vermin, and then the elements of shooting, the safe management of a gun in limited company but not so well as would going out with his father, if his father is of the right sort and can spare the time. Many fathers of the right sort can scarcely buy cartridges at their present price The keepers style in shooting is usually a nightmare, unless he be one of the competition-winning order, in which case he will improbably be a good keeper. The latter is more skilled in the use of traps and climbing-irons than of the deadly hail. But the interruption in the career of a boy of the age under consideration is as nothing compared with the disadvantages attaching to a very large number of his elders- not those who were lucky enough to have served their sporting apprenticeship before that fatal autumn of 1914, but the class to whom the war has brought various advantages which open up the prospect of a shooting career. To these fortunate standers on the threshold a few hints, it has been suggested, would not come amiss. Shooting, though a pastime, is also a science and an art. But when undertaken in company it is a species of game and, in common with other games, is conducted under rules, some of which are traditional, others, arising from modern conditions are added to or modified from time to time as these conditions change. These rules, based largely on considerations of safety to ones fellow-sportsmen, fairness to the quarry, and unselfishness all round, are unwritten and unwriteable, but they are nevertheless rules. He who would master them after his boyhood ought not to be above putting the clock back and doing as boys used to do half a century ago, viz., accompanying a shooting party in the role of observer only. To anybody gifted with ordinary powers of observa- tion, without which a shooter is a private nuisance and a public menace, a few days spent thus will be worth a library-full of instructions. Shooting, as a pastime, or even as a business, may be undertaken by the shooter alone, divested of any particular moral obligations save the care obviously necessary to avoid firing shots which might injure men or stock, seen or unseen the object being usually to secure the game, no matter how little consideration is wasted on the nature, sporting or otherwise, of such shots as may present themselves.....