Colonel Into Grouse
THE instinct of the chase is as old as love. Yet nowadays almost all of us, even those as impenitently devoted to shooting as; for instance, I am, are pricked by strange doubts about the ethics of this pleasure. And that, in an age so fruitful of new cruelties for mankind, and grown so callous, it forgets every month a dozen atrocities, any one of which would have shaken Victorian society with a five-year long earthquake of indignation. The reason for this tenderness towards game, when we are so ruthless to each other, springs, I think, from the banue—the sort of highly rationalised shoot where seven or eight privileged gentlemen who can think or talk of nothing but shooting, despatch on a day over a thousand driven birds without having to walk as much as a mile. Those are the gentry whom Colonel Stanford satirises in "The Twelfth," satirises with spite, humour, affection, and, above all, knowledge.
Colonel the Hon. George Hysteron-Proteron, CB., J.P., gener- ally known as the "Grouse-Cock," is an old Tartar and a brilliant shot. He eats grouse all the year round ; in the close season he practises changing guns, incidentally smashing a host of electric bulbs so doing, in his club bedroom. One July day, after a pecu- liarly satisfying lunch, old George collapses in the club smoking- room, and looks like dying on the embarrassed secretary. But he doesn't. Instead, he wakes up on an Aberdeenshire moor. He feels something fluffy round his neck. He takes a look at his feet. He has been metamorphosed into an elderly bad-tempered cock grouse.
George knows the moor well, as well as he knows the seven eminent guns who assemble there on August 12th. For a moment old associations tug at George. He almost hopes his cronies will do well. But a few pellets put into his tail at long range by Lord Charles (Crasher) Casserole, his life-long rival, inflame him to a red-hot hatred of all humans, and sportsmen in particular. Know- ing from experience the habits of his hunters, he induces his fellow grouse always to break back over the beaters. They are at last out- witted—in part at least—and old George, desperate, fluffed out with hatred, flies straight into Crasher Casserole's ferretty face. There- after, Colonel Hysteron-Proteron has a miraculous recovery, and devotes the rest of his indulged life to bird sanctuaries and flower shows.
Colonel Stanford is no practised writer, but he certainly con- trived to make me laugh inordinately, and even almost to cry, for he catches miraculously the almost unbearable and certainly un- ethical rapture one knows while waiting for a drive to begin. Will we ever taste such deplorable pleasures again?
SIMON HARCOURT-SMITH.
Previous page
