SNIPE-SHOOTING IN WALES.
rirFIE sport of snipe-shooting fully answers the great test of the true field sport,—its capability of exciting intense enthusiasm. There are some forms of shooting about which it is impossible to feel enthusiastic. Probably nobody has ever descanted upon the glories of shooting pigeons from traps, though it is a curious reflection that the ignoble pastime which is generally condemned to-day was really popular twenty years ago, when Lords and Commons used to shoot annual matches, and ladies watched the handicaps at Hurlingham. But few other forms of shooting have not found a writer to sound their praises. There is, of course, a good deal more written to-day about the science of driving game than was possible thirty years ago, when much less was known about it ; and certainly those who claim for the shooting of driven birds that it supplies the finest test imaginable of shooting skill, combined with physical enjoyment of air and sunshine, can give plenty of reasons for their choice. To stand in a valley below one of the hanging combes of the West Country on a frosty, sunlit December morning, and to watch pheasants come sailing out from the trees a hundred and fifty yards away; or to wait beyond a belt of birch and fir, or a ten-foot quickset hedge, and to know that at any second a covey of partridges may come whirring down wind, scattering and twisting as they top the fence; or to stand hidden on the edge of a lake when there are duck high on the wing, and when half-a-dozen long-necked mallard suddenly swing into the picture, driving through grey air at an incredible pace,—there are few moments in many days' shooting to equal those, in the swiftness of the • opportunity offered to the shooter and in the keenness of the pleasure he may have if he takes it. But that is not the sum-total of the pleasure of shooting. Unless it is the wildfowler of the punt- gun, there is no gunner who claims more for his favourite sport than the snipe-shooter.
The snipe calls to the shooter from the wild, and to that wild call the shooter must go. There are snipe shot every year within sight of London chimneys, but they differ from the snipe of the wild as the gull singing the song of the sea differs from the gull catching snails in a garden. They will probably be at a given spot at a given time, for one thing, and that is what the snipe of the wild habitually is not. There are days when you may walk over the best snipe ground you know, and when there seems to be every reason why there should be as many snipe there to-day as there were yesterday, and yet when single birds get up where fours and fives got up before ; or, worse fortune than that, you may walk the ground blank for miles. But is it, after all, much worse fortune ? Like the gambler who declared that the next best thing to winning money was losing it, the true snipe-shooter knows that the next best thing to finding snipe is not finding them. The host who asks his guest for his big pheasant day is as certain as he can be that, unless rain or wind spoils the shooting alto- gether, he will be able to send so many birds over the guns; and the keeper who has watched the partridges pair in February and bring their broods safely through the summer can be sure of telling his master in which fields he will find the coveys. They know in each case that the birds are there, and that is what the snipe-shooter does not know, and reckons the fact one of the chief charms of his sport. The big bog - may be empty; or yet again he may chance on the day of days when the snipe are in, not in dozens, but in hundreds, and on that day he does not know what envy is. For of all birds gifted with flight the snipe knows best how to use his wings so as to leave his enemy with two empty barrels and nothing added to the bag. He rises always so as to find the wind, it is true ; and if you are walking down wind he may give you a number of successive shots at his white breast before he slips away sideways and criss-cross, zigzagging higher and higher, until he drops unseen perhaps half-a-mile away. But you must of necessity walk at least as often across or up wind as down, and to be able to drop a right and left at any angle, and under any conditions, more often than not marks a very good snipe-shot indeed. A driven snipe is an easy bird ; you realise that his flight, though fast, is nothing like that of a grouse or partridge coming with the wind. But one of the chief difficulties of walking up snipe is that the arrow-like vision of blurred yellow and brown and white jumps up as often as not when you are clumsily poised half on and half off a. tussock standing up out of bogwater, and "when you shoot zig he goes zag, and when you shoot zag
be goes zig." Shoot as soon as you see him, wherever he is, is the only rule worth remembering.
And if you are wise, go snipe-shooting in Wales. There is capital snipe-shooting to be had in Scotland, and nowhere, when the snipe are in, are nere more snipe to be shot at than in Ireland. But there is a difference in snipe-shooting in Wales. If your ground lies in the wildest country of hogland and mountain, you may yet find in the smallest village, what you will not find in Scotland or Ireland, an admirably clean and comfortable inn. You will be welcomed by your host and hostess, who will show you first into a large and glowing kitchen with two settles, tall and wide, one on either side of a red fire ; you will dine off home-grown chicken and mutton, and cream and butter from the dairy, and before the inn closes you will see the village notables sit smoking round a big round table in the bar parlour, with red and green bottles gleaming above the bar ; possibly your host's daughters in the sitting-room will sing you part-songs in Welsh, with the middle one of the three playing the piano, and the father joining in with a deep-chested bass. It is a curious and moving harmony, perhaps made a little melancholy by the arrangement of the parts given to the three higher voices. The harmony is essentially Welsh ; and so is the custom, which you first come across when you turn in for the night, of giving you but one sheet to your bed. A Welshman would be surprised if you suggested that there were not two sheets; but the top one, as a matter of fact, is a blanket,— smooth and soft and white, but still a blanket..
But you have not yet seen all that is meant by Welsh hospitality. That is perhaps best tested when at the end of some three hours' bard walking over red and umber and emerald-green bog mosses, stepping gingerly from rush-clump to rush-clump, or splashing whole-heartedly through a foot of standing water, you are reminded that it is time for lunch. There is no need to carry lunch with you, so long as you keep within sight of a cottage belonging to one of the small farmers who make a living out of the sheep fed on those rushy, wind- swept hills and valleys. You knock at the door, and your companion asks in Welsh if you can come in for lunch, or, rather, for tea. Nothing, it seems, could afford greater pleasure to the two old ladies who are the only members of the household at home. One of them clatters off in her clogs to cut bread-and-butter—and excellent white bread, home-baked, and yellow butter it is—and the other puts a kettle on a fire glowing in the heart of an enormous chimney-seak—a very oasthouse of a chimney, with cured herrings smoking in it, and with the beams that cross from the chimney to the far side of the room hung with bags and bundles, a drying pumpkin, an old pin-fire double-barrelled gun, bunches of seed-pods, and other homely properties. A question is asked and answered in Welsh, and within a minute the elder of the two old ladies reappears from an inner room smiling and nodding in her tall Welsh beaver hat, specially put on for the benefit of the Englishman. Could any other headgear better fit in with that enormous chimney and the drying pumpkin P You turn your bead and half expect to see a coach drawn by rats and Cinderella sitting with her pretty feet in the cinders.
Incidentally, the snipe-shooter gets very wet. Snipe can be shot in rain, if pheasants cannot, and they are invariably shot on very wet ground, if not actually in water. But wet boots can be dried, and the discomfort of them vanishes with the warm and happy memories that glide through the shooter's tiring brain in the last few minutes before easy and early sleep,—a brace killed right and left rising from the unlikeliest patch of dry fallow ; jack-snipe flitting up like darting moths from the rushes ; a mallard bustling out of a quiet eddy of the trout-stream ; a high-hatted old lady nodding witch-like in a cottage doorway ; and, last of all, sunset lighting gold lamps in the purple bogwater and on the apple-green mosses of the marsh.
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