"VARIOUS."
THE poet has sung of the sportsman who violated all laws, human and divine, in the course of his excursions with a gun :— "I well remember. 'Twas a Sunday morn,
He shot hen pheasants in the standing corn.
'Twas in September. Can'st devise a plan More hateful in the sight of God and man?"
The name of the poem for the moment is forgotten. It ought to have been "Various." It sums up in a few short sentences a thousand entries in the game book. It hints without naming them at additions to the bag which have been made with shame; it suggests others which have been deliberately included in a lawless total. It invites reminiscence of acci- dents happy and unhappy ; it impels the curious to turn over the game-book pages in search of unlikely items—a bird shot out of season, like the unabashed one's hen pheasants, a game bird seldom found at this time or in that company, a bird (perhaps a beast) shot by accident—a search, in fact, for the separate items and incidents of that fascinating total, the mixed bag of many seasons.
"Various" ought to include first no doubt the lawful extras
of the ordinary day. The game-book divides up its page a little arbitrarily into ten columns ; after the date, place of
shooting, and names of the guns come five columns appro- priated to the staple kinds of game which are entered in the largest numbers—grouse, partridges, pheasants, hares, rabbits. Then comes a broad and separate space for "various," with a thin column for the number and a wide column for descrip- tion, and the best mixed bags are those in which "various" occupies the largest proportion of the full page. The best, of course, belong not to England, but to Scotland, and a really good mixed bag may have anything over nine or ten different names in it. Eleven kinds are very hard to get; twelve are harder ; fifteen are possible, but would need an extraordinary variety of country to work over. It would mean arable ground for partridges, open moor for blackcock, grouse, snipe, hares, and possibly golden plover, water for mallard and teal, woodland for pheasants, woodcock, pigeons, rabbits, and roedeer, and high ground with both trees and rocks for capercaillie and ptarmigan. Such a bag may have been made, but not often. Much more frequently the " various " added to the expected grouse or pheasants or partridges are two or three only—a teal rising from rushes at the edge of a hillside loch, a pigeon dashing over the spruces near the lodge, a home-bred snipe or woodcock getting up from bog or bracken on the moor. The presence in the bag of one sort of " various " may very well prevent the appear- ance of another. If there are capercaillie to be entered, for instance, it may mean that the length of time necessary for taking the spruce and firwoods on the high ground made it impossible to touch the low ground where the farmer has been reminding the keeper, perhaps, of an untouched covey
of nineteen or twenty partridges. If there are blackcock and roe in the bag, it may mean that the guns have not been near the parts of the moor where you may expect a shot at mallard or teal. If there are ptarmigan—a bird which in
some places is getting scarcer and scarcer because of the protection given to eagles and peregrines—they will probably have been shot on the high stony sides of a hill where there are no pheasants. Or if the entries of south-country Septem- ber partridge-shooting include summer migrants such as the rare landrail or, rarer still, the quail, the time of year will not have arrived for the winter migrant, the woodcock from Norway. Both quail and landrail, it is true, have been shot in these islands in the winter, but these are freakish exceptions. The quail, for that matter, owing to the merciless netting on the shores of the Mediterranean during the time of its spring migration northwards, has almost ceased to be worth calling a British bird.
But " various " includes more than game birds, and more than birds that are actually shot. In the " various " column there may rightly be entered a note, say, of a live wood- cock, caught and released without shooting. The writer had a woodcock given him the other day by a beater, who had taken it out of some string netting used in beating a covert
for pheasants. It was quite uninjured, and apparently not even alarmed; its dark, large eyes were duly admired, and it flew away quietly, in a perfectly straight line, to the edge of the covert. This was on the top of a bank above a large pond in the wood, and, oddly enough, a few days after the woodcock went through its unusual performance the pond was visited by two swans, which remained for several days. There are no other swans in the neighbourhood, and possibly these were two of those which Lord Montagu of Beaulieu during recent years has allowed to go unpinioned from his estate, where they breed wild. Lord Montagu has recently written to the Mayor of Southampton expressing the hope that his swans, wherever they find their way, may not be shot. They would ill become a "various" column. A legitimate and quite as unexpected an item which recently figured in the bag of a grouse drive were three wild geese—somewhat of a problem for the kitchen. The pronouncement of the kitchen, indeed, is an important matter in the assigning of proper places to "various." The curlew is a typical cause of dispute. "The curlew, be he thin or fat, carries a shilling on his back "—so goes the old saying, but it is not every cook who would pay a shilling for him. When he is young and comes off the moor or the hill he is well enough ; but if he comes from the seashore in the winter the wise cook banishes him. The green plover is another bird of debated virtues. The unwary buy him plucked, as a golden plover, though he can always be detected and refused by reason of his hind toe, which the golden plover lacks. After cooking, the difference between the two birds is even more marked ; though there are those who protest, as in the case of the curlew, that green plover are by no means inedible. There is less dispute about a waterhen, which fre- quently meets an undeserved fate by flying out of a covert before the beaters, and which is seldom welcomed at the table ; a coot is equally sure of rejection. But a coot can set a puzzle at a covertside when he flies out high and fast, with a rapid, even beat of the wings, and his long legs stretched out behind his short tail. He has often been shot for a duck, and might be compared, perhaps, to an elongated puffin.
Another useful characteristic of "various" is that the vague description may be used to conceal sin and ignorance. On most moors it is the custom, when shooting grouse and black cock, to spare the greyhens, and a greyhen and a grouse on the wing together can easily be distinguished. The greyhen is a larger bird of a lighter colour, and has a more lumbering flight, with a slower wing-beat. But it is seldom that a season goes by without a greyhen falling to the guns of the experienced and inexperienced alike; on these unhappy occasions the choice before the compiler of the game-book lies between "various" and "grouse," if the greyhen perishes before August 20th; after that date she becomes blackgame. " Various " has also frequently described a young pheasant getting up among partridges in September ; it has done duty for a redwing, shot at because it was either a snipe or a teal, and for partridges, killed without thought on the edge of the grouse moor in August. Partridges and pheasants have been killed in and out of season equally by accident ; few men, probably, have shot for many years with- out firing at a hare or rabbit and finding that with the same shot they had added to the bag a partridge squatting in the furrow or a pheasant in the undergrowth. Rabbits in the same way have often ended the existence of their enemies by bolting into a hole at the same moment when a ferret was unexpectedly making its way out, so that both perished in the mouth of the hole together. These are accidents which befall even the most wary. But ignorance or impetuousness adds even unhappier items to the bag than a ferret. There are gamekeepers who will demand the destruction of nightjars, calling loudly upon the guns to shoot a hawk ; there are others who are equally vociferous on the appearance of an owl, even on a moor in August, where you would suppose that even the most hidebound prejudice could hardly imagine an owl doing evil. Occasion- ally, it is true, the keeper may be justified in demanding other sacrifices besides those of game. A cat and a pheasant are not, perhaps, a frequent right and left, but they are frequently in the woods together. On a moor, again, there may be " various " which could never find their way into a English game-book ; but that is because in most parts of Scotland there is only one way to get rid of foxes, and that is to shoot them. Two of the oddest " various " in the writer's notebook belong one of them to a grouse moor, the other to the tradition of a country house. The first is a blackbird, which was shot by an enthusiastic gun under the impression that it was a driven grouse approaching him. The other was a smaller victim. He lived and died in the days of muzzle-loaders, when many hours might be spent without the reward of a pheasant, or, indeed, any bag whatever. So unrewarded the master of the house, a man of an explosive temperament, stalked gloomily up the drive to the house ; he had not fired a shot. Suddenly be was observed to lift his piece and fire; after the detonation he walked on. There was a large bole in the gravel, but his friends, expecting to pick up the remains, if not of a rabbit, at least of a rat, could see nothing else. After a little, for be was not a man to trifle with, he was timidly questioned on the subject. "What F" he roared, "didn't you see that damned great spider P" The spider was enough ; the desire of the sportsman was satisfied, and order once more reigned in the gunroom.
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