Forty Winter Afternoons
By STRIX AST week, in a letter to the Editor reproving me for not having read a book recently pub- lished by• one of his pupils, a learned man let fall the observation: `Strix undoubtedly has plenty of spare time.
I am not hypersensitive, not umbrage-prone. I regard spare time as a Good Thing, of which —within reason—one can hardly have too much. Even the Professor's use of 'undoubtedly,' with its unflattering implications of faineantisme and unemployability, would normally have glanced off my thick skin. But it so happened that the Professor's assumption caught me in a state of unwonted vulnerability.
The shooting season ends this week, and when - I read his,letter I had just finished looking through my game-book. From the entries emerges a Pattern of behaviour at first sight not far removed from hedonism. Leaving altogether out of ac- count the records of days on which I have been shooting with friends or had friends to shoot with Me I see that on more than forty afternoons in the last four months I have been out shooting by myself.
Admittedly the winter afternoons are short; but it would be dishonest to pretend that the formula which I sometimes use, in conversation with serious-minded people, to describe these ex- cursions ('taking the dogs out for an hour after lunch') is not euphemistic. If, as has often hap- pened, one is alone in'the'house, a quarter of an hour is quite enough for luncheon; and on even the shortest day of the year that leaves two hours of daylight in which to scramble round the boundaries and the outlying coverts. By the time the dogs have been fed, the gun cleaned and sodden clothes hung up in the drying-room, the reference to 'an hour after lunch' is revealed as the most transparent hypocrisy. It looks on the face of it as if I had devoted a disproportionate part of the winter to the pursuit of pleasure.
I could plead—and the twinge of guilt induced by the Professor's letter persuades me that I should plead—extenuating circumstances. One is entitled to some relaxation; and, since I am fully occupied in the mornings .and work in the even- ings on a huge, dull book, the forays on all these winter afternoons perhaps do not scandalously exceed my .due'ration of spare time. During them, moreover, I automatically acquire a close ac- quaintance with the conditions of woods, planta- tions, hedges, fences, gates add so on for which I am responsible and which would, otherwise not be inspected so regularly or so thoroughly. But in my heart I .know these to be specious and un- worthy arguments; if 'my habits are defensible at all, they must be defended by less indirect methods.
Rather surprisingly, a case, though not a very impressive one, can be made out for them on economic grounds. The records show that on the forty afternoons I killed just over one hundred pheasants (almost all cocks), seven partridges, eight woodcock, nine hares, one snipe and a few pigeons. With cock pheasants averaging 19s. a brace and hares about 5s. each the value of this game was a bit over £50; and since our larder has been adequately stocked with game from less casual shooting days, these weekly odds and ends have, except for the delicious woodcock, been sold.
Outgoings have been low. People who under- stand rough shooting will not suspect me of serious inaccuracy when I say that the bag of 130-140 head involved the expenditure of less than 250 cartridges; for on solitary expeditions of this type an experienced shot, even if he is not a good one, is somehow generally able to make sure of the rare chances he gets, provided he has a steady dog with a good nose and a capacity for pointing. But call it 300 cartridges, if you like; that comes to £8. Add a couple of pounds for gun oil, tow, a very little petrol, and wear and tear of clothes which ought to have gone to the jumble sale years ago. It looks as if my questionable proclivities brought in a net profit (tax free) of f40, or £1 for each afternoon.
* * *
This does not, I admit, exhibit my earning power in a very dazzling light; but then the ob- ject of the exercise was not to make money, but to do what I enjoy doing more than anything else. My habits may' be Philistine and uncivic, but they are not insalubrious. I suppose I walked five or six miles on each of the forty afternoons, and in such contexts walking includes advancing ."at the pas gymnastiqne with a bulging game-bag on one's back through knee-high brambles in an effort to keep up with the dogs; for pursuing cock pheasants in December and January has affinities with beagling. This sort of thing causes one to feel very well, and to address oneself, in the evening, to the task of literary composition with more zest than if one had passed a sedentary day.
'Hunting with a gun and dog is delightful in itself,' wrote Turgenev; and of course, in the sort of operations under review, one's dogs are responsible for 80 per cent. of the bag and more than half the enjoyment. The Turgenev Museum in Orel, where I found myself last summer, is full of evidence of his passion for the chase, and further north, at Yasnaya Polyana, Tolstoy spent much of his time shooting in the same • solitary fashion with the help of a dog. How odd, and, sad, that their translator, Mrs. Garnett, never mastered the distinction between a snipe and a woodcock !
The nice lady in charge of Turgenev's shrine seemed pleased when I showed an interest in his sporting activities.
'In England also,' she suggested, 'many of your writers are fond of shooting?'
'No. Not many.'
'How curious! Why is that?'
1 could not quite bring myself to say that in literary circles shooting was widely regarded as ni-kulturny. I answered (as I now with mixed feelings recall) : 'The good. ones work too hard. They do not have enough spare time.'
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