In July, when raspberries come, the bear turns vegetarian; then mulberries and wild apples in the month of September; then acorns in October and November. By the end of September, Black Game have retired to the thickest woods. The willow grouse are so packed in the turnip fields as to defy the wariest dog; the rest have left for warmer climes. It is now that the bateau and boat shooting commences. Punts contain boatmen only. In coot-drives the etiquette is to complete the line and keep it closed, driving from one end of the lake to the other, pressing the game ashore. If the birds should fly overhead and settle on the other side of the line, the punts are put about and the drive repeated from the other side.
In bustard-stalking, the sportsman goes to the other extreme, making no attempt to hide, but on the contrary, showing himself carelessly, as if unaware of the birds’ presence. In a native cart with a thatched roof he drives slowly beside the plowed fields like some farmer inspecting his land, then brings them down with a knout.
Rabbits are met with in most places, even in the dunes, and are not protected. Ferrets are used to thin them out. There are red and white hares in the woods that may be enticed by imitating a doe’s bleat, which may also produce the bonus of an amorous, twenty-six point red buck.
The winter season comprises the following: vulpecibism is not here considered a crime, and many a gallant fox has fallen from a deadly barrel behind a bateau. As the country is mostly unrideable, foxes are nevertheless contingent and are trapped adrag, or hunted with clubs near Phamaphy.
The forest pig should be approached from behind, leaping upon it and gripping it with your knees. While grasping with one hand the thick mane of the creature’s shine, plunge the knife into the body behind the right shoulder blade, between the first and second ribs.
With bear, the Sportsman is generally provided with two guns and a spear as a dernier ressort. When ringing a bear, as it is termed, should the peasant guide again cross the track of a bear he knows is out of the circle when making his ring, rather than returning to his starting point, he will accordingly follow the fresh track. Many Sportsmen will pursue only when the animal has settled himself for the winter. When the peasant has discovered the spot where he has made his den, the Sportsman thus informed goes to the place alone, generally taking with him three or four rough dogs, to rouse the bear from his lair; and thus he has only himself to blame if he returns empty-handed (or does not return).
Wolves are very wary, difficult to drive from their lurking place. (Tether a young pig as bait and pinch its ear to make him squeak.)
On the inaccessible little island of Reil, once featured on coins (unapproachable and fog-bound most of the year), one may stalk a group of ibex which have been carried there by volcanic disruption. Patriarchal rams have dark yellow fleece. The parti-colored hybrids are bigger and more powerful with superb ebony black horns which curve backward, saberlike, almost to the spine, like the bow of Pandarus. No dog can keep up with them.
The coveted lynx, our European tiger, are here considered vermin. In the Marches, miniature antelope sleep like dogs near the railway tracks. As for Belgian wolves and white blackbirds, more people talk of them than see them.
The Mze, as Thucydides tells us, is the “fishiest” river in Europe, “comprised of two-thirds fish and one-third water.” To this unaddicted observer, the fish seem quite unsophisticated, picking at almost any fly in the book at random, though the gaudier ones are preferred. The tributaries are run with trout of microscopic size, as well as salmon (the only piscivorous animals which profit by abundance.) A new American method to catch pike involves a short line, a strong hook, and a big worm. The great sturgeon must be shot in the head, for if wounded, they go off at great speed or sink immediately, only to reappear inflated by decomposition. They are best retrieved by two large men in a rowboat, though recently a Russian prince retrieved thirteen in five days by swimming. Ponds should be avoided as the natives often net the narrow places and dynamite the deeper pools.
Among our most intrepid guests are, of course, those English counts and American physicians who court landrails, the king of quails, returning home with barrels of them preserved by cooks, and generally setting off a great migration of dead birds by steam launch to the poulterer’s. Often they use lighted torches to attract exhausted quails, net larks at night, surprise wild bustards with their wings frozen (driving them in this helpless state straight to market) and gather wild ducks after the frost, starved to death on the golf links. Their weapon of choice is a.303 sporting Lee-Metford or Mannlicher.
But true sport in Cannonia is for neither show nor pot. You will find no downy tailfeathers of the golden eagle in our hats. Only the Capercailzie Chase, our national sport, retains its original characteristics, which the invasion of the Western hunters have banished from so much of our cultural life.
The male of the species capercailzie is in splendid condition in April, when the valley corn is still short, his beak ornamented with a pair of bristling mustachios which he will soon lose to his rivals. When the cock and hen are seeking each other at first light (or twilight) they make low deep notes of love somewhat resembling a woodcutter’s saw, notes that cannot be imitated in words or music, and it is only in April or possibly early May, when his lovesong betrays him, that the Sportsman can locate this wild and timid bird, and then only his silhouette on the driest limb of the tallest tree.
Leave the three or four hours before dawn, astonishing the poultry. Flop the old horse behind the ears with a pig-driving whip. Load your dog in the fantail of the gig. Set out chuckling silently and at the very best pace, on the lane leading to the steepest mountains, for the capercailzie lives only where the water rushes dangerously down from the hills. The standard uniform for such a hunt is a loose gray Tyrolese coat with buckthorn buttons, trousers garnished with green braid, mouse-gray felt boots fit loosely at the ankle, and a Phrygian cap. The dog should be cleansed the night before with a douche of rhubarb, aloe, syrup of buckthorn, and Castile soap.
If nothing can be done in Cannonia without a count, in Klavierland nothing can be accomplished without a dog, and of its many species, only the Chetvorah is capable of dealing with the capercailzie.
Full-blooded, sanguine, up and apt, the Chetvorah are bred to leave their point and return to the Sportsman, showing by their movements that they have found game, an invaluable quality in thick cover. They must point and retrieve alike; in summer act as bloodhound on the trail of a wounded roe; in winter retrieve ducks from water; and in spring act as a spaniel for snipe. In September they must take no notice whatsoever of hares, but two months later they must hunt them down without noticing partridges, as well as retrieve teal from ice-floes. (Occasionally, with large game, they will adopt the expedient of Ulysses and squat upon the ground.)
The capercailzie is the oldest, largest, wariest, and proudest member of the Black Game genus, as well as the finest table bird in history. He has been with us since before the Ice Age and will, no doubt, survive us as a species. While his crowing and rearing grounds occupy the wildest areas of the world, where his chicks survive chiefly on bilberries, the adult bird prefers the edge of man’s destructiveness, diligently following the axe, the plough, and his fist of fire. In ancient times, they were salted and exported to China, and while small families of distant relatives survive in the Italian Undine (Valsavaranici pharatrope), the Black Forest (Kaltebrooner bastobarbus), the Scanian Forest (Fjall ripa), and in Siberia (Glukar naryank), they were extinct in Britain by 1760, the only one left is stuffed in the Earl of Surrey’s manse (the Earl being the first man to teach a dog to stand before the gun), and they thrive today only in the Unnamed Mountains of Cannonia.