the Club, killed four pigs out of one band with four successive bullets as they rushed past him across a road about ten yards wide. It often happened that two or even three different men fired successively at the same animal. In these cases it was the duty of the Secretary to examine the various claimants as to the position in which the animal had been standing or running when they fired, and then to examine the body, and see by what bullet it had been killed, awarding the game to the man who finally killed it. A good deal of argument sometimes arose, but only one or two of the members were jealous; and as a register of all the shots fired and the number of animals killed was noted after each drive, the individual skill of the members was pretty well known.
In these short winter days we always began at daylight and went on till dark, stopping in the middle of the day to lunch in the forest round a fire which was lighted. The keepers, though not bad fellows, did not seem to me to have nearly so much woodcraft or knowledge of the number of animals in their particular beats as German keepers usually have. Their business seemed to be mainly that of watching to keep off the numerous poachers who exist here and who do a good deal of snaring as well as shooting when they get the chance.
After leaving Bouillon I often returned through Paris and went on to Brittany, where a friend of mine, the late W.H. Pope, used to keep his gunning punt at a little village called Sarzeau on the Mer de Morbihan. There I spent a week or ten days in what is thought, by the few men who really understand the art of punting, to be the most exciting of all kinds of small game shooting. Pope was a remarkably strong and hardy fellow who had for years been in the habit of punting on the English and Scotch coasts; but, finding the number of geese and widgeon rapidly decreasing and the number of gunners too great, he had made his winter headquarters in Brittany for some years. We used to live in three rooms of an old chateau on the shore of the great land-locked expanse of salt water known as the Mer de Morbihan, which is frequented in winter by immense flocks of Brent geese and widgeon. Here, at first, we had the sport pretty much to ourselves, the only local gunners being fishermen, who went out in little flat-bottomed coracles with long muskets loaded with large shot, and by waiting about in the likely places used to get a shot or two nearly every tide when the weather was not too rough, though they seldom picked up more than two or three birds at a shot. At first they interfered a good deal with our sport by firing and putting up the fowl which we were trying to approach, but we gradually made friends of them, and succeeded in convincing them that they would get more fowl by waiting till we had fired a shot, and then by helping to retrieve the cripples, which were often numerous. Pope never cared to fire unless he was near enough to kill a good many at a shot, and he was indefatigable in his endeavours to make record shots. He had a double-handed punt with a gun weighing about 160 pounds, which carried one and a half pounds of shot, and usually preferred to make the final approach himself, leaving me to fire the shot when he thought the favourable moment had occurred.
We used to go out as a rule, whenever the weather allowed, about two hours before low water, and sculled the punt to a likely spot, where we
