Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER I THE GUN AND THE CHARGE In the whole realm of sport there is no matter so controversial as snipe shooting. Whoever the writer may be, and, unless he restricts himself to mere generalisations, whatever he may write, he will always find plenty of people who hold views other than his own. Snipe shooting is a difficult subject. I must do my best from my own point of view, and, with the foreknowledge that a certain proportion of readers are sure to differ from me in details, console myself with the reflection that I shall but be in the same gallery as that occupied by other scribes who have gone before. Let me first of all take into consideration the question of armament. I have at times regularly used a 2o-bore, a i6-bore, and a 12-bore on snipe (I have also killed snipe withsuch extremes as a -410 and a 6) and have seen a good deal of the performance of small bores, for snipe shooting, in other hands ; and the conviction I have had forced upon me is that an average shot will kill fifteen or twenty per cent. more birds with a i2-bore than with a 2o-bore. Snipe shooting is a different thing from nearly every other kind of shooting. A first-class shot can walk up September partridges and kill nearly as large, never quite as large, a proportion of birds with a 2o-bore as he would kill if shooting with a 12-bore. Such shooting is a matter of pure skill; if the gun is held right, the bird comes down. Snipe shooting is very often not a matter of pure skill ' though the gun is held right, the bird may escape scot-free. The partridge does not twist; the snipe does twist; and it is this twisting habit of the latter bird that gives the 12-bore its great superiority over the 2o-bore as a gun for snipe. Of those snipe which twist as the shot is fired, or the instant after the... --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.