Grousing Begins

The London season closed, last week, as Royalty and many another left for Scotland to shoot tens of thousands of grouse.

Everyone knows that hardly an Englishman thought of going all the way to Scotland after small game until the railway was developed during the past century. Thus there is something piquantly "nouveau" about the Scottish grouse season--an unproved, ephemeral event less than a century old.

In August "everyone goes to Scotland," and last week "everyone" included a more than usually thick sprinkling of potent Americans: John Pierpont Morgan, Alanson Bigelow Houghton, James Watson Gerard, Charles W. Ogden, Henry C. Phipps, Clarence Hungerford Mackay, Walter Teagle, Herbert L. Pratt, Stephen Metcalf and many another.

The Royal Family, as usual, were proceeding by easy stages to their retired Scottish estate, Balmoral. Before leaving London, the King and Queen attended a U. S. musical comedy, The Vagabond King. Then His Majesty set out for ancient Bolton Abbey in Yorkshire, seat of the Duke of Devonshire, while Queen Mary went by another route to sojourn briefly with her brother, the Marquess of Cambridge, at Shotton Hall, Shrewsbury.

"How do you shoot grouse?" was a question which many an American wished but hesitated to ask Britons, last week. The best preliminary advice seemed to be: "First rent your moor."

To do this one scans the London Times and invariably finds, at the proper season, that a great many Scotsmen want to rent their grouse moors. Rental for a whole season may run up to -L-5,000 ($24,300) or more; but thrifty hunters know that they can often pick up a fair moor for a week or two at relatively trifling cost. Having rented a moor, one must then bring or buy much hunting gear, and, in any case, should wear the hunting costume of the moment. This ensemble, which varies slightly each season, is often topped off with a pert and random feather stuck in the hat. Thus equipped, one asks; "Shall it be dogs or beaters?"

Although "shooting over dogs" is the most time-sanctioned method, it is now entirely passe, chiefly because smart, modern sportsmen no longer want to trudge after dogs which advance before them, flushing or scaring up the birds.

A more swank ritual is observed by sitting in a "butt" or comfortable shelter and allowing a crescent-moon shaped line of human "beaters" to herd the game gently along until it can be flushed so as to fly directly over one's gun.

While waiting for this to happen no gentleman will omit a few modest, customary intimations that the number of birds which he slew last year on such-and-such a moor was really colossal.*

When the flushed birds have been winged, a motor lorry will roll up. A butler materializes. Soon the sportsmen are regaled with "high" game, with meats that are rare and bloody in a fashionably virile sense, and with champagne iced in a portable refrigerator.

*The record made by John Augustus de Grey, seventh Baron Walsingham, 78, some 40 years ago, still stands: 1,070 birds killed in one day with one gun.