Grouse

Last week a few U. S. citizens with sporting friends abroad were eating grouse --plump red Scotch grouse sent by express steamers and heralded by cables giving warning of their shipment. For a fortnight the shotguns that the Scotch call "double pipe scatter guns" had been popping on the moors. King George was there to get a little shooting before seeing his new granddaughter (see p. 21). John Pierpont Morgan was at Gannochy Lodge and Clarence Hungerford Mackay at Hunt-hill, Brechin. Bernard Baruch could not stay but Silkman Emil Stehli and Charles Steele of the House of Morgan were shooting. Other U. S. gunners--Broker Andre Pillot, Banker Edward Shearson, Red D Line's Frederic Dallet--were talking about their first week's bags. Ambassador Charles Gates Dawes left for an archaeological tour in France after a week in Perthshire, in high fettle because he had potted eleven birds the first morning and shot well above the average of his party every day. Once more, in spite of predictions that the international polo and America's Cup races would lure Englishmen away, and the depressed stockmarket keep Americans at home, fires blazed high in feudal halls rented for the season. Once more beaters in a semicircle drove toward the blinds; once more, amid smells of gunpowder and bog myrtle, the birds rose and were shot at. Most sportsmen who go to Scotland after Aug. 12 and before the end of September, go because they know, or want to learn, the rules of a peculiar, a social kind of shooting. No lone hunter with dog and gun can stroll into the brush. The grouse industry is so well organized that to shoot one must rent or own a moor or get invited by someone who does. Rents are based on the bags of grouse that game- keepers estimate can be raised on the property. The usual price is about $5 per estimated brace. A fair sized moor, estimated to give 3,000 brace, rents for $15,000 with its house and gamekeepers, but without house-servants. The grouse season brings Scotland an annual income of about $10,000,000. To shoot Scotch grouse, a visitor gets in a car with his host after breakfast and drives to some point on the edge of the moors. Then he gets out and walks to the butt--a crescent-shaped blind screened with furze. Last year one U. S. millionaire kept a tractor at the moor's edge in which he drove to the butt after leaving his car, but this luxury was criticized as bad sportsmanship. Gunners are served by three classes of retainers: 1) beaters who drive the grouse up to the guns; 2) gun-bearers who keep the guns loaded and laid ready on the peat sods of the butts; 3) butlers who keep the glasses filled and serve luncheon. A good day's bag of Scotch grouse is 80. Once before reputable witnesses Lord Walsingham shot 1,070 brace of grouse between breakfast and supper. Occasionally beaters instead of grouse are hit, and then damages must be paid. One U. S. sportsman who gave $500 for a slight injury warned his friends that his generosity had stimulated other bearded gillies to come too near the guns. When a beater falls, other beaters drag him away; when a grouse falls, the ground huntsman lets a dog out of the blind. Some huntsmen use setters, some pointers, some cocker spaniels. The dogs are trained to retrieve dead birds and catch wounded ones that are scrambling off in the heather.

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