# Memoirs of Travel, Sport and Natural History/Chapter 11

Memoirs of Travel, Sport and Natural History by Henry John Elwes was first published in London in 1930, and edited by Edward G. Hawke
CHAPTER XI
SPORT IN BELGIUM AND BRITTANY, 1891–1899
In 1891 Mr. E.N. Buxton, who was a member of the Société de Bouillon, an old-established shooting syndicate in Belgium, offered to resign his membership in my favour if agreeable to the members, and I was duly elected.
The Club was comprised of twenty members, mostly Belgian officers and noblemen, who for many years past had met twice a year at Bouillon in the Ardennes, to shoot over a large tract of forest which they rented partly from the State, partly from a commune and partly from a private landowner. The rules of the Club made it obligatory to subscribe for the term of their lease, which was renewable every nine years; and to conform to certain rules which experience had proved necessary to ensure safety to the guns and beaters, and to maintain a footing of friendly equality among men of various nationality and age. The President was a very keen old sportsman and he, with the Secretary, the Comte de la Faille, made the arrangements for the sport, and gave all the necessary orders to the keepers, of whom there were five. The Club met every year in the third week of November and the second week of January at Bouillon, where the Hotel de la Poste was reserved for the three days that the battues lasted; though it was an old-fashioned country inn, we had most comfortable quarters and excellent cooking.
On my first visit I was received in a most friendly manner, and soon found that the French that I had learnt in Brussels as a boy enabled me to make myself quite at home with them. I must say that a keener lot of sportsmen could not be found in any country, No weather ever stopped them, though the winter in the Ardennes is both cold and wet. Breakfast was on the table at six every morning, and the carriages which conveyed the guns to the rendezvous, often six or eight miles off, started at 6.45 a.m, and if anyone was not ready he had to come on as he could. Lots were drawn for places at breakfast every day, and though, hot soup and coffee were provided at lunch for both guns and beaters, every one ordered and took out for himself whatever he liked best.
The modus operandi was as follows:
The guns, usually ten or twelve in number, for there were always several absentees among the members, were posted in the rides at from sixty to one hundred yards apart, according to the size of the beat and the thickness of the covert; and the game was driven by a line of from thirty to forty beaters towards the guns. The game consisted of a few red deer, which nearly always went back and were rarely killed, a considerable number of wild pigs, and a good many roe, with a sprinkling of hares, pheasants, hazel grouse and foxes. Each gun carried a rifle, and usually a gun loaded with heavy shot for roe, but we seldom fired at anything smaller than roe, until the beat was nearly over, for fear of turning back pigs and deer. Some of the members were remarkably good and quick shots with a rifle, but it is a very difficult thing to make sure of one's ​shot when an animal is passing through brushwood or trees, and firing was strictly prohibited unless the game was at a certain angle before or behind one, on account of the danger to the other guns. I soon found that it was necessary to be much more warmly clothed than at home, for the beats were long, and one often had to keep still for half an hour at a time in the snow, keeping a sharp look-out and sitting as quietly as possible. For many of the wild boars in the forest were very cunning, and knew perfectly well that there was danger in front. They would come quietly ahead of the beaters and, if they heard or saw anything suspicious, either turn back or make a rush past the line in the thickest covert they could find. The forest consisted mostly of beech and oak standards with underwood cut every twenty or twenty-four years, with patches of spruce plantations or of young Scots pine in some places. The ground was mostly undulating, or with steep slopes overlooking the banks of the Semois, a very winding stream which bounded the forest on one side; some of these slopes were the most favourite lying places for the wild pigs, though there was never any certainty whether or where you would find them. On one occasion I arrived at Bouillon a day before time, and as there was no wind, and a good covering of snow on the ground, I went round some of the best beats by myself to see if I could estimate by their tracks the probable number of wild pigs on the ground. I am confident that on that occasion there were at least six lots, some of which contained ten to fifteen or more, and a good many smaller parties and single boars. According to the reports of the keepers and beaters, on the next day seventy or eighty pigs at least were seen, but if I recollect right only seven were killed, and this was more than the average. Roe were much more generally distributed, and easier to drive and to kill, as you can generally kill them with shot up to thirty yards. But the number of shots fired in the day rarely amounted to a hundred among the whole party, and there were many days on which some of the guns did not fire at all. Now this sort of shooting, in which you have nothing to do but to sit still and look out sharp, for hours together perhaps without a shot, may seem slow and monotonous, and I often thought I could have had much more fun by hunting the pigs with dogs. Yet there was a charm about it that I cannot explain, unless it was the constant expectation that you were going to have a big boar right on the top of you.
FIG. 7.—A BELGIAN BOAR.
An even more exciting encounter than this occurred three or four years after, when we were down a favourite beat for pigs known as la Forêt. I was posted in the middle of the line of guns about half-way down a long slope under tall beech trees, with little or no underwood, so that one could see the ground clear for 300 yards in front, where thick brushwood began. I sat against a tree as still as a post, watching and listening to the sound of the beaters, who could be heard half a mile away, until I saw a herd of at least twenty-five pigs, mostly sows and yearlings, come slowly out of the thicket, and stand listening and looking to see if the coast was clear. Luckily the wind was right, and in a short time the whole lot came trotting on in full view straight to my post. I had a ·303 magazine rifle firing ten shots without reloading, and determined to let them come close up before opening fire, and get as many as possible. I got three down in no time, but by that time they had seen me and turned towards my next neighbour on the left, so that I could not fire again without risk to him. If they had gone on past the line, I might have got three or four more behind me, but they went close past him and then turned up the line, where two more were killed by other guns. My neighbour, who was not a member of the Club, but an officer of the Forest Service who had been asked as a guest and who had never seen wild pigs so close before, lost his head completely and never fired a shot. But as one of my pigs crawled on and died at his feet he was intensely delighted, thinking that he had really killed it himself. I thought it was a pity to spoil his pleasure by claiming it myself, so I said nothing about it till the story leaked out through a man who was with him and was certain that the forester had not fired at all.
On the best day I ever had at Bouillon I killed three pigs, two roe and a fox, but I have known eleven pigs and twenty-eight roe killed in a day. On one occasion the Prince de Croy, who was one of the best shots in ​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 ​waited till a patch of mud was exposed by the tide, when it was soon covered with hungry widgeon and geese. The numbers were extraordinary; in fact, the flocks were as a rule far too large to approach closely, because they covered such a wide area of water that the outside ducks saw the sides of the punt, before we had got near enough to the centre. By daylight we rarely got near enough to the packs of widgeon to make a heavy shot, but just as it got dark in the evening, and just before daybreak, we generally managed to get within sixty yards, which was about the most deadly distance with this gun. Then if all went well one might kill forty or fifty or more at a shot. As soon as the gun was fired we sat up in the punt, and sculled to where they lay in the water, some dead, others only winged, which we had to shoot with a small gun. It was astonishing how quickly these cripples disappeared in all directions among the mudbanks and the channels which intersected them. One had to be very careful, when the tide was falling and darkness coming on, not to get aground on the mud, which might entail remaining there for four or five hours till the tide rose high enough to float the punt again.
Pope knew the channels and passages in the various mud banks so well from long experience that he would take no more risk than necessary, and though the expanse of ground was very large, we only got weatherbound on one or two occasions. A gunning punt lies so low in the water and is so bad a sea-boat that she is very easily swamped if the wind gets up enough to raise a sea in the deeper channels. In such cases we had to go ashore and take shelter on one of the islands till the water got smoother, or perhaps haul up the punt on the shore and walk home.
Punting is dangerous work unless one is very careful, and it is best carried on from the shelter of a yacht or sailing-boat large enough to board when bad weather sets in. One winter we hired a large fishing-boat and went for a cruise down the coast outside the Mer de Morbihan, but we found no other place where the fowl were so numerous, and the waters so well suited to punting. On this occasion we had a French friend on board, the owner of the chateau where we lodged, who was anxious to see a little of the sport. One evening we were sitting on deck after dusk in a harbour that Pope had not explored, and did not know his way about in, as he did at Sarzeau. Widgeon were whistling and meowing in swarms all around the yacht, but it was too dark, as I thought, to do any good until the moon rose; and when our friend proposed to try a shot I told him I would not go. But Pope said they were so close that he could not lose the yacht and he determined to try a shot. So they started, and in a very few minutes I heard a shot 300 or 400 yards away. The tide was running pretty strongly and must have taken them down faster in the dark than they thought, for the sounds of rowing got fainter and fainter and soon I could hear them no longer. I hailed and fired several shots to let them know where the boat was, but, as they told me afterwards, the channel turned, and whenever they rowed towards us the boat stuck in the mud. Luckily, though dark, it was quite calm, and as I could do nothing to help them I left a sailor on watch with orders to keep a good light burning and went to bed. Six hours later when the moon rose they came back very cold and tired, without a single duck, having lost their way in the ​mist which hung over the water, directly after firing. Pope was very angry with himself, but when we had put our French friend to bed and had had a hot breakfast it was just getting light enough to start out again. He came out with me for a daylight cruise, during which we had no less than four shots at Brent geese. The great charm and interest of this kind of sport lie in its extreme uncertainty, for unless the weather is good and the birds hungry and settled to their feed, it is very little use expecting a really heavy shot.
The best season we had was the hard winter of 1893–4, when, even in Brittany, the sea froze in shallow places, and the water freezing on the bows of the punt made it difficult to keep the elevation of the gun correct. I found that whatever amount of clothes I put on it was impossible to keep warm in the punt when one was lying waiting, but neither of us was the worse for it; and the flocks of mallard and teal, which were frozen out of their usual fresh-water haunts and came to feed on the saltings and doze, were much easier to approach than the widgeon or geese. In that winter Pope killed over 2,000 head in about eight weeks between the first week in December and the middle of February. Once he picked up fifty-four geese after a single shot, losing many more in the dark.
The best shot I ever made was a flying one, a very rare chance when shooting with a punt gun. It happened in this way. We had gone out early in the afternoon and were lying in an open channel among the mud-banks, waiting for the first appearance of the mud as the tide fell. Great flocks of hungry widgeon were settled, or flying all round us; the gun was loaded and we were ready to set up to the first favourable chance. A flock of perhaps 500 widgeon came flying across our bows at perhaps sixty or seventy yards off, and, as they crossed, a great black-backed gull stooped at them and drove them down to within perhaps fifteen feet of the water. Seeing my chance I depressed the stock of the gun with my left hand and pulled the lanyard with my right, just at the right moment, and cut a hole through the thickest part of the flock as they dipped. A cloud of birds fell and we picked up about forty, besides losing a number of winged birds. However, as usual, the majority were retrieved by the fishermen, whose coracles were not far off, and who could follow the cripples over the shallows where we had not enough water to float.
It was very difficult to judge distance when lying down with one's eyes only just above the gunwale of the punt. Often it seemed that the ducks were much closer than they really were, and the continual noise which is kept up by a flock of widgeon, in the dusk, often sounded quite close, when it was 200 or 300 yards off. The ducks were often swimming away from the punt as fast as we were able to advance when lying down and using the set poles in shallow water. When one had to scull with one hand over the side of the punt, it was frightfully hard work. But Pope had a right arm of iron, and the patience of Job, and would not willingly let me fire unless the chance seemed good enough. Often, just as we were getting up the birds jumped, disturbed by a shot in the neighbourhood, or lifted off the mud by the rising tide; and often at night if there was haze on the water we could not make out the ducks at all, and were obliged to shoot ​in the direction where the sound seemed to indicate that they were thickest. The Brent geese were much more day feeders than the widgeon, and we often got shots by laying the punt among the seaweed, in a position where the geese would come past on the tide. But such shots rarely killed more than three or four, as, though the geese seemed thick on the water, it is only when they are crowded on a small patch of mud that you can really make a heavy shot.
This form of shooting is now hardly known to English sportsmen, though in the days of Hawker and Folkard it was followed as a means of living by many fishermen on the south and east coasts. I have often thought that if an electric motor could be devised, sufficiently noiseless and light enough to be adapted to a gunning punt, great sport might still be had. But there are few places m the world where it could have such a good chance as on the Mer de Morbihan.