GOOD HUNTING

New Zealand Listener, Volume 29, Issue 752, 11 December 1953, Page 9

GOOD HUNTING

by

SUNDOWNER

NOVEMBER 22

N general, if a hunter tells me that he dropped a stag at 600 yards, I silently cut his figure in halves. If the distance stretches to 800 or 900 yards, I dismiss him as a man who has no eye for distance or no respect for the truth; though IT could once in 50 times be wrong. But New Zealand will soon be reading a

book whose author thinks a stag at 900 yards an easy

target, and to a man who has shot at Bisley, who knows his rifle and knows his ground, who can select his position and take his own time, study his target through a telescope, and put in a second shot if the first goes too high or too low, it perhaps is easy relatively. On that point I will not contradict him or express any deeper doubt than these mild words of surprise. But I find it a strain to say the same about the distances at which the author sees his stags, and is seen by them. In one case he looks ahead and sees a stag watching him a mile away, and a mile in any country and® any light is 1760 yards, though the yards can stretch or contract a little according to the atmosphere. In this case not only did the hunter see the deer, but the deer saw the hunter. It saw him and smelt him, but "at that distance was little concerned." Then it "took a few prancing steps down the slope’’-still a mile away +-and was seen by the Cocker spaniel, who at once became a nuisance, How far a dog can see I don’t know, but a spaniel galvanised into action by the movement of a single deer a mile away is a very unusual dog in any company. In another case two men are eating a lunch in the, shade of a rock below a terrace, having resisted the temptation to boil their billy. A lone stag comes to

the skyline three miles away, sees the men immediately, and roars at them. * The author of these episodes is younger than I am, and the events are recent. He had to be honest -with himself in his shooting, because the meat was often necessary to him for food. Which of us, therefore, has forgotten his tables? Or is each of these the case in 50 in which what looks like a thumper is the simple truth? se ke *

NOVEMBER 23

WAS rash when I said that I would never read The Ring and the Book. I have almost made a start-thanks to Sir Frederick Treves, G. K. Chesterton, and two wily readers in Invercargill who sent me 295 pages of printed reasons for changing my mind, 106 pictorial

reasons, four certified copies of certain entries in the

Registers of the Parish Church of San Lorenzo. in. Lucina, RRome, and a very polite note to say that the whole collection had cost only threepence, and that I was not to feel. obliged to look at any of it, Chesterton’s essay I had read over 40 years ago, and I no sooner began to reread it than I realised that he was one of the reasons why I had never read the poem itself. When he wrote that essay Chesterton must have been under 30, but the literary vice that destroyed him had already taken possession of him, and I was one of the. fools who sat down to pray with him and went off .angrily to scoff. Of Treves I had read nothing but The Other Side of the Lantern, .and 1. had no idea, until I felt compelled to. read The Country of "The Ring and the Book,’ how igood he» could be on a subject so remote from his own’ wotk. ‘Now ' I know everything but what Browning himself said,-and- if I had not mislaid

or lent my two volumes of his poetry, I would already be acquainting myself with that. I know that I have to read every ore of his 21,000 lines, each of the ten variations on the story, and follow the action all the way from Rome to Arezzo and back to the high scaffold in the Corso. I hope, therefore, that whoever is holding my Browning will return him before my desire to read him again has evaporated. te st Ba

NOVEMBER 25

THINK it was Montaigne who said that when his body got a bellyache his mind got it, too; or something like that. It must be true of everyone who has a mind, though it is easy to think of great sufferers whose thinking remained outwardly cheerful and serene. But I can’t think of anyone, sage or

saint, whose mind was wholly unaffected by bodily

suffering, whose eye never wavered and voice never shook till death and victory meant the same thing to him. A woman who had Jost more than half her sight in an accident, and eventually lost it all, told me when the shadows were closing in on her that she now judged of the health of her friends by their voices. If they said they were well, but said it in unconvincing tones, she knew they were not well. If they complained in voices that sent the dogs into their kennels, she knew that they were pampered humbugs. But I Started to say that I agreed with Montaigne. For about a week I have had what my father used to call the collywobbles, and have had to learn again for the hundredth time that neither discipline nor castor oil is a sure defence against the blues. It has, I suppose; been the most delightful week in the whole year to those healthy enough to enjoy it; but a bug in our blood is a hundred bugs in our thoughts and feelings. We. may be the stuff of which dreams are made; but the admixture of any of me in a dream this week would have given the, dreamer. some very unpleasant moments. (To be continued)