You've got to believe them when they come back from a day's shooting, confess they got nothing, and yet say they had a grand day. After all, sport is not all in the winning. The playing is the thing. So you don't doubt words like this.
"In one field something like sixty snipe got up."
"Did you shoot any?"
"Not one. And then a wood cock rose right at my feet. No, I didn't get him."
"Did you see anything else?"
"Yes, a hare came ambling in an arc towards me. Didn't see me until he was within a few paces. Then he just sat down and looked at me. I couldn't shoot him, could I?"
We may think we have a lot of wild life in this country, but there was an account in the Figaro of the life of an alleged poacher in France who is accused of killing two wild life wardens, and what is chiefly interesting to the foreigner, is the variety and apparent abundance of game in his Department, the Var.
The day he was arrested, he had fifteen thrushes in his bag. Thrushes like the berries of the juniper, and when sated, would fly to a nearby lake to drink. The poacher knew their line of flight and was expert in taking them. From restaurants he got 25 francs per thrush say something over Pounds 3. For a boar, he got 4,000 francs or some Pounds 500. He was hunting mad. When he inherited a bit of family money, the first thing he did was to join a shooting party in an exclusive shoot in Spain.
But back to the quantity of game in France. A nearby terrain of 35,000 hectares, reserved for military use, is known as a tremendous game reserve. In the hunting season, as many as three hundred boars, says the newspaper, have been shot. And all around the home village of the accused are forests, positively "trembling with woodcock and deer." Some country.