The timeless appeal of grouse
We might moan about the weather or an uncomfortable butt but there is nowhere else we would rather be
In an extract from his book, Outside Days, Max Hastings reminds us that however inclement the weather or uncomfortable the butt, this month, there is really nowhere other than the moor that we would rather be
Good or bad, driven grouse days are seldom less than notable
Every grouse butt possesses a personality of its own. However good the shooting, I feel a touch deprived if I find myself taking up position on a moor behind a mere shield of wooden slats. Give me, instead, one of those works of the keeper’s art, a drystone wall semi-circle, topped with a couple of decks of peat and heather. A concrete floor seems a shade overdone. But settling down to begin a day high in the hills, deep inside one’s own little sporting rampart, gets the whole occasion off on the best possible footing.
I also like a butt with a short horizon. The longer I have to look at those oncoming birds, soaring and dropping with the contours across a mile of hillside, the more sure I am to miss them when they reach me. It seems easier if they burst over the ridge, 30 yards in front, and the challenge is simply that of pulling up the gun and firing instantly, knowing that a second’s hesitation will be too long.
The memories of grouse shooting that I cherish are of sunlit days, shooting in shirtsleeves. Yet honesty compels me to face the fact that on more than half the days I have shot in recent years, the weather has been something between moderate and appalling. For those of us who wear spectacles, a day of driving rain spells disaster on the moor. It is difficult enough to hit grouse at the best of times, but with water streaming off one’s glasses it becomes plain impossible.
I like to think that I am an all-weather sportsman. But there have been at least a couple of days in recent seasons when I have stood huddled in the butt, praying that our host would face reality and call the whole thing off. The gale was driving clouds of grouse out of the flanks, while only a few clusters of bedraggled birds crossed the line. The gun was so wet and slippery that it needed a sharp effort to move the safety catch forward. I was missing almost everything that came my way. The dog was lying shivering in the mud at my feet, oblivious to anything going on above her head. Then again, perhaps it is the memory of shooting on days like that which make the bright ones seem so precious when they come. And the stinkers give us plenty to whimper about over tea.
Good or bad, driven grouse days are seldom less than notable. Perhaps because I do not get more than six or seven of them a year, I can claim to have a pretty clear picture in my mind of each of the moors I have shot over the past eight or nine years. Snapshots – of this covey or that flanker, this drive or that gun – remain fixed in the mind. At all the shoots I visit, at least half the bag is made by three or four local guns who do nothing but shoot grouse from August to December. More than any other form of shooting, driven grouse demands practice. I have improved from very bad to moderate in recent years. But I still shoot too late, still make heavy weather of crossing birds, still find singletons or pairs much easier than packs. How often one yearns to shoot with two guns on grouse moors, simply to have a chance to make a dent in the packs. I know a boorish Highland peer who always brings a pair, even when everybody else is shooting with one (I asked his loader one day how many his lordship brings when he is invited to shoot double guns. Three? Four?) Most of us make do with wives or children stuffing cartridges, to speed up the reloading rate. But there is no way of getting in four barrels at any one lot of grouse without two guns.
One of the ‘snapshots’ I mentioned above shows my neighbour in the butts two years running, a Scottish baronet who conceals his customary good humour beneath a choleric appearance. He stands hunched, his gun lying before him on the front of the butt, hands in pocket, spaniels at feet, until an incoming birds shifts him into instant action. Something almost always falls down. When he is spectating, however, and the birds are coming over me, I feel I can write the caption to the expression on his face in the picture: “Why the hell do they waste valuable sky, heather and cartridges letting silly bloody southerners shoot at birds they can’t hit.”
Yet, lately, I find myself questioning one cherished truism: that grouse are the most difficult of all gamebirds to shoot. I think we should modify that assertion and declare that grouse in a wind are the hardest. Birds flying with or across the wind present terrific problems. Again and again, some of us aim at an overhead grouse in a pack and are embarrassed to see the one behind fall dead. If the wind is absent, or if the birds cross the line against it, then surely they become much more manageable targets; indeed, no harder than the average driven pheasant. Personally, I found that one season I was using around five cartridges to kill a single grouse in high wind and rain. But on a couple of still days, my average improved to around one for two or three. Most other guns found the same.
One handicap I could do without on the moor is that of my own absurd height. Grouse butts are not designed for men of 6ft 6in. I face an annual chorus of cracks about my need for a portable butt extender. In reality, I sit on a shooting stick or fold myself double while I am waiting (usually reading a book, for those half-hour waits can pall). Concealment is important on the moor. The trouble sets in, however, when the birds streak forward and I extend myself to shoot. Even the most single-minded grouse is prone to jink at the last moment, with ill-effects on my aim, when it sees two or three feet of Hastings suddenly appear in its flight path.
I don’t know whether it is my imagination but, in general, grouse-beating seems better
managed in England these days than it is in Scotland. In the Highlands, it is almost impossible to recruit a team of local beaters, and thus most estates depend upon roving groups of university students, a keen and good-hearted lot who nonetheless lack expertise, especially as flankers. A lot of birds seem to get back past them. Then again, your elderly Cumbrian flanker is not averse to a quiet sit down in mid drive. A friend with an exceptionally fluent stableyard vocabulary and voice power to match was enraged one day last season by a flanker sitting contemplating his pension while grouse streamed away over his head. “WHY DON’T YOU WAVE YOUR FLAG, YOU SILLY OLD ******** ******** **** ?” bellowed a well-known voice from the butts. The elderly sage leapt to his feet as if he’d been shot. Even a lifetime of Cumbrian pubs hadn’t immunised him to that sort of language and volume – and from a gentleman, too. He was still waving his flag with a fine frenzy when the pickers-up started work.
For all the joys of grouse-driving, at most moors one does not have the fun of the walking, which is so much part of Scottish sport. A veritable armoured column of fourwheel-drive vehicles wends its way up the hill towards the butts, because nowadays each of us likes to take his own transport, loaded down with personal impedimenta and dogs. This is practical and comfortable, but less sociable. The corrupting bit comes in, however, after leaving the Range Rovers, Shoguns and Mercedes jeeps. More and more moors provide house-to-butt transport, in the form of the all-terrain Argo. We are all great admirers of the Argo for bringing deer down from the hill and taking everybody over 60 to the butts. But I think Argo rides should be banned for anybody under 60, who is not sick or crippled. If sport is to involve absolutely no physical exertion, why bother to get out of the wagon at all? Why not go the whole hog and shoot from the back of the vehicle or drive grouse over the road? I do not believe Highland hills and internal combustion engines were ever designed for each other. I may be a Luddite or a reactionary about this. But I shall continue to heap scorn on any man short of late middle age who cannot even be bothered to walk up a hill to shoot.
This is carping. The truth is, of course, that, like most shooters, I will sell my soul any time for a day at driven grouse. The thrill never fades, watching those birds turning above the hillside, then falling out of the sky to land sometimes a quarter mile below in the burn, whence the dog will know that she has done a day’s work before she returns. Shooting on a famous moor we once took for a day, my loader said kindly, “It’s nice to have some people here who are really keen. His lordship, now, when he’s here, settles down in the back of the butt with his tranny and The Daily Telegraph and tells me to let him know when there’s something worth shooting. It’s just a chore to him, you see.” I hope it will never be that to me. At the end of each drive, when a flurry of larks through the line indicates that the beaters are just over the horizon, there is always that stab of regret for the finish. Luckily there is usually another butt, another covey over the hill. The above is an extract from Max Hastings’ Outside Days, reproduced by kind permission of the author and the publisher, Pan Macmillan. The book is also available as an ebook, published by Macmillan, and as an audio edition, published by Audible.