Transcriber's Note Text emphasis represented as _Italics_. A GAMEKEEPER'S NOTE-BOOK [Illustration: A PIPE OF PEACE LONDON, EDWARD ARNOLD.] A GAMEKEEPER'S NOTE-BOOK BY OWEN JONES AUTHOR OF "TEN YEARS' GAMEKEEPING" AND MARCUS WOODWARD JOINT AUTHOR OF "WOODCRAFT" _WITH PHOTOGRAVURE ILLUSTRATIONS_ SECOND IMPRESSION LONDON EDWARD ARNOLD 1910 [_All rights reserved_] PREAMBLE A gamekeeper's notes are written for the most part on the tablets of his mind. He is a man of silence; yet he is ever ready to unlock the casket of his memories if old friends, and sympathetic, are about him. We have known keepers who could talk, when so minded, as well as they could shoot, making their points as certainly as they would bowl over any straying cat that crossed their paths. But few keepers can handle a pen with the same confidence as a gun. Some keepers, it is true, carry note-books, and therein make certain brief notes--simple records and plain statements of fact, interesting enough to glance over, but nothing to read. The vermin bag has an honourable place in these notes--year by year the keeper may set down precisely how many malefactors (and others) have fallen to his gun and traps. It is a record in which he takes almost as much pride as in his daily and yearly lists of game; the grand total of a good season for game or vermin lingers for ever on his lips. The date of a shoot, the beat, the number and names of the guns, and what luck befell them, all may be noted with scrupulous care, with a word about the weather, perhaps, and possibly also on the benefits in cash received by the keeper at the day's end. Many carry little pocket note-books wherein they keep an account of dates and places--the date of all dates in the year being, of course, that on which the first wild pheasant's egg was found among the primroses. A page of the book may be filled with the names and nicknames of poachers caught, and a record of their transgressions and penalties. For the rest, for all the details, that should clothe the nakedness of these briefly written words, one must go to the keeper's mind. And the best of all a keeper's notes are the ones he never jots down.