Books
SHOOTING TIMES & COUNTRY MAGAZINE • 65
extending to 1983. McDougall lived
in Norfolk, but his goose chasing
took place in Scotland in the form of
annual pilgrimages with a few friends.
He writes of how, having admired
a piece by BB (Denys Watkins-
Pitchford) in The Field, he contacted
the author and was invited on a goose
foray in 1944. They teamed up on
several expeditions and it was BB who
encouraged him to keep a diary.
Wild goose chase
The descriptions of each winter’s
wild goose chase have an almost
mesmeric quality. No matter where
you are in the world, you can dip into
Goose Fe ver and be transported to the
bleak mid-winter fi elds of Scotland.
A friend of mine used to retire to an
armchair with a coff ee and a copy of
the book, saying: “I’m just off to have
a fl ight with McDougall.” What makes
the accounts even more interesting is
that anybody familiar with the goose
haunts of Scotland will recognise
many of the locations where the
adventures take place.
Mr Sponge’s Sporting Tour, a novel
by R. S. Surtees, was published in
1853 and features the comic fox-
hunting rogue “Soapy” Sponge. He is
a gentleman of the type “...who was
generally spoken of as having nothing
a-year, paid quarterly”. An expert
despatched 10
man-eating tigers in
India in the period 1907
to 1930. He coolly recounts the
tactics he used to tackle
a succession of man-eaters who cut
a swathe through the villagers.Man-eating tiger
One beast alone — the Champawat
tigress — killed 436 people. Corbett
very nearly became the 437th after
examining gruesome evidence of the
cat’s latest human kill: “While looking
at the leg, I had forgotten all about
the tigress until suddenly I felt I was
in great danger. Hurriedly grounding
the butt of the rifl e I put two fi ngers
on the triggers, raising my head as
I did so, and saw a little earth from
the 15-foot bank in front of me, come
rolling down the steep side and plop
into the pool.”
The tigress was stalking Corbett —
only his instinctive action in pointing
the rifl e upwards saved his life.
Corbett had a deep respect for his
quarry and wrote of the tiger: “When
he is exterminated — as exterminated
he will be unless public opinion rallies
to his support — India will be the
poorer, having lost the fi nest of her
fauna.” He helped establish India’s
fi rst national park, in the Kumaon
Hills, in 1936.freeloader, he manages to get himself
invited to stay and hunt everywhere.
Our anti-hero slithers around
the Victorian countryside at a time
when hunting was a mainstream
part of rural society. One character
he encounters is the ferocious
Lord Scamperdale, of whom it was
said: “No man rides harder than
my Lord Scamperdale — always
goes as if he had a spare neck in his
pocket.” Sponge has good advice on
horsemanship: “It is best to let the
horse go his way, and pretend it is
yours. There is no secret so close as
between a rider and his horse.”
Surtees was a prolifi c author, and
several of his books — including this
one — were illustrated by the brilliant
caricaturist John Leech.
Horn of the Hunter is the story of
a fi rst safari written by American
columnist Robert Ruark. It is based
on his nine-week trip to British East
Africa in the early 1950s and became
an instant classic. It is said that
immediately after it was published,
Harry Selby, Ruark’s professional
hunter, was booked up fi ve years
in advance. Ruark famously wrote
of the Cape buff alo: “He looks at you
like you owe him money.”
Man-Eaters of Kumaon is the
astonishing account of how Colonel
Jim Corbett tracked down and