CLIVE GAMMON
I was once invited to shoot mallard in com- pany with three Frenchmen at two o'clock in the afternoon. This was in Co. Cork. I asked the man who was arranging the sport why this peculiar hour had been selected. Would it not be better, I suggested, to do as other gunners do and hole up in the reeds to catch the morning flight.
'What?' he said, 'And have all our ducks shot on us?'
Not all Frenchmen are as naive as my companions were on this particular occa- sion, but a lot of them are, and I am afraid that some sporting agencies are inclined to take a little advantage of this. As is well known, however, the French have odd ideas when it comes to field sports and are them- selves regarded as fair game by gillies. guides. stalkers and so on. This same crowd of Frenchmen I'm talking about were not dis- mayed when the only contact they had with the mallard was a few departing quacks. They settled down to bombard—and that is the only word—a coot which amiably swam about for them well out of range. On the way home they were similarly unsuccess- ful in trying to ambush a field full of lap- wings, but gunned down a thrush which came out of a holly tree right in front of them. It's easy to throw up one's hands at a nation which has an official opening and closing day for the lark-shooting season. But what I like about the French as sportsmen, if that's not too strong a word, is their enormous enthusiasm. They may not hit much, they hit the wrong things but they do love it and there is none of the obverse about them, the boring snobbery that you get especially from the kind of Englishman who is terrified of revealing a 'wrong' attitude or even of using an incorrect bit of jargon. I encountered a horrid little nest of these in a Scottish fishing hotel last summer. The season was dry and unproductive: only a few salmon hid run up the little spate river into the loch and catches were infrequent.
However somebody had trolled a spoon behind a boat and got one. It lay on a salver in the entrance hall and this little group of unsuccessful men in the bar were bilious with envy. 'Trolling?' said one tweeded idiot. 'I'd just as soon take a grenade to the water.' Yet it was plain to me that each of them was there on a short fishing holiday, his only contact with salmon fishing for the whole year. I felt like telling them that by a freak of good fortune I had my own couple of miles of salmon river and that when times were tough I wouldn't hesitate to use any legitimate means, including a bunch of worms, to get a fish—and that in any case fly-fishing from a drifting boat in a loch was about the simplest method' of angling ever invented by man. My liver must have been in good shape that day because I didn't.
As a matter of fact, all those national characteristics which we are told don't exist come very quickly to the surface in field sports. North Americans, for example, glamorise their quarry to an extraordinary degree. You only have to pick up Field and Stream to see that. They don't catch trout but three pounds of Wiring fury. They also love fish which jump. For instance, the pike. while sizeable, is not regarded in Britain as a particularly sporting fish. Americans call them 'Great Northern Pike' and dote on them because they leap about although, pos- sibly because of this, they show little stamina. The British pride themselves on their sport- ing methods, but American anglers think British fishing tackle is ludicrously crude and heavy. Their great Atlantic salmon expert. Lee Wulff, uses a rod that many of us would think of as too light for sizeable trout.
Germans like pike, too, but for the dif- ferent reason that they are large and there- fore provide a lot to eat. A baffled gillie on Lough Mask, where pike are regarded as vermin, told me of the elaborate arrange- ments a German angler made to have his modest ten-pound pike air-freighted back to Munich.
The mercifully few Belgians I have fished or shot with have all been impossibly thrust- ing and rude. They fish as they drive, I realised, when, because of an overbooking. I was one of four anglers who had to share a big-game fishing launch planned for three on the West African coast. The obvious arrangement was to establish a rota, which was done. But when the time came for the change-over, the Belgian would not get out of his fighting chair. That he was not tossed over the side was due partly to the civilised background and partly to the cowardice of the two Frenchmen and myself who had found ourselves in his company.
Scandinavians, except for the Swedes, Danes and Finns, approximate closely in sporting behaviour to the British. Yes, the Norwegians are fine.
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