Taking what comes

Small mixed-bag days are hugely popular, but they can be very hard to find, as Matt Cross discovers

- Matt Cross

Everyone has their dream of a perfect shoot day, whether it’s grouse slicing fast and low over a purple Yorkshire moor, towering pheasants pushed off the top of a Scottish hill, or a big bag of pillaging pigeons over a Norfolk pea field.

But one dream day is common — the small group of friends, the busy spaniel rumbling the hedgerow and the bag filling piecemeal with whatever is found. A hare, a rabbit, perhaps a brace of pheasants or red-legged partridges, a snipe flushed from a bog, a woodcock tumbled from the gorse. The kind of day where the bag speaks of the character of the place and the point in the season, not simply the same pheasants or partridges you could shoot anywhere.

An autumn bag in Suffolk would be heavy with grey partridges and brown hares; in Yorkshire, rabbits and grouse might take their place.

On Scotland’s west coast, in a dark December, woodcock and wintering ducks would fill the gamebag. In the eastern Highlands, there would be grouse again and, before the ban, the blue-white flash of a changeling hare.

There is something innately appealing for many of us about small mixed-bags. Perhaps it is the feel of the hunt — free, unconstrained and needing a gift for snap shooting that is very different from what’s required on the peg.

Maybe it is the history of that type of shooting, memories of those sporting engravings where the bag was small but varied. Perhaps it is the connection back to the days of youth when you bagged a pigeon, a bunny and a crow with an air rifle, a sort of grown-up version of the farmyard marauding many of us enjoyed.

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