Shooting's Strangest Days

Book excerpt: Mad old colonels who took their trousers off before going elephant hunting, women poachers with terriers sewn into their underskirts, duck shooters chasing their quarry in helicopters - here they all in their vast and until now, long forgotten, eccentricity. Shooting's Strangest Days is a unique collection of stories about the mad, the bad and the truly dangerous to know from more than two hundred years of sporting shooting. Covering everything from delightfully dotty Royals - like George V, who always went shooting with a gun loader deliberately chosen because he looked exactly like the king - to obscure French chamois hunters, South American crocodile stranglers, Russian secret service beaters and suicidal Himalayan goat guides.