TRAVELING IN STYLE : SHOOTING STARS : <i> No other game bird on earth can flutter your pulse quite like a streaking red grouse coming at you low over the heather like a cannonball at sonic speed </i>

The Glorious Twelfth, as Aug. 12 has long been known and anticipated feverishly by British sportsmen, is the first day of red grouse shooting on the mauve and gentle moors of Scotland and Northern England. Brits set great store by tradition, and this one dates to the mid-18th Century when their soldiers, posted north to cool any fiery Scottish ideas of rebellion, discovered soul-satisfying elation in shooting, roasting and devouring a brace of succulent grouse.

During the 19th and early 20th centuries, formal grouse shoots were the almost exclusive purview of dukes, lords and such. Later, England’s old-boy network of Oxbridge and other public school chaps wangled an invitation to the party. So obviously there were regal and social overtones here, a bit midway between a christening and a coronation. Indeed, trendy London restaurants have been known to celebrate serving their first entree of August grouse with all the pomp and circumstance that other establishments bestow on a just-off-the-plane bottle of Beaujolais nouveau .

My invitation to the party was connived through a friend back East with contacts on the moors. After setting up the shoot, he called back to sort things out and make sure I had all the necessary gear: gun, hunting clothes, tweeds, tattersalls and all the rest of it. Almost as an afterthought, he tossed in, “And don’t forget black tie.”

Black tie? Hell, I grew up shooting dove over the corn and pigeon peas of south Georgia before my first shave, duck in the rice fields of South Carolina and later powdered a few dozen pheasant every October for 12 or so years in the corn rows of South Dakota. All this with my trusty Winchester pump and a ripped and bloody Sears, Roebuck canvas hunting jacket. What was this grouse thing, a bird shoot or a debutante party?

What greeted me when I arrived at Farleyer House was a joyful mixture of both, an exhilarating rondeau of outdoor activity and cheerful socializing from the 6:30 a.m. wake-up knock until dinner at 8, with post-prandial coffee, liqueurs and tall tales of former shoots spun in the drawing room. Farleyer, dating from the late 1500s and once the home of the Menzies family after they were evicted from nearby Menzies Castle during the 1745 rebellion, is in the Central Highlands near the delightful little village of Aberfeldy. During the Menzies residency the house, gardens and overall estate were upgraded to the baronial level suitable for a major clan chief’s family.

The guest list couldn’t have been put together better to produce more good shooting and good cheer: a father-son team of excellent wing shots from Houston, both with their exuberant wives spreading laughter to the rafters with their high good humor; two thoroughly civil and good-natured British businessmen anxious to pass on grouse-shooting tips as well as help a colonial understand how best to “abide by the spirit of the sport”; a deadeye count from Rome with his ravishingly elegant, Caracas-born contessa . I was soon to find, alas, that each of these gentlemen must have spent half his waking hours with either a field gun or skeet gun in his hands. “Get your birds” to them meant missing one shot in a dozen.

Maj. Neil Ramsey, our host whose father had owned Farleyer for six decades, is Scottish to the marrow, a former Eton-Sandhurst officer in the historic Scots Guards who has served in Malaysia, Suez, Germany and on the general staff in London. A hale and hearty chap, the major still finds outdoor life to his liking, spending most of his time setting up grouse, partridge and pheasant shoots in Scotland, Hungary and Spain; arranging roe and red deer stalking; and planning custom-tailored golf holidays around Scotland’s historic courses and others of equal beauty but less renown.

Planning and staff supervision of a Scottish breakfast, field lunch, decidedly gourmet dinner and wine-cellar selection is the domain of Ramsey’s gracious and most capable wife, Caroline. While the formidable nature of a huge Scottish breakfast (start with eggs, bangers, kippers and keep going) needs no explanation, the delicious and more-than-welcome field lunches do. We started with hot venison bouillon with sherry, moved on to warm pies and casseroles of salmon, venison, pheasant, wild duck and other game, then finished with cold sandwiches of the same mix. And although gunpowder and hard alcohol are a dicey combination, there was always one round of cold beer, a dram of sherry or a bottle of Perrier to get you through to the tarts and tea.

Caroline Ramsey’s dinners were regal affairs indeed--all sparkling silver and crystal, flowers and flickering candelabra, and lively conversation up and down the long table. First courses leaned toward the likes of wild duck terrine, goujons of sole, game pate or heavenly smoked salmon. From then on it was roast haunch of venison, noisettes of lamb with a mint and Pernod sauce, salmon hollandaise or roast grouse. It is hunters’ food with more than a little of the cachet one soon learns to expect of everything at Farleyer.

Scotland and Northern England are the only places on earth you’ll find the red grouse, the cock little more than a pound of handsome and plump game bird with rufous-brown plumage and distinctive red eye wattles that inflate during courtship and territorial disputes. Heather is about the only thing they need to get through life. Once beyond the chick stage, the red grouse eats almost nothing but the tough and fibrous heather shoots, its large gizzard--filled with quartz grit--grinding the stalks into nourishment.

Heather is also grouse habitat, one that they are reluctant to leave to go any great distance, particularly if there are hawks or other predatory birds about. This makes shooting much more difficult, since red grouse fly low and close to the heather contour and thus are upon you in a flash, often in waves of coveys that seem to blacken the sky.

Prelude to a shoot begins in the gun room, where sturdy Barbour coats, Royal Hunter Wellington boots and rather pricey shotguns are much in evidence: England’s Purdy, made since early in the 19th Century; the Holland & Holland, equally fine and prestigious, and Belgian Brownings and Italy’s Berettas. All in all, a lineup of the Rolls, Bentleys and Ferraris of shotguns, some of which can run $35,000 the matched pair.

When I screwed the barrel to my Winchester, one would have thought that I had pulled a Pershing missile out of the gun case; Rule No. 1 of grouse shooting is that no “automatic” weapons are allowed in the field, double barrels being the preferred weapon. Never mind that mine was a pump; I happily accepted a pair of Spain’s Arrizabalagas in the “spirit of the sport.”

The driven shoot (there are also walk-up or “rough” shoots) has all the formal pageantry and much of the color of a bullfight. You half expect Alistair Cooke to step out from behind a lavender hillock and brief you in measured tones on what’s to come.

The shoot begins with each “gun” selecting a “butt slip” from the shoot host. The butts, usually eight about 45 yards apart, are laid out in a straight line on the moors. They are about five feet in diameter, four feet or so deep and often have stones or sod parapets piled up around the perimeter to further hide the shooter. Some butt lines have been there so long that they look like Roman ruins climbing the hillside. You and your loader stand in the pit selected on the card and wait for the first drive to begin. There are usually five or six a day, split by the midday field lunch. After each drive you move up two butts, giving each gun a reasonable chance of good position during the day.

The “beaters,” men who drive up the birds, usually number between 12 and 24 on the hill, depending upon the number of guns and acreage of the heather moor. They come toward the butt line snapping small white flags, hollering their heads off and generally trying to get the grouse up out of the heather and toward the guns. When the beaters come into gun range, the shoot host or one of the flankers at either end of the line blows his field horn, the signal that no more shots will be taken toward the beaters but only after the bird flies over the line. And a cardinal rule of grouse shooting is to never, never swing through the line in leading a bird. Lift your gun, then lower it again for the retreating grouse.

To the drive-shoot neophyte, the wait for a first bird to fly toward the line is interminable, a time of rapid pulse and rampant anxiety.

“Lovely,” breathed my loader Donnie as I dropped the first one, an easy, low-deflection shot coming almost straight at me and falling practically in the butt. From then on it was grouse whistling to the right, to the left and at times almost taking your hat off as they flashed by and over the butts. Donnie kept a fresh gun at the ready, one that I frequently didn’t need. Growing up in the Depression South, you learned to husband your shells, letting the chancy shots go by.

We shot for three days, two under Perthshire skies as fiercely blue and radiant as you could hope for, one when it was much like shooting under Victoria Falls. All told, we dropped 191 brace one day, 201 in another and 91 in the wet. I “got my birds,” but nothing like the mounds of grouse that were stacked around many of the butts after each drive. Eight or nine birds per drive isn’t shameful, but others were getting twice that, the penalty for shooting on a moor filled with Davy Crocketts.

Following the afternoon shoot, it was back to Farleyer and into a hot bath that you could float a kayak in, throw on something comfortable, relax a bit and wait for the dressing gong. Then it was black-tie time and a go at the always-set drinks table for a wee dram and meeting the ladies in their finery. What else but The Famous Grouse Scotch, distilled and blended at nearby Perth since 1800. The ladies had been riding horseback with their children, shopping for tartans, cashmeres and handicrafts in Aberfeldy and Perth, or taking long walks on Farleyer’s gorgeous grounds or along the lovely banks of the nearby River Tay. Everyone was relaxed, in the highest spirits and ready for all those delicious things waiting for us in the dining room, perhaps among them a beautifully browned lagopus lagopus scoticus.

“G’back! G’back!” is the characteristic alarm call of a cock grouse flushed during the shooting season. Funny, after three glorious days of good shooting and great company, I was thinking the same thing for next August, black tie and all.

Brochures and information on seasonal shooting of game birds as well as deer stalking and Scotland-England golf holidays are available from Maj. Neil Ramsey, Farleyer, Aberfeldy, Perthshire, Scotland PH15 2JE; telephone 0887-20523. Prices vary from site to site; holiday described was in the $7,000 range for six nights with four days shooting, all inclusive. The British Tourist Authority also has a listing of lodges, estates and agents arranging shoots for the above and other game. Telephone (2l3) 628-3525, or write: 350 S. Figueroa St., Los Angeles 90071.