785 



THE SPORT OF KINGS. 



BY 



C. H. Donald. 



A cold crisp morning in February, a team of falcons in perfec 

 ' Tarak " and a good trusty horse beneath you, and what could 

 man want more to make his enjoyment complete and a holiday 

 something to be remembered in after years. All very fine you say, 

 but the falcons are not much use without the quarry, and that is not 

 always a certain find ! Well, that may be so, but to obviate that 

 risk, train your falcons to something that you are sure to find. 

 I had the misfortune to be stationed in an out-of-the-way place 

 in the Punjab, where a whole day's outing with the gun might, 

 if you were lucky, furnish you with a couple of brace of snipe, 

 a few duck and possibly a hare, so I dispensed with my gun and 

 promptly sent for my old falconer and his brother, who was also his 

 assistant, and set to work to catch and lay in a stock of falcons on 

 the " something for everything " principle. A few days' roaming 

 about the river bank with a net, a set of nooses and some mynahs 

 and sparrows in a cage, and I had collected two peregrines — one a 

 haggard and the other a splendid dark bird in her first year — a saker, 

 a luggar and two merlins, and within the month was ready for 

 houbara, herons, paddy-birds, crows, kites, hoopoes and larks, and 

 surely it would be a bad day on which I could not find one or 

 other of the above. The saker I kept exclusively for kites, the 

 young peregrine was all there when she saw a heron, and both had 

 also been " entered " to houbara. The luggars showed me many a 

 good chase, when all else failed, after a luckless crow or a squaking 

 paddy bird ; and the little merlins, last but by no means least, were the 

 prettiest sight of all to watch ringing up after a lark or a hoopoe, or 

 putting in stoop after stoop as they got above their quarry. 



With such a team out, I need never despair of a chase somewhere. 

 If I could get away for the whole day, both peregrines and a luggar 

 or the merlins accompanied me, and we sallied forth to the sand 

 hills, some 5 miles out from my bungalow, and a fairly certain find 

 for houbara, where scattered fields of mustard, now in flower, 

 attracted them and clumps of " dhak " bushes afforded ample cover 

 during the day. 



