QUAIL SHOOTING 349 
till fall approaches, when there is a repetition of all 
the fears and troubles and dangers of preceding years. 
He who can average three kills out of six shots, 
cover and open, is an excellent marksman. The shooter 
may make a run of ten or twenty straight kills, but 
soon there are sure to come misses if he does not pick 
his shots. In winter the shooting is much more diffi- 
cult than in the fall. Of course, the man who never 
misses is of the parlor, not of the field. 
The home of the greater number of the American 
quails of the extreme southwest or on the Pacific coast 
is in a country of great aridity. Moreover, much of 
the vegetation of that country consists of thorny and 
spiny plants, of which many are cactus, yucca or 
mesquite. It is evident that over much of this country 
the use of dogs in shooting these birds would be diffi- 
cult, if not impracticable. For much of the year the 
ground is so dry that no scent would lie, and a dog, 
unless trained for that particular work, would be at 
a great disadvantage. Moreover, in the swift traveling 
performed by hunting dogs, as they are trained in the 
South for field trial work, a dog, in a very short time, 
would inevitably become crippled by the spines of the 
cactus, which he could not help constantly running 
over or into. If to these difficulties we add the fact 
that the quails seldom or never lie to a dog, but run as 
hard as they can at the first intimation of danger, 
endeavoring to get into the thick brush, through which 
they can thread their way faster than any animal can 
