CHAPTER IX 

 WILDFOWL-SHOOTING IN THE MARISMA 



ITS PRINCIPLES AND PRACTICE 



Vast as their aggregations may be, yet wildfowl do not 

 necessarily — merely by virtue of niimljers — aftbrd any sort of 



certainty to the modern fowler. Half-a- 

 million may be in view day by day, but 

 in situations or under conditions where 

 scarce half-a-score can be killed. This 

 elementary feature is never appreciated 

 .^^ by the uninitiated, nor probably ever will 

 [f// be, since Hawker's terse and trenchant 

 prologue failed to fix it.' 



What "the Colonel" wrote a century 

 ago stands equally good to-day; and mutatis 

 mutandis will probably stand good a 

 century hence. 

 Long before the authors had appeared on the scene with 

 breech-loaders — even before the epoch of Hawker with his 

 copper-caps and detonators — the Spanish fowlers of the marisma 

 had already devised means of their own wdiereby the s warming- 

 wildfowl could be secured by wholesale. As a market venture, 

 their system of a stalking-horse (called a cahresto) was deadly 

 in the extreme and interesting to boot, affording unique 

 opportunity of closely approaching massed wildfowl while still 

 unconscious of danger. We have spent delightful days crouch- 

 ing behind these shaggy ponies, and describe the method later. 

 But this is not a style that at all subserves the aspirations of 

 the modern gunner, and we here study the problem from his 

 point of view. 



' See Instrudions to Yoamj Sportsmen, liy 1'. Hawker, second edition (1816), pp. 229, 230. 



lOf) 



