428 WILD SPAIN. 



CHAPTEK XXXVIII. 



DEEK-STALKING AND "STILL-HUNTING" 



On the Southern Plains. 



Though left to the last, the system of " rastreando," as 

 it is called in Spanish — stalking or " still-hunting," as we 

 have rendered it in English (though neither expression is 

 perhaps a precise equivalent), affords some of the prettiest 

 sport to be obtained with the rifle in the Peninsula. As an 

 example of this sport, we have taken our latest and not 

 least successful deer-stalking expedition, which took place 

 in March, 1892 — exactly twenty years after the campaign 

 recorded in the first chapter (p. 23) of our book. 



- There only remained a few days before the season for 

 deer-shooting would close. For more than a week we had 

 been ready awaiting a change in the weather ; but heavy 

 rains day by day delayed a start. Never had there been 

 known so wet a winter. From the Giralda tower at 

 Seville, the whole country appeared a sea, and the great 

 river, in the early days of March, was causing serious 

 anxieties to the Sevillanos, having reached a higher level 

 than local records had hitherto known. Already its angry 

 waters dashed in foam over the key-stones of Triana bridge ; 

 the transpontine suburb was submerged to the second 

 floors ; from its flat roofs starving men and women cried 

 for bread as boats passed by, navigating, Venetian-fashion, 

 the flooded streets. The city itself was an island — only 

 preserved from inundation by incessant labour at the 

 embankments, over whose topmost stones the menacing 

 waves already lapped, when a lull in the storm saved 

 Seville. A breach in that embankment or a further rise, 



