The Coto Dofana ce 
through the crystal air? All the keener is the joy when, with 
heavy thump, your first goose 1s landed on the sand amid the tin 
decoys. When three or four lie there, Vazquez will send his 
fleet two-legged “water-dog” to set them up with twigs 
supporting their bills, to beguile more of their kind into line with 
the barrels. If the day be propitious, the sky will be dotted at 
times with geese in all directions. Now and again they will give 
you a shot, the expert taking surely three or four to the tyro’s 
one. It is half-past eight, and you have sat in your hole close on 
two hours before Vazquez comes to gather the slain, to which he 
will add two or three more, marked down afar, and picked up as 
SPANISH LYNX 
dead as the rest. Never have two of your waking hours passed 
so quickly. What would you not give to live them over again 
and undo some of those inexplicable misses? But one goose 
alone would amply repay that early start. Even four or five 
are all you can carry, and the twenty or thirty that our expert 
[who must be nameless] would have shot, will live to stock 
the world afresh. 
Among the fauna of the Coto Dofana, a word must be given 
to the lynx. Never can I forget sitting one afternoon, Paradox 
in hand, on the fringe of a covert. I was waiting for stag, 
rather drowsily, for the beat was a long one and the sun hot, 
when my eyes suddenly rested on a lynx standing broadside 
among the bushes, beyond a bare belt of sand, some fifty yards 
off. Fain would I have changed my bullet for slugs, but those 
D 
