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6 



symmetrically) into two very nearly equal tubes, about three inches before entering the lungs, 

 that the rings are at all strongly marked, or that the tube impresses one as at all powerful. 



" I have already noticed that it is not easy to get at these birds (possibly due in part to a 

 keen sense of hearing accompanying their large ear-orifices) ; and, as far as my experience goes, 

 there is only one way of shooting them with a shot-gun. With a rifle it is not difficult to get 

 within two hundred and fifty to three hundred yards of them, at which distance, with a heavy 

 442 match rifle, one ought to knock them over every time. The melancholy fact, however, is, 

 that habitually one only succeeds in missing them and thoroughly scaring them with a rifle ; so 

 nothing remains but to have recourse to a long single eight-bore with BB green cartridge. This 

 will easily knock them down up to seventy, or, if a shot tells well in the neck, up to eighty 

 yards ; but getting within eighty or even a hundred yards of them can only be managed, as a 

 general rule, in one way. You obtain from one of the native fowlers the loan of a trained 

 Buffalo, and enter the water a good quarter of a mile away from the birds, under cover of the 

 quadruped. It has, as usual, a string run tightly through the nostrils and tied together behind 

 the horns. You hold this string where it lies across the cheek with the left hand ; your 

 extended left arm is hidden behind the neck ; your whole body is bent, so that your head and 

 neck are covered by the Buffalo's shoulders, your body and the greater part of your legs by its 

 body. Only your legs to a little above the knees show close to the hind legs ; and as far as 

 possible you always keep the beast up to his belly in water. Thus covered you slowly sidle up 

 towards the Cranes, making the Buffalo now put his head up, nose in air, now stop and lower 

 his head to the water, and generally dawdle and meander about with apparently no fixed idea in 

 his head, according to the natural manners and customs of a free and independent buffalo. 

 With a little practice it is easy thus to get within shot. You softly let the cheek-string go, and 

 at once fire below the buffalo's neck. Before your gun is well off, your sporting companion, who 

 has a marked distrust of Europeans and white faces, and has been incessantly endeavouring to 

 kick you throughout your whole promenade, knocks you head over heels, and rushes off towards 

 his dusky owner, bellowing as if he, and not you, were the injured party. This is firstrate sport ; 

 but, after trying it once or twice, nearly catching my death of cold, losing a powder-flask, and 

 realizing a stock in trade of bruises enough to last the rest of my natural life, I have preferred 

 sitting quietly on the bank and allowing my native coadjutors to shoot the birds I wanted. 



"When shot they are worth nothing as food; which, considering their diet here, is not 

 surprising. 



" In Europe, nowadays, the common Crane is not thought worth eating, and people wonder 

 at our ancestors esteeming them as they did ; but the reason of this is obvious. In former days, 

 when they were so numerous in Norfolk and other English counties, they used, I apprehend, to 

 arrive at the time of wheat-harvest, and feed exclusively on grain. Grain-fed Cranes are delicious. 

 The common Cranes that have lately left us, and which, for two months, had been daily gorging 

 themselves in our fields on grain of various kinds, were fat, juicy, tender, and delicately flavoured 

 — in fact, to my mind, with the exception of a Florican (Otis deliciosa), or one of our Norfolk 

 Pheasants, about as good birds as can be put on the table, and this although five or six months 

 before, when they first arrived, they were stringy, tough, lean, fishy things, not worth eating, or 

 shooting even, except for plumes. 



