204 
DUCK-SHOOTING. 
was a hundred and three Ducks, and eleven Geese, be- 
sides smaller birds. At one shot he had been known 
to kill two hundred and one Sea-Purres. He earned 
about ten pounds per week, and his companion 
rather more bj a similar plan. 
But the exploits of our British fowlers are insigni- 
ficant when compared with the grand scale on 
which this warfare is carried on in Mexico, where 
a great Tiro de Patos, or Duck-shooting, is, we are 
assured*, one of the most curious scenes that 
it is possible to witness. The Indians, by whom it 
is principally conducted, prepare a battery composed 
of seventy or eighty musket-barrels, arranged in two 
rows, one of which sweeps the water, while the 
other is a little elevated so as to take the Ducks as 
they rise upon the wing. The barrels are connected 
with each other, and fired by a train; but the whole 
apparatus, as well as the man who has charge of it, 
are concealed in the rushes, until the moment, when, 
after many hours of cautious labour, one of the 
dense columns of Ducks, which blacken at times the 
surface of the lake, is driven by the distant canoes 
of his associates sufficiently near to the fatal spot. 
The double tier of guns is immediately fired, and the 
water remains strewed with the bodies of the killed 
and wounded, whose escape is cut off by the circle 
of canoes beyond. Twelve hundred Ducks are 
often brought in as the result of a single attack; 
and during the whole season they form the ordinary 
food of the lower classes in the town of Mexico, 
where they are sold for a trifling sum. 
We have alluded to decoys as the great source of 
* Ward’s Mexico . 
