At the first shoot of the year fully 25 per cent of the spoil are coots; but at the later shoots ducks are obtained in greater proportion, as coots then quit the rice-grounds. These later shoots do not produce quite such stupendous totals; but still immense numbers are bagged—ten or twelve thousand in a morning.
As the majority of purchasers come from a distance and usually only remain for one, or perhaps two, of the fixed shooting days, such prices as £80 to £100 represent a fairly stiff rent.
Few mallards are obtained at the first shoot, but their numbers increase as the winter advances. The chief species are pintail, wigeon, teal, and shoveller, together with a few shelducks and many common and red-crested pochards. Flamingoes and spoon-bills frequent the shallows in small numbers.
As individual instances; from a replaza that cost 900 pesetas (say £40), and which was the ninth in point of price that year, one gun fired 700 cartridges in a single morning.
The best replaza—at least the most expensive (it cost 1500 pesetas)—was tenanted last winter by friends from whose experiences, not too encouraging, we gather: At the first shoot (November 13) the post was occupied by a single gun, who, after firing 400 shots, was compelled to desist owing to injury to his shoulder. “I believe,” he writes, “I might have fired 1500 cartridges had I continued all day, but was obliged to leave early. The boatmen had then gathered ninety—sixty ducks, thirty coot—and expected to recover more.”
On November 28 the post was occupied by three guns: “No day for duck, a blazing sun so hot that the reflection from the water blistered our faces. The ducks mounted up high in air and mostly cleared early in the proceedings, though some were attracted by our 100 decoys. We killed ninety-six, mostly wigeon and pochard, a few mallard and teal, besides twenty snipe. The desideratum is a really rough day, but that at Valencia is past praying for.”
The arrozales are run dry (and of course the shooting stopped) by the middle of January. The water, in fact, is only kept up so long solely for the sake of the shooting. So soon as its level has fallen a couple of inches the fowl all leave directly.
CHAPTER XXXIII
ON SMALL-GAME SHOOTING IN SPAIN
HARDLY will one enter a village posada or a peasant’s lonely cot without observing one inevitable sign. Among the simple adornments of the whitewashed wall and as an integral item thereof hangs a caged redleg. And from the rafters above will be slung an antediluvian fowling-piece, probably a converted “flinter,” bearing upon its rusty single barrel some such inscription—inset in gold characters—as, “Antequera, 1843.” These two articles, along with a cork-stoppered powder-horn and battered leathern shot-belt, constitute the stock-in-trade and most cherished treasures of our rustic friend, the Spanish cazador. Possibly he also possesses a pachón, or heavily built native pointer; but the dog is chiefly used to find ground-game or quail, since the redleg, ever alert and swift of foot, defies all pottering pursuit. Hence the reclamo, or call-bird, is almost universally preferred for that purpose.
Red-legged partridges abound throughout the length and breadth of wilder Spain—not, as at home, on the open corn-lands, but amidst the interminable scrub and brushwood of the hills and dales, on the moory wastes, and palmetto-clad prairie. On the latter hares, quail, and lesser bustard vary the game.