The latter were probably wounded birds lingering since the preceding winter; which may also, perhaps, explain the presence of three greylag geese which were seen but not secured. Several common snipe were also shot—these facts afford "food for reflection!"
During the shooting, the air was alive with birds; besides ducks, there were herons of all sorts—old and young—egrets, white spoonbills, night-herons—many young ones, brown and speckled like bitterns—together with crested and eared grebes, dabchicks, terns, coots and pratincoles in thousands; while above all, sailed files of glossy ibis with curious barking croaks, several cormorants, and a string of cranes.
Among miscellaneous birds shot were most of the above, with little bitterns, various rails and one purple waterhen, little gulls, whimbrels (?) and bar-tailed godwit.
It is worth adding that a dead bird, left floating, was completely devoured in less than five minutes by water-beetles (Dyticus), which hollowed out the body and left nothing, but empty skin and feathers! One felt that, had one the bad luck to get bogged, these creatures were capable of making away with a man well under half an hour.
CHAPTER XXXVIII.
DEER-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, and the stately and historic city had been swept away—as Consuegra and many a small town or village was swept away in Southern Spain daring the terrible floods of 'ninety-two.