There was, however, ample employment for the shot-gun, as the crested partridge abounded in our neighbourhood. I have not yet mentioned this bird; it is smaller than our partridge, and has all its habits, with this exception, that it will fly to trees when disturbed. This I imagine arises from an instinctive fear of vermin, with which the country abounds, the silver grey fox being very destructive,—not to speak of coyotes, snakes, and birds of prey. There is also little cover on the ground, with the exception of stones, and when the partridge is undisturbed, it will busk among these. The call of the male is similar to that of the English bird. The crested partridge is hard to put up, being a great runner; harder still to shoot flying, for it is particularly strong on the wing, and flies low on a ground of much its own colour. When shot and cooked it is white, dry, and insipid; still it is a partridge, and as such is much relished.
I will mention a circumstance here in connection with shooting, which has so much of the marvellous in it that I had determined to omit it.
Whilst encamped at Santa Rosa Valley, after leaving Carrillo’s house, we were visited one morning by some Sonorians (probably those who afterwards stole our cattle). As they requested us to fire a few shots with our rifles at a mark, we consented willingly enough, and being in good practice and in good luck, we fired with success at dollars and other small targets.
An hour or two afterwards, the three of us proceeded in search of venison; it was about mid-day, the sun was very powerful and the sky cloudless. Making for a shady thicket where we hoped to find, we unexpectedly started a doe from the long grass; she was out of shot before we could raise a gun, but there still remained a fawn. Pretty innocent! there it stood gazing at us wondrously, and I warrant had there been meat in our larder at home not one of us would have touched a trigger; but lamb is innocent, and yet you eat it, Madam, and the only difference between us is that you have a butcher to take life, and I had not.
The fawn stood motionless as I advanced a few paces and took, as I imagined, deadly aim. I missed, and still it did not move: the others fired, and missed also. From the same distance (about seventy-five yards), we fired each four bullets without success; still the fawn moved but a pace or two, and our rifle ammunition was exhausted. I then crept up to the fawn, and within twenty paces I fired twice at it with my pistol; it then, unharmed, quietly walked away in search of its mother. We looked at each other in some doubt after this, and for a long time I was puzzled to conjecture how to account for this apparently charmed life.
At last I solved the problem in this way, as I thought. The sun was intensely powerful, and had been reflected back to us from the yellow grass on which we had kept our eyes throughout a long walk; either this glare or the rarefaction of the air had, probably, caused an optical delusion, and the fawn appearing nearer to us than in reality it was, we fired under it. Had this struck me at the time, I would have searched in the long grass for the place where the bullets struck, and I have no doubt, considering the practice we were in, that they would all have been found in the same range, and short; but on account of the height of the grass, we were unable to see whilst firing where our balls fell. And this is the sole way I can account for this curious adventure.
This is the sole marvellous story I have to tell, and is a fact; but so capricious is reading man, that I dare say many a one who would have believed me had I related the destruction in one long shot of three buffaloes, two coyotes, and a digger Indian, will smile incredulously at my party firing fourteen barrels within seventy paces of a motionless deer! So be it—and annotators of circulating library books will write “Gammon!â€� in black-lead pencil on the margin, and I must grin whilst I writhe under this infliction.
About three miles from our camp was the Stanislaus River; and crossing this in a ferry-boat, we would be at once in the vicinity of a famous digging, “Carson’s Hill,� by name. All that we read of that is bright and fairy-like, in connection with reported gold discoveries, has been presented as a Gradgrind fact at Carson’s Hill.
The rivers produced, the hills produced, and even the quartz[23] produced, having previously been rotted by nature, that man might pick the gold out with his penknife. “Rich nests,� “tall pockets,� “big strikes,� lumps and chunks, were the reward of labour at Carson’s Hill; whilst the miserable population elsewhere were content with ounces of gold, or, at the best, pounds.
No one knows how many fortunes have been made at Carson’s Hill, nor how many bloody battles have been fought there for the rich earth—but a great many. Two small armies met once on the brow of the hill, and parleyed, weapons in hand and with savage looks, for as much quartz as you might carry away in a fish-cart.