This moving battery fairly resembles a load of sheaves, and well do we remember the terrible, suffocating heat we have endured, shut up for hours in this thing during the blazing days of July and August. The result, nevertheless, repays all suffering. We refer to no mere cynegetic pride but to the enduring joy of observing, at close quarters and still unsuspicious, these glorious game-birds at home on their private plains. The local idea is to fire through a slit previously made in the _estéras_; but somehow, when the cart stops and the game instantly rises, you find (despite care and practice) that the birds always fly in a direction you cannot command or where the narrow slit forbids your covering them. Hence we adopted the plan of sliding off behind as the cart pulled up, thus firing the two barrels with perfect freedom. We have succeeded by this means in bringing to bag many pairs of bustard during a day's manoeuvring.
[Illustration: SPANISH THISTLE AND STONECHAT]
We now come to the system of bustard-driving, which we regard as practically the only really legitimate method of dealing with this grand game. From the end of August onwards the young bustards are perfectly capable of taking care of themselves. The country is then cleared of crops, and while this precludes the birds being "done to death" as in the weeks immediately preceding, yet the ubiquitous thistles (often of gigantic size, ten or twelve feet in height), charlock, and _viznagas_ provide welcome covert for concealing the guns, while the heat still renders the game somewhat more susceptible to the artifices of the fowler. This is the easiest period.
As the season advances the hunter's difficulties increase. The brown earth becomes daily more and more naked, while files of slow-moving ox-teams everywhere traverse the stubble, ploughing league-long furrows twenty abreast. These factors combine to aid the game and stretch to its utmost limit the venatic instincts of the fowler.
Let us now attempt to describe a day's bustard-driving on scientific lines. The district having being selected, it is advisable to send out the night before a trustworthy scout who will sleep at the _cortijo_ and be abroad with the dawn in order to locate precisely the various _bandadas_, or troops of bustard, in the neighbourhood. The shooting-party (three or four guns for choice, but in no case to exceed six[44]) follow in the morning--riding, as a rule, to the rendezvous; though should there be a high-road available it is sometimes convenient to drive (or nowadays even to motor), having in that case sent the saddle-horses forward, along with the scout, on the previous day.