The gunner lies expectant on the cut rushes which strew the bottom-boards of his _cajon_--a box-shaped punt some 7 feet long by 2-1/2 broad, which is concealed by being thrust bodily in the midst of the biggest samphire bush available. The craft nevertheless is still afloat and, though flat-bottomed, is yet terribly crank, and any sudden movement to port or starboard threatens to capsize the entire outfit.
To allay the tense suspicion of flighting wildfowl, several of the adjacent bushes for fifty yards around have been heightened by the addition of a cut bough or two--the idea being to induce a theory among passing ducks merely that this particular spot seems peculiarly favourable to samphire-growth--that and nothing more.
In setting up decoys, while many are posed in lifelike attitudes, it is advisable to hang a few (especially white-plumaged species, such as pintail, shoveler, and wigeon-drakes) in almost vertical positions, in order to induce a belief among hungry incomers that these birds are "turning-up" to feast on abundant subaquatic plants beneath.
This intermittent flight is naturally irregular, hunger affecting greater or less numbers on different days; but when it comes off in force affords the cream of wildfowling from before noon till the sun droops in the west. During the last hour before he dips not a wing moves.
Duck-shooting thus resolves itself into two main systems: (1) intercepting the fowl on flight at dawn, and later (2) awaiting their incoming at expected points.
A good shoot may sometimes be engineered by cutting a broad "ride" through the samphire along some flight-line, thereby forming an open channel between two _lucios_. Ducks which have hitherto flown sky-high in order to cross the danger-zone will now pass quite low along the new waterway, and even prefer it to crossing the cover at hazard, however high.
A typical day's fowling in mid-marisma may be described. The night has been spent in a reed-built hut charmingly situate on a mud-islet half-an-acre in extent, and commanding unequalled views of flooded and featureless marisma. At 4 A.M. we turn out and by the dim light of a lantern embark in a _cajon_ (punt), serenaded by the croaks and gabbling of flamingoes somewhere out in the dark waters. My wild companion, Batata, kneeling in the bows and grasping a punt-pole in either hand, bends to his work, and away we glide--into the unknown.