As soon as the drawings were in his hand he took me to our gun-room
and gave me a quite unneeded lesson in the art of loading a gun - first
so much powder, then a wad well rammed down with the old obsolete
ramrod; then so much shot and a second wad and ramming down; then a
percussion cap on the nipple. He then led the way to the plantation,
and finding two wild pigeons sitting together in a tree, he ordered me
to fire. I fired, and one fell, quite dead, and that completed my
education, for now he declared he was not going to waste any more time
on my instruction.
The gun he had told me to use was a single-barrel fowling-piece, an
ancient converted flintlock, the stock made of an iron-hard black wood
with silver mountings. When I stood it up and measured myself by it I
found it was nearly two inches taller than I was, but it was light to
carry and served me well: I became as much attached to it as to any
living thing, and it was like a living being to me, and I had great
faith in its intelligence.
My chief ambition was to shoot wild duck. My brother shot them in
preference to anything else: they were so much esteemed and he was so
much commended when he came in with a few in his bag that I looked on
duck-shooting as the greatest thing I could go in for. Ducks were
common enough with us and in great variety; I know not in what country
more kinds are to be found. There were no fewer than five species of
teal, the commonest a dark brown bird with black mottlings; another,
very common, was pale grey, the plumage beautifully barred and
pencilled with brown and black; then we had the blue-winged teal, a
maroon-red duck which ranges from Patagonia to California; the ringed
teal, with salmon-coloured breast and velvet-black collar; the
Brazilian teal, a lovely olive-brown and velvet-black duck, with
crimson beak and legs. There were two pintails, one of which was the
most abundant species in the country; also a widgeon, a lake duck, a
shoveller duck, with red plumage, grey head and neck, and blue wings;
and two species of the long-legged whistling or tree duck. Another
common species was the rosy-billed duck, now to be seen on ornamental
waters in England; and occasionally we saw the wild Muscovy duck,
called Royal duck by the natives, but it was a rare visitor so far
south. We also had geese and swans: the upland geese from the
Megellanic Straits that came to us in winter - that is to say, our
winter from May to August. And there were two swans, the black-necked,
which has black flesh and is unfit to eat, and the white or Coscoroba
Swan, as good a table bird as there is in the world. And oddly enough
this bird has been known to the natives as a "goose" since the
discovery of America, and now after three centuries our scientific
ornithologists have made the discovery that it is a link between the
geese and swans, but is more goose than swan. It is a beautiful white
bird, with bright red bill and legs, the wings tipped with black; and
has a loud musical cry of three notes, the last prolonged note with a
falling inflection.
These were the birds we sought after in winter; but we could shoot for
the table all the year round, for no sooner was it the duck's pairing
and breeding season than another bird-population from their breeding-
grounds in the arctic and sub-arctic regions came on the scene -
plover, sandpiper, godwit, curlew, whimbrel, - a host of northern
species that made the summerdried pampas their winter abode.
My first attempt at duck-shooting was made at a pond not many minutes'
walk from the house, where I found a pair of shoveller ducks, feeding
in their usual way in the shallow water with head and neck immersed.
Anxious not to fail in this first trial, I got down flat on the ground
and crawled snake-fashion for a distance of fifty or sixty yards,
until I was less than twenty yards from the birds, when I fired and
killed one.
That first duck was a great joy, and having succeeded so well with my
careful tactics, I continued in the same way, confining my attention
to pairs or small parties of three or four birds, when by patiently
creeping a long distance through the grass I could get very close to
them. In this way I shot teal, widgeon, pintail, shovellers, and
finally the noble rosy-bill, which was esteemed for the table above
all the others.
My brother, ambitious of a big bag, invariably went a distance from
home in quest of the large flocks, and despised my way of duck-
shooting; but it sometimes vexed him to find on his return from a
day's expedition that I had succeeded in getting as many birds as
himself without having gone much more than a mile from home.
Some months after I had started shooting I began to have trouble with
my beloved gun, owing to a weakness it had developed in its lock - one
of the infirmities incidental to age which the gunsmiths of Buenos
Ayres were never able to cure effectually. Whenever it got bad I was
permitted to put it into the cart sent to town periodically, to have
it repaired, and would then go gunless for a week or ten days. On one
of these occasions I one day saw a party of shoveller duck dibbling in
a small rain-pool at the side of the plantation, within a dozen yards
of the old moat which surrounded it.
