Walter John Buck

“ The love of sport is strong in our breasts, but it is not the sole, or an all-potent factor therein. Other things are strong to charm, and here the scenery and accompaniments lacked nothing of beauty and interest—the grand hills, not high but severe in jagged skylines and escarpments that shone like marble in the sun. The air resounded with the music of leaping waters, with the merry carol of Sandpiper and gentler warble of Whinchat: and further off the soaring flight of Buzzard and Raven lent life to the silent hills. ”

“ A land without Trout labours, in our eyes, under grave physical disadvantages; its currency is, metaphorically, below par, its stocks at a discount. The absence of many modern luxuries in Spain—say, manhood suffrage, school-boards, and the like—we can survive; the absence of trout, never. Not even the presence on mountain, moor, or marsh, of such noble denizens as Spain can boast—the ibex, bustard, and boar, the lynx and lammergeyer—can wholly, from an angler's point of view, fill the void, or atone for the absence of sparkling streams and that gamest of fresh-water game, the trout. ”

“ A characteristic and withal a truly noble and ornamental object is the Great Bustard, on those vast stretches of silent corn-lands which form his home. Among the things of sport are few more attractive scenes than a band of bustards at rest. Bring your field-glass to bear on that gathering which you see yonder, basking in the sunshine, in full enjoyment of their siesta. There are four-or five-and-twenty of them, and how immense they look against the background of sprouting corn that covers the landscape: well may a stranger mistake them for deer or goats. ”

“ Vasquez cannot tell you who is Prime Minister at Madrid, and cares not whether England may wish to surrender Gibraltar to Spain; but he can tell you whither that pack of duck, like a small cloud on the horizon, is hurrying to alight; he can point out to you the birds fresh come from the north, as distinguished from earlier arrivals, as he can also tell you when ducks, which, to the uninitiated, appear quite happy and content, are packing up, and will be gone with the morning's light. He will take you where the snipe are in hundreds when you have searched their favourite haunts in vain ”

“ No more lovely trouting waters can angling introspect conceive than some of those in Northern Spain. Now surging through some tortuous gorge in successive pools, dark, and foam-flecked, each of which look like "holds" for monsters; now opening out on a hill-girt plateau, where the current broadens into rippled shallows, with long-tailed runs and hollowed banks, the Cantabrian rivers offer promises all too fair. For the unfortunate trout has no fair play meted out to him in this hungry land. No count is taken of his noble qualities, nor of his economic necessities. ”

“ Montagu's Harrier hunts with impetuous flight, in long, straight bee-lines close over the mancha, always appearing about to alight but not doing so. But for systematic searching-out of a breadth of land, none compare with the Imperial Eagle; usually in pairs, these noble tyrants choose a line of country, and with wide sweeps to right and left, crossing and recrossing each other at the central point like well-trained setters, they beat miles of scrub in a few hours, while a Buzzard or Marsh-Harrier will hover and circle round a single spot and spend half a day over a few acres of rushes. ”

“ The flamingo itself, indeed, is the one solitary speck of pure bright colour amidst the broad leagues of mud and muddy water which it so conspicuously ornaments. Other birds are there, it is true, but to them the same remark applies. They, also, are as bright, pure and conspicuously different from their environment as are the flamingoes. What more exquisite examples of bright, spotless beauty amidst strongly contrasted surroundings than the stilts and avocets, the lovely southern herons, egrets and spoonbills, the gulls and marsh-terns? ”

“ Before us, for example, is a grove of stone-pines, embedded to their centres amidst dark green thicket; through the massed foliage of lentiscus and briar shoots up a forest of waving bamboos, tall almost and straight as the pines themselves; the foreground filled with the delicate mauve of rosemary, with giant heather and heaths of a dozen hues, all wrestling for space, with clumps of pampas-grass and palmetto, genista, butcher's-broom, and wild fennel. Here a mass of abolága, or Spanish gorse, ablaze with golden bloom ”

“ The larger Gull-billed Tern (Sterna anglica) is also common in summer in the marisma, where we have taken the eggs of all four species.
The utter loneliness and desolation of the middle marismas are a sensation to be remembered. Hour after hour one pushes forward across the flooded plain, only to bring within view more and yet more vistas of watery waste and endless horizons of tawny water. On a low islet in the far distance stand a herd of cattle—mere points in space: but they, too, partake of the general wildness, and splash off at a galop while yet a mile away. ”

“ True to their appointed season came the dark clouds of pintail, teal, and wigeon, the long skeins of grey geese; but where in other years they had revelled in shallows rich in aquatic vegetation, now the travellers find in their stead a calcined plain devoid of all that is attractive to the tastes of their tribe. For the parched-up soil, whose life-blood has been drained by the heats of the summer solstice, whose plant-life is burnt up, remains panting all the autumn through for the precious moisture that comes not. ”

“ Its stealth preserves the lynx from falling readily into danger, and few are shot comparatively with their numbers in the wilder regions of Spain. When a lynx detects an ambuscade, there is an instant's cogitation ere the big cat bounds off. One moment, from the jungle, the great yellow eye meets one's own—that cruel, pretty face, full of hate and shy self-possession, set off by the bushy whiskers and tufted ears—then, like a yellow gleam, the beast disappears for ever in the thicket. ”

“ With this beautiful weapon, which shoots ball as accurately as a rifle, and comes to the eye as handy as a game-gun, no distracting doubts need flurry one's aim at flying stag or boar within one hundred yards; even snap-shots in covert are now a luxury instead of the nerve-and temper-trying ordeal of yore. Such is the power and penetration of the hollow-fronted conical ball that we have "raked" a stag from stem to stern at one hundred and forty yards, the bullet entering his chest, and lodging near the root of the tail almost undamaged, after traversing the whole of the animal's vitals. ”

“ Even the horses or ponies of the marisma seem to have reverted to their original man-fearing state, and are as shy and timid as any of the feræ naturæ. After long days on the monotonous marisma, one's wearied eyes at length rejoice at a vision of trees—a dark green pine-grove casting grateful shade on the scorching sands beneath. To that oasis we direct our coarse: but it is a fraud, one of Nature's cruel mockeries—a mirage. Not a tree grows on that spot, or within leagues of it, nor has done for ages—perhaps since time began. ”

“ Here every little thicket or clump of brushwood holds some of the birds that have been driven forward, and even on the barest ground some have found refuge behind a tuft of grass or palmetto. Everywhere partridges start up from the slightest covert, and one sees them running forward ere they rise. But the hottest work occurs in the belt of rush and reed—in the juncos that border the marisma. ”

“ Born of the mountain and the snow-field, they come leaping and surging seawards, dancing to their own wild music, as they crush through narrow gorges, by crag and hanging wood, hurrying ever northward towards the Biscayan sea. The angler's path along their banks is no made road: often for miles, ay, leagues, he may be constrained to follow the goatherds' upland path—a camino de perdices in native phrase—and only able to gaze down, like Tantalus, on tempting streams, perhaps close beneath, yet far beyond his reach. ”

“ Like most Spanish examples, this eagle was much splashed with white below, especially on the thighs. Shortly after, on a bare stretch of maize stubble, we rode fairly into a pack of little bustard, and though the gun was in the slings a quick shot secured three—one to the first barrel, and a brace, winged, to the second. A long skein of cranes came gaggling over as we breakfasted on the banks of Guadalete, and, passing the Agredera, by evening the long ride was over, and we were once more amidst the grateful comforts of Jerez de la Frontera. ”

“ These youngsters are only separated from the wild herds, "rounded up," and captured with great difficulty—after long and fast chases on the open plains. Perfect little demons of vice and fury they are, too, when caught, shaggy and unkempt little beasts, coated with dried mud, biting at each other, quarrelling and screaming with savage rage—a corral full of them newly-caught is indeed a singular sight. On many of the old mares of the marisma the hand of man has never placed a halter. ”

“ This, more African than Africa, in spring, autumn and winter is a paradise, the huerta of Europe, low-lying and protected by the sierras of Nevada and Morena from the deadly breath of the central plateau; but in the four summer months an infierno, where every green thing is burnt up by a fiery sun, where shade is not, and where life is only endurable by discarding European habits and adopting those of Moorish or Oriental races. ”

“ The Spanish mountaineer does not much affect ibex-hunting, though there are in each mountain-village some who try to earn a few precarious dollars by it. The peasants who follow this pursuit in the alpine regions of Spain become fearless climbers: with their feet clad in alparagatas, or hemp-soled sandals, they traverse ridges and descend crags where nail-shod guide would falter. The first object is to get as high as possible. Then, crawling to the verge of some fearful abyss, the hunter commands the depths below, and, if he descry ibex, is enabled to approach without the warning of the wind. ”

“ Whatever be the cause, the country gentleman, the country parson and doctor, Hodge and rural population generally, are unknown in Spain. The landowner hies him townwards at night to his gossip, his paséo and his favourite game of tresillo at the casino—the workman to his village, his wife and bairns in the humble tenement he proudly calls his casa. Spain is a land of customs and accepted traditions—be they good or bad. For centuries no one has sought to introduce a novelty—say a taste for rural life, though the conditions for its enjoyment exist here as favourably, at least, as elsewhere. ”

“ In the burning heats of summer, when every green thing is scorched to death, the cattle die by hundreds from thirst and want of pasturage; in winter, when plains are flooded, and valleys water-logged, the death-rate from cold, want, and disease is hardly less heavy than that of summer. Small wonder the great bare-necked scavengers of Nature increase and flourish.
Passing beneath the twin crags of Las Dos Hermanas, we struck the course of the Majaceite, whose rushing stream, embowered amidst magnificent oleanders, looked more like trout than anything we had then seen in these sierras. ”

“ The short coastline between Trafalgar and Huelva thus forms, as it were, the only opening to this favoured land, secure in a mountain-setting—the gem for which contending races fought for centuries, and from whose southernmost rock the British flag floats over the bristling battlements of Gibraltar.
To see Andalucia, the traveller must ride. In a wide and wild land, where distances are great and the heat greater, where roads, rail, and bridges exist not, the saddle is the only means of locomotion. ”

“ From Lebrija on the east to Almonte on the west, and from the Atlantic almost up to Seville itself, the map is vacant. This huge area is, in fact, a wilderness, and in winter the greater part a dismal waste of waters. For league after league as one advances into that forbidding desolation, the eye rests on nothing but water—tawny waters meeting the sky all round the horizon. The Guadalquivir intersects the marisma, its triple channel divided from the adjacent shallows and savannahs by low mud-banks. ”

“ How strange it is that the flamingo, a bird which never seems happy unless half-way up to his knees in water, should so long delay the period of incubation: for, long before eggs could be laid and hatched in these nests and the young reared, the full summer-heats of June and July would have set in, the water would have entirely disappeared, and the flamingoes would be left stranded in the midst of a scorching desert of dry, sun-baked mud. ”

“ An animated scene lay before us; the wastes were thronged with bird-life. The horizon glistened with the sheen of Flamingoes in thousands, and the intervening space lay streaked and dotted with flights and flotillas of aquatic fowl. The nearer foreshores, fringed with rush and sedge and dark stretches of tamarisk, were peopled with Storks and Herons, Egrets, Spoonbills, Stilts, Avocets, and other waders. While breakfasting under a spreading pine, we observed commotion among our feathered neighbours—the whole multitude had risen on wing as a single Booted Eagle swept over the scene. ”

“ One night shortly after quitting my post, little better than a human icicle, and not without fear of the dangers of scrambling cave-wards, in absolute darkness along the ice-slope, a little herd of goats passed—mere shadows—within easy shot of where, five minutes before, I had been lying in wait. On another morning at dawn the tracks of a big male showed that he, too, must have passed at some hour of the night within five-and-twenty yards of the snow-screen. ”

“ Hour after hour we glide down the rapid current, through green vineyards, all resonant with the long-drawn songs of the vintagers. Now the cliffs close in, and we pass through a gorge, whose sides rise a thousand feet sheer from the water, overgrown with masses of broom, heath, gorse, and a variety of evergreen shrubs wherever a ledge or cranny afford hold for their roots. Gigantic aloes with broad spiked blades and towering stalks stud the rocky declivities, and the cactus, wild fig, and other sub-tropical forms of plant-life lend character to the scenery. ”