Again we conclude with an independent impression by J. C. C.:--
Never a visit to the Coto Doñana but brings some separate experience--possibly more pleasurable in retrospect than reality! I will instance my first interview with wild-boars. Now, of course, I know more about them and can almost regard them with serenity; but at that time, believe me, it was not so. That first encounter at really close quarters occurred at the close of a long day's work. My post was behind a twelve-inch pine on an otherwise bare hill, the reverse slope of which dipped down to dense bamboo-thickets just out of my sight, though close by. Within a few minutes commenced and continued the hullabaloo of hounds. Close glued to my pine-trunk I listened in tense excitement. Suddenly, ere I had quite realised such possibility, there rushed into view on the ridge, not twenty paces distant, a great shaggy grey boar. He had dashed up the steep bank beyond and was now making direct for my legs. This is not the confession of a nervous man, but it did occur to me that truer safety lay in the _fork_ of my tree! but B. was the next gun, only sixty or seventy yards away, and keenly interested. In a moment I was myself again; but the interval had been, to say the least, painfully enthralling. I had, of course, to wait till the great "Havato" had crossed my "firing-lines." He certainly saw _something_, for he paused momentarily, took rapid counsel, and bolted past. Nerves were steady now, and once across the line the boar had my right in the ribs, left in flank. I actually saw blood spurt--hair fly--at each shot, yet the boar followed on his course unmoved. Pachydermatous pig! I pondered while reloading. Ten seconds later on my boar's sleuth follows _Boca-Negra_, a veritable Beth Gelert. Utterly ignoring me, he passes away into gloom and silence; but shortly I see him coming back, blood-stained and satiated, and my self-respect returns. Ten minutes later, a second tusker gallops along the hollow behind. Him also my right caught fair in the ribs--only a few inches left of the heart, yet again without visible result. The second bullet, however, broke his spine as he ascended the sand-bank beyond, and he fell stone dead. When the beat was over we followed No. 1. He also lay still, 200 yards away--a pair of first-rate tuskers.