The Philippines: Past and Present (Volume 2 of 2)Worcester, Dean C. (Dean Conant)
History
The Philippines: Past and Present (Volume 2 of 2)
Worcester, Dean C. (Dean Conant)
Philippines; Philippines -- History -- 1898-1946
A party which happened to visit Cavilli, a small isolated coral island
in the Sulu Sea, once found it alive with junglefowl. No one else
has ever seen any there. Obviously a great flock flew in and then
flew away again.
Particularly fine sport may be had on Fuga Island by walking along
the edge of the forest in the late afternoon. The birds which are
then feeding in the open fly straight for cover and present difficult
cross shots.
The larger hornbills are very good to eat, but as easy to hit on
the wing as a fair-sized door sailing through the air would be,
so do not offer much sport.
Wild hogs are abundant throughout the archipelago. Deer are found on
nearly all of the islands, but there are several noteworthy exceptions,
such as Palawan and Cebú. The Filipinos are very fond of hunting
deer. Sometimes they run them down with dogs and drive them into
nets where they lance them--a most unsportsman-like proceeding. The
wealthier Filipinos like to take up their stations at good strategic
posts, and then have the country beaten toward them. In this way they
sometimes get fifty or more deer in a single drive. I have never been
able to see anything very exciting about this method of hunting.
It is very good sport, on occasion, to still-hunt deer. The best deer
shooting I have ever had was at what is called the Cogonal Grande in
the center of the island of Culion. It is a great circular valley
sloping very gradually toward the center. Its higher portions are
overgrown with cógon grass which gives the valley its name. Probably
it was once the bed of a lake. At all events its center is swampy at
the present time and has grown up into a hopeless jungle of pandanus,
bamboo grass, etc., through which runs a maze of deer paths. Numerous
little cañons lead down from the neighbouring hills to this valley
and each of them has forest in it.
In the month of December, when the cógon is dry, if fired it burns
toward the centre on all sides until the blaze reaches the wet
swampy portion where the vegetation is not dry enough to burn. If
dogs are then put into the little stretches of forest which run down
the ravines toward the open valley, they almost invariably drive out
deer which run straight for the tangle at its centre, necessarily
crossing ground which has been burned bare.
As a result one gets hard cross shots but has the advantage of seeing
every bullet strike, as the soil is very dry at this season. This
makes interesting shooting. One gets game enough to keep the camp in
meat and not enough so that he feels like a butcher.
Many hunters go out at night with bull's-eye lanterns, shine the
deer and fire at their eyes. This is not so bad as jacking them
from a boat, because a man who hunts on foot necessarily makes a
good deal of noise, and they are apt to become alarmed and run away,
whereas one can approach in a boat so silently that they do not hear
the noise of the paddles or the rippling of the water.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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