Читать книгу Oh, Shoot! Confessions of an Agitated Sportsman - Rex Beach - Страница 3

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Most men enjoy hunting, or would if they had a chance, but there is a small, abnormal minority who are hopeless addicts to the chase. To them the fiscal year begins with the opening of the deer season or the start of the duck flight, and ends when “birds and quadrupeds may no longer be legally possessed.” They are the fellows who wrap their own fish rods, join outing associations, and wear buckskin shirts when they disappear into the trackless wastes of Westchester County for the club’s annual potlatch and big-game lying contests.

To this class I belong. I offer what follows not as an excuse, but as a plea in extenuation. It is a feeble effort to paint the optimistic soul of a sportsman, to show how impossible it is to prevent him from having a good time, no matter how his luck breaks, and, in a general way, to answer the question, “Why is a hunter?”

There is no satisfactory answer to that query; hunters are merely born that way. Something in their blood manifests itself in regular accord with the signs of the zodiac. In my case, for instance, when autumn brings the open season, I suffer a complete and baffling change of disposition. I am no longer the splendid, upright citizen whose Christian virtues are a joy to his neighbors and an inspiration to the youth of his community. No. I grow furtive and restless; honest toil irks me. I begin to chase sparrows and point meadow larks and bark at rabbit tracks. I fall ill and manifest alarming symptoms which demand change of climate and surcease from the grinding routine. I sigh and complain. I moan in my sleep and my appetite flags. I allow myself to be discovered dejectedly fondling a favorite fowling piece or staring, with the drooping eyes of a Saint Bernard, at some moth-eaten example of taxidermic atrocity. The only book that stirs my languid soul is that thrilling work, Syllabus of the Fish and Game Regulations.

So adept have I become at simulating the signs of overwork that seldom am I denied a hunting trip to save my tottering health. Mind you, I do not advocate deceit. I abhor hypocrisy in the home, and I merely recount my own method of procedure for the benefit of such fellow huntsmen as are married and may be in need of first aid.

I was suffering the ravages of suppressed desires, common to my kind, when, several autumns ago, a friend told me about a form of wild-goose shooting in vogue on the outer shoals of Pamlico Sound, North Carolina, and utterly stampeded my processes of orderly thought.

“They use rolling blinds on the sand bars,” he told me. “They put down live decoys, a couple hundred yards away, then, when the geese come in, they roll the blind up to them.”

I assured him that his story was interesting but absurd. Having hunted Canada honkers, I knew them to be suspicious birds, skeptical of the plainest circumstantial evidence and possessed of all the distrust of an income-tax examiner.

“You don’t move while they’re looking,” my informant told me. “When they rubber, you hold your breath and, if religiously inclined, you pray. When they lower their heads, you push the blind forward. A goose is a poor judge of distance, and you can roll right up to him if you know how.”

I didn’t believe him; but the next day I was en route to North Carolina, and I have been back there every year since. I have shot from rolling blinds, stake blinds, and batteries. Sometimes I have good luck, again I do not. But nothing destroys my enjoyment, and every trip is a success. Once I am away with a gun on my arm, I become a nomad, a Siwash; I return home only when my sense of guilt becomes unbearable and when the warmth of my wife’s letters approaches zero.

And I have done well down there. At first, I went alone, traveled light, and spent little money. Now I take friends with me; I keep a well-equipped hunting boat there the year round; I stay a long time, and I spend sums vastly larger than I can afford. A brace of ducks used to cost me perhaps ten dollars, in the raw; now they stand me several times that, exclusive of general overhead. It shows what any persistent sportsman may accomplish even with a poor start. Perhaps no habitual hunter pays more for his entertainment than I do, and, figuring losses in business, time wasted, etc., etc., I truthfully can say that I enjoy the sport of kings.

This year there were five of us in the party—Maximilian Foster and Grantland Rice, fellow scribes, and Duke and Duchess, two English setters of breeding that we took along to investigate the quail resources of the country.

Max had made the trip once before; so he needed no urging to go again—only an excuse. We hit upon a good one. He is an abandoned trout fisherman and he ties his own flies. Feathers are expensive and hard to get. Why not lay in a good supply? It was the best we could think of at short notice; so he went home to try it out.

There was every reason why Grant should remain at his desk, but we argued that there might well be problems of trajectory involved in goose shooting which would revolutionize the golf industry if thoughtfully studied. Who could better investigate this promising field than a recognized golf paranoiac like him? We had only to suggest this line of thought; Grant rose hungrily to the bait and darted with it into the uptown Subway. He argued where it would do the most good, and to such effect that he promised to follow us a week later.

Now, a word about Duke and Duchess. In my time I have owned many dogs, for a dog is something I lack the force of character to refuse. Anybody can give me any kind of dog at any time, and I am grateful—to the point of tears. That is how these two came to our house—as gift dogs—and they made me very happy for a while, because I had always wanted a pair of setters. Frankly, however, they abused their welcome, for there has seldom been merely a pair of them. I have presented setter puppies to my relatives and to my friends. I am now preparing a gift list of my business acquaintances and fellow club members, but I am slowly losing ground, and my place grows more and more to resemble a Bide-a-Wee Home.

I had never been able to hunt over this pair, for whenever I was ready for a trip, household duties prevented Duchess from going along, or else I foresaw the necessity of taking with me a large crate in which to ship back her excess profits. This time, however, conditions appeared to be propitious, so Max and I decided to do upland shooting while waiting for Grant to join us, and then wind up our hunt with a gigantic offensive against the ducks and geese. After watching Duke and Duchess point some of my pigeons and retrieve corncobs, Max and I decided they were natural game sleuths and could detect a bird in almost any disguise. If a quail hoped to escape them, it would have to wear hip boots and a beard.

Time was, not long ago, when travel was no great hardship. But all that is changed. Government operation of the railroads worked wonders, even during the brief time we had it. For instance, it restored all the thrill and suspense, all the old exciting uncertainty of travel during the Civil War wood-burning days. No longer does one encounter on the part of employees that un-American servility which made travel so popular with the parasitic rich. Real democracy prevails; train crews are rough, gruff, and unmannerly, and even the lowly porter has learned the sovereign dignity of labor—and maintains it. Nor is there now any difference in the accommodations on the jerkwater feeders and the main lines, all that having yielded to the glorious leveling process. Train schedules are ingeniously arranged for the benefit of innkeepers at junction points, and the last named are maintained for the purpose of allowing one train to escape before another can interfere with it.

Having missed connections wherever practical, and taken the dogs out for a walk in several towns of which we had never heard, Max and I arrived, in due course, at Beaufort, only twelve hours late. We were a bit weak from hunger and considerably bruised from futile attempts to battle our way into the dining car, but otherwise we were little the worse for the journey.

The guides were waiting with the boat, but they bore bad news.

“There’s plenty of geese on the banks,” Ri told us, “but we’ve had summer weather and the tides are so low there’s no shooting.”

Seldom does a hunter make a long trip and encounter weather or game conditions that are anything except unparalleled. I have learned long since to anticipate the announcement that all would have been well had I arrived three weeks earlier or had I postponed my coming for a similar length of time; therefore we ignored Ri’s evil tidings, pointed to Duke and Duchess, and forecast a bad week for any quail that were unwise enough to remain in the county.

Both Ri and Nathan are banks men, born and raised close to the Hatteras surf; they know nothing of quail hunting, so we blueprinted it for them on the way to the dock.

“High-schooled dogs like these are almost human,” we explained. “They are trained to pay no attention to anything except game birds, but, with respect to them, their intelligence is uncanny, their instinct unerring. They will quarter a field on the run, pick up the scent of a covey, wheel and work up wind to a point. When they come to a stand, you know you’ve got quail. You walk up, give them the word to flush; then they retrieve the dead birds and lay them at your feet without marring a feather. It’s beautiful work.”

While we were in the midst of this tribute, Duke, whose leash I had removed, squeezed out through the picket fence of a backyard with the palpitating remains of a white pullet in his mouth. He was proud; he was atremble with the ardor of the chase; the irate owner of the deceased fowl was at his heels, brandishing a hoe.

I settled with the outraged citizen; then I engaged Duke in a tug of war for the corpus delicti. It was a strictly fresh pullet; there was nothing cold storage about it, for it stretched. Meanwhile, Max explained how to break a dog of chicken-stealing.

“Tie the dead bird round his neck where he can’t get at it. That will cure him.”

“But why cure him?” Ri inquired, earnestly. “Seems like you’d ought to encourage a habit of that kind. Them dogs is worth money!”

Duke and Duchess were much interested in the boat. While we unpacked, they explored it from end to end; then Duchess went out on deck, tried to point a school of mullet, and fell overboard. Nathan retrieved her with a boat hook; she came streaming into the cabin, shook herself thoroughly over my open steamer trunk, then, unobserved, climbed into my berth and pulled the covers up around her chin. She has a long, silky, expensive coat, and it dries slowly; but she liked my bed and spent most of a restless night trying to blot herself upon my chest.

I did not sleep well. No one can enjoy unbroken repose so long as a wet dog insists upon sleeping inside the bosom of his pajamas. I arose at dawn with a hollow cough and all the premonitory symptoms of pneumonia, but Duchess appeared to be none the worse for her wetting, and we felt a great relief. It would have been a sad interruption to our outing had either dog fallen ill.

That day, while the boat was being outfitted, Max and I hired an automobile and went out to start a rolling barrage against the quail. The dogs were shivering with excitement when we put them into the first field, but they had nothing on us, for few thrills exceed that of the hunter who, after a year indoors, slips a pair of shells into his gun and says, “Let’s go.”

But within a half hour we knew we had pulled a flivver. Out of the entire state of North Carolina we had selected the one section where big, inch-long cockleburs were too thick for dogs to work. Nothing less than a patent-leather dachshund could have lived in those fields. In no time Duke and Duchess were burred up so solidly they could hardly move. They were bleeding; their spun-silk coats were matted and rolled until their skins were as tight as drum heads; their plumy tails were like baseball bats, and they weighed so much that their knees buckled and they looked as if they were about to jump.

They put up a covey or two, but it became a question either of removing their coats in solid blankets, as a whale is stripped of its blubber, or of patiently freeing them, one burr at a time—an all-day task—so we went back to the car and sought a snipe marsh.

Snipe marshes are wet, and the mud is usually deep, dark, and sticky. One either stands or sits in it, and to get the fullest enjoyment from the sport one should forget his rubber boots. This we had done; hence we were pretty squashy when we got back into the automobile about dark. We slowly froze on the way to town, but before we had hoarsed up too badly to speak, we agreed that it had been a great day.

I picked burrs most of that night. Along toward morning, however, I realized that it was a hopeless task. I had hair all over the cabin; my fingers were bleeding, Duke and Duchess were upon the verge of hysteria, and whenever we looked at each other we showed our teeth and growled. So I decided to clip them. But it is no part of a vacation to shear a pair of fretful canines, size six and seven-eighths, with a pair of dull manicure scissors. Breakfast found those dogs looking as if they had on tights. I was haggard, but grimly determined to enjoy another day in the glorious open if only I could stay awake.

It was no use trying to hunt here, however; so I gave the word to up anchor and hie away out of the cocklebur belt.

So far as I can discover, a boat owner has one privilege, expensive but gratifying; he can, when the spirit moves him, say, “Let us go away from here,” and sometimes the boat goes. I voiced that lordly order, ran Duchess out of my bed, and lay down for a nap. But not to sleep. Ri and Nathan began an intricate and noisy job of steam fitting in the engine room. Now and then the motor joined them, only to miss, cough, and die in their arms. By and by I heard echoes of profanity; so I arose to investigate the nature of the difficulty.

Max was frowning at the engine; Ri was massaging its forehead with a handful of waste; Nathan was spasmodically wrenching hisses out of it with the starting bar. He raised a streaming face to say:

“She never balked on us before,”

Ri agreed:

“She never missed an explosion coming over.”

“Sure you’ve got gas?” I hopefully inquired. This is my first question in cases of engine trouble.

They were sure; so I returned to my bunk and ran Duchess out of my warm place. Had they answered my inquiry in the negative, I could have instantly diagnosed the case, but when an engine has gasoline and still refuses to run, I delve no deeper. I respect its wishes.

Another half hour passed; then I went forward and asked if there was plenty of spark. This is my second question, and it leaves me clean. But there was spark enough, so I effaced myself once for all and again disturbed Duchess just as she had made an igloo of my bedclothes. This time I dozed off, lulled by sounds which indicated that Nathan has begun a major operation of some sort, with the others passing instruments and counting sponges.

Running footsteps roused me. Max was removing a fire extinguisher from its rack when I opened my eyes. He was calm; nothing to worry about except a small conflagration under the engine-room floor. If we worked fast, we might save a part of the ship, and wasn’t it fortunate that we were still tied up to the dock?

Contrary to expectations, we managed to put out the blaze, after which we found that all our motor needed was a cozy little fire in its living room to take the chill out of the air, for when we turned it over it went to work in the most cheerful spirit.

That afternoon we hunted farther up the sound, but what quail we raised were in impossible thickets and the snipe on the marshes had gone visiting over the week end. As we pulled out at daybreak on the following morning, we ran aground on a falling tide and stuck there.

Some trips seem to have a jinx on them. John W. Jonah appears to keep step right up to the finish. After laboring long and blasphemously in a vain effort to get afloat, the unwelcome suspicion entered our minds that this was such a one.

I had built this boat especially for hunting in these shallow waters, and while she is not much to look at, she is warm and comfortable, and it is Ri’s boast that she is the only fifty-foot craft in existence that can navigate on a heavy frost or a light dew. But that is an exaggeration, as we discovered when, finally, we were forced to go overboard, regardless of the weather, and boost her off by main strength. Then we learned that she had been cunningly designed to draw just enough water so as to thoroughly wet us, regardless of the height of our waders. But the experience benefited our colds; it did them a world of good and practically renewed their youth.

Max and I tested out the game resources of several sections of that shore on the way to Ocracoke, but instead of shipping quail home to our expectant friends, we had hard work to get enough to keep body and soul together, and those few, of course, we could neither taste nor smell—our colds were doing so well. Always there was some good reason why we had shot nothing today but had high hopes for the morrow; Duke and Duchess began to regard the whole expedition as a hoax on them, and spent their time collecting ticks for me to remove during the evening. Nevertheless, the open life was having its effect upon Max and me. We had arrived soft, pallid, gas-bleached, our bones afflicted with city-bred aches and pains; after a week spent on waist-deep sand bars, in damp marshes and draughty fields, we were practically bedridden.

Ocracoke, center of the goose-hunting industry, is a quaint New England village pitched on the outer rim of Pamlico Sound, and it hovers around a tiny circular lagoon. The houses are scattered among wind-twisted cedars or thickets of juniper and sedge, and most of them possess two outstanding adjuncts—a private graveyard and a decoy pen. All male inhabitants above the age of nine are experts on internal-combustion engines, for motor boats are everywhere except in the back yards. Of distinctive landmarks there are four—one lighthouse, one colored man, and two Methodist churches. Ocracoke has tried other negroes, but likes this one, and as for religion, it will probably build another Methodist church when prices get back to normal.

Now, for the benefit of any reader genuinely in quest of information, a word as to the kind of hunting here in vogue and the methods involved. First, understand that this stormy Hatteras region is the Palm Beach of the Canada goose and his little cousin the brant. Ducks winter all along the Atlantic coast, but Pamlico Sound marks, roughly, the goose’s southern limit. Here each wary old gander pilots his family; here he and his mate watch their young folks make social engagements for the following season.

There is no marsh or pond shooting, for the wild fowl frequent the shallow waters of the sound and it is necessary to hunt from rolling blinds, stake blinds, or batteries. The rolling blind I have described—it is used only on cold, drizzly days in the late season when the geese have chilblains and gather on the dry bars to compare frost bites. A stake blind resembles a pulpit raised upon four posts, and is useful mainly in decoying inexperienced Northern hunters. Green sportsmen stool well to stake blinds, for they are comfortable, but a wise gunner shies at them as does a gander. He knows that the real thing is a battery.

This latter device may be described as a sort of coffin, but lacking in the creature comforts of a casket. It is a narrow, water-tight box with a flush deck about two feet wide, to three sides of which are hinged large folding wings of cloth or sacking stretched upon a light wooden framework. It is painted an inconspicuous color; heavy weights sink it so low that its decks are awash. The sportsman lies at full length in it, and his body is thus really beneath the level of the water. When it is surrounded by a couple hundred dancing decoys, the hunter is effectually hidden from all but high-flying birds. To such as fly low, the rig is a snare and a delusion; not unless they flare high enough to get a duck’s-eye view do they see the ace-in-the-hole, and then it is usually too late.

Battery shooting requires some little practice and experience. One must begin by learning to endure patiently the sensations of ossification, for to rest one’s aching frame even briefly by sitting up, or to so much as raise one’s head for a good look about, is a high crime and a misdemeanor. It completely ruins the whole day for the guides, who are comfortably anchored off to leeward in the tender, and affords them the opportunity of saying, later:

“You can’t expect ’em to decoy to a lump. If you’d of kep’ down, you’d of got fifty birds to-day.”

And that is not the only discomfort. All batteries are too small, and some of them leak in the small of the back. If the wind shifts or blows up, they sink before the guides arrive. For years I tried to adapt myself to the existing models, but failed. I fasted until my hips narrowed to an AA last; I wore the hair off the top of my head; my body became rectangular, and still I did not fit. I have had rubber-booted guides stand upon my abdomen and stamp me into my mold, as the barefoot maidens of Italy tread the autumn vintage, but, no matter how well they wedged me in, some part of me, sooner or later, slipped. The damp salt air swelled me, perhaps; anyhow, I bulged until from a distance I looked like a dead porpoise, and the ducks avoided me.

Tiring of this, I had a large box built. I equipped it with a rubber mattress and pillow, and now I shoot in Oriental luxury. But, even under favorable conditions, to correctly time incoming birds, to rise up and “meet them” at precisely the right instant, is a matter of considerable nicety. One must shoot sitting, which is a trick in itself, especially on the back hand, and ducks do not remain stationary when surprised by the apparition of a magnified jack-in-the-box. They are reputed to travel at ninety miles an hour, when hitting on all four, but that is too conservative. Start the goose flesh on a teal’s neck, for instance, and he will leave your vicinity so fast that a load of shot needs short pants and running shoes to overtake him.

I have lain in a double box alongside of experienced field shots and picked up many valuable additions to my vocabulary of epithets. I have seen nice, well-bred, Christian gentlemen grind their teeth, throw their shells overboard, and send for better loads, even smash their guns in profane and impotent rage. That is, I have seen them perform thus when I myself was not stone blind with fury.

We shot for a couple of days, off Ocracoke, while we were waiting for Grant, but the weather was warm and we had little luck; then the bottom fell out of the glass and, in high hopes of a norther, we ran up the banks to our favorite hunting grounds. As we pulled into our anchorage, the bars were black with wild fowl; through our field glasses we could see thousands, tens of thousands, of resting geese; up toward Hatteras Inlet the sky was smudged with smoky streamers which we knew to be wheeling clouds of redheads. Before we had been at rest a half hour, the wind hauled and came whooping out of the north, bearing a cold, driving rain; so we shook hands all around. All that is necessary for good shooting on Pamlico is bad weather. It looked as if we had buried our jinx once for all.

Our party had grown, for we had picked up the hunting rigs at Ocracoke—they were moored astern of us, launches, battery boats, and decoy skiffs streaming out like the tail of a comet. All that day and the next we watched low-flying strings of geese and ragged flocks of ducks beating past us, while we told stories or conducted simple experiments in probability and chance. In the latter I was unsuccessful, as usual, for I simply cannot become accustomed to the high cost of two small pair.

The second morning brought a slight betterment of conditions; so we set out early, Max in search of shelter behind a marshy islet, while I hit for the outer reefs. After several attempts, Ri finally found a spot where a mile of shoals had flattened the sea sufficiently to promise some hope of “getting down.”

While we were placing the battery, Grantland Rice arrived in a small boat from Ocracoke. He was drenched; he had been four days en route from New York, and he was about fed up on rough travel. Through numb, blue lips he chattered, “You’re harder to find than Stanley.”

I directed him to the houseboat and told him where to obtain comfort and warmth— third bureau drawer, left-hand corner, but be sure to cork it up when through—then explained that Max had put down a double box and was waiting for him.

“The weather to kill geese is weather to kill men,” I assured him. “You’re in luck to arrive during a norther like this.”

“Any nursing facilities aboard the boat?” Grant wanted to know.

I assured him with pride that we were equipped to take care of almost anything up to double pneumonia, and that if worse came to worst and his lungs filled up, we could run him over to the mainland, where he could probably get in touch with a hospital by mail.

My battery managed to live, with the lead wash strips turned up, but the gale drove foam and spray over me in such quantities that I was soon numb and wet—the normal state for a battery hunter. Members of the Greely expedition doubtless suffered some discomforts, and the retreat from Serbia must have been trying, but for 100-per-cent-perfect exposure give me a battery in stormy winter weather.

However, I managed to collect a fair number of birds before dusk, when, in answer to my feeble signals, the guides rescued me. They seized me by my brittle ears, raised me stiffly to my heels, then slid me, head first, into the tiny cabin of the launch, as stokers shove cordwood into a boiler. By the time we got back to the boat I could bend my larger joints slightly and I no longer gave off a metallic sound when things fell on me.

The other boys had not fared so well. They had been drowned out, their battery had been sunk without trace, and they had nothing to show for their day’s sport except a clothes line full of steaming garments and a nice pair of congestive chills. Otherwise it had been a great day, and we looked forward to more fun on the morrow.

But how vain our hopes! As usual, the weather was unparalleled. Once again it surprised the oldest inhabitants. That night the wind whipped into the south, drove all the water off the bars, then fell away to a calm, and the temperature became oppressive. The wild fowl reassembled in great rafts where we could not get at them; we lay in our batteries, panting like lizards and moaning for iced lemonade, while the skin on our noses curled up like dried paint. The only birds we got were poor half-witted things, delirious with the heat.

Such conditions could not last—the guides assured us of that—and they didn’t. The next day it rained, and a battery in rainy weather is about as dry as a goldfish globe. Now, a strong man with an iron will may school himself to lie motionless while he slowly perishes from cold, for after the first few agonizing hours there is comparatively little discomfort to death by freezing, but I defy anybody to drown without a struggle.

But why drag out the painful details? We had not interred our jinx. One day a hurricane blew out of the north and piled the angry waters in upon us, the next it shifted, ran the tides out, and left us as dry as a lime burner’s boot; the third it rained or fogged or turned glassy calm. Grizzled old veterans from the Hatteras Life-saving Station rowed out to tell us that such weather was impossible and threatened to ruin their business, but what could you expect under a Democratic administration?

One morning, Ri outlined a desperate plan to me, and I leaped at it. Away inshore, across miles of flats, we could see probably a million geese and twice that many ducks enjoying a shallow footbath where no boat could approach them.

“Let’s leave the launch outside, wade our rig up to their feedin’ ground, and dig it in. It ‘ll take a half day of hard work, but there’s goin’ to be a loose goose flyin’ about three o’clock, and you can shoot till plumb dark. We’ll leave the box down and wade back.”

It sounded difficult, so we tried it, towing the empty battery behind us. The big decoy skiff dragged like an alligator, but we poled, waded, shoved, and tugged until we came to where the bottom was pitted and white with uptorn grass roots. Here we dug a hole deep enough to sink the box—no easy job with a broken-handled shovel—put out our stools, and then the men shoved the empty boat away.

Tons of wild fowl had gone out as we came in, but soon after I lay down they began returning. First there came a pair of sprigs, then a pair of black ducks. The black mallard is my favorite—he is so wary, so wise, and so game. He can look into the neck of a jug, and he fights to the last. When the hen dropped, the drake, as usual, flared vertically. Upward he leaped in that exhibition of furious aerial gymnastics peculiar to his breed; then, at the top of his climb, he seemed to hang motionless for the briefest interval. That is the psychological instant at which to nail a black duck. As he came down, fighting, I was up and overboard after him. The water was shallow, but I splashed like a sternwheeler, and I was wet to the waist before I had retrieved that cripple.

Next I glimpsed a long, low line of waving wings approaching, and flattened myself to the thickness of a flannel cake, thrilling in every nerve. Never did twenty geese head in more prettily. They had started to set their pinions, and I was picking my shots, when one of the decoys, a young gander in the Boy Scout class, cracked under the nervous strain and began to flap madly. He flared the incomers, and I failed to get more than two.

I made haste to gather up the dead birds and lay them on the battery wings; then I moved the shell-shocked gander to the head of the rig. But before I could get him anchored, distant honks warned me, and I ran for cover. Of course, I tripped over decoy lines—everybody does. I did Miss Kellerman’s famous standing, sitting, standing dive, but there was still a dry spot between my shoulder blades when I plunged kicking into the battery. I was too late, however, and the flock went by, out of range, laughing uproariously at me.

Then up from the south came a rain squall, and I stood with my back to it, shivering and talking loudly as tiny glacial streams explored parts of my body that are not accustomed to water. During the rest of the afternoon, cloudbursts followed one another with such regularity that my battery resembled a horse trough, and when I immersed myself in it it overflowed. But between squalls the birds flew. When a bunch of geese pitched in at my head and I downed five, I fell in love with the spot and would have resisted a writ of eviction.

When the guides appeared at dark I had a pile of game that all but filled the tiny skiff which they had thoughtfully brought along. By the time we had loaded it with the dead birds and the crate of live decoys it was gunwale deep, so we set out to wade back to the launch, towing it behind us.

Night had fallen; fog and rain occasionally obscured the gleam of our distant ship’s lantern. Other lights winked at us out of the gloom, and although they were miles away, nevertheless they all looked alike; so, naturally, we got lost. We headed for first one then another twinkling beacon, and altered our course only when the water deepened so that we could proceed no farther without swimming.

I have been successfully lost where you would least expect it, but never before had I been lost at sea with nothing whatever to sit down upon except the ocean, and after an hour or two I voted it the last word in nothing to do. I can think of no poorer way of spending a rainy December night than chasing will-o’-the-wisps round a knee-deep mud flat the size of Texas, with an open channel between you and the shore.

I presume we waded no more than twenty-five miles—although it seemed much farther —before we found the launch and collapsed over her gunwale like three wet shirts. Then, just to show that things are never as bad as possible, the engine balked.

I asked if there was plenty of gas and if the spark was working, and, receiving the usual affirmative answer, I dissolved completely into my rubber boots. Ri was probably quite as miserable as I, but he began to scrub up for the customary operation. He removed the motor’s appendix, or its Fay and Bowen, and ran a straw through it, the while we could see frantic flashes of the houseboat’s headlight.

I felt an aching pity for Max and Grant. What a shock to them it would be to find us in the morning, frozen over the disemboweled remains of our engine, like merrymakers stricken at a feast of toadstools. They were men of fine feelings; it would nearly, if not quite, spoil their whole trip, even though they divided my dead birds between them.

But the machine made a miraculous recovery, and at its first encouraging “put” a great warmth of satisfaction stole through me. After all, it had been a wonderful day.

Human endurance, however, could not out-game that weather. The evening finally came when the boys announced that their time was up, so, after supper, we sent the small boats up to Ocracoke on the inside and fared forth into the dark sound.

As we blindly felt our way out from our anchorage, we ran over a stake net, picked it up and wrapped it around our propeller, and grounded helplessly on the edge of the outer bar. There we stuck. Examination showed a very pretty state of affairs. The net with its hard cotton lead line had wedged in between the propeller and the hull, and disconnected the shaft—a trifling damage and one that could have been repaired easily enough had we possessed a deep-sea diving outfit or a floating dry dock. But, search our baggage as we might, we could find neither. That’s the trouble about leaving home in a hurry, one is apt to forget his dry dock.

Just to show us that he was still on the job, old J. W. Jinx arranged a shift in the wind. It had been calm all day; now a gale came off the sound and held us firmly on the reef. Pamlico began to show her teeth in the gloom, and with every swell we worked higher up on the bar and the boat bumped until our teeth rattled. We were several miles offshore, without any sort of skiff; it began to look as if we had about run out of luck and might have to hunt standing room somewhere in the surf. However, a yacht had made in near by on the day before, and, thanks to our searchlight, we managed to get a rise out of her. She sent a launch off, and it finally towed us back to shelter.

By this time it was midnight and the duties of host rested heavily upon me. I could with difficulty meet the accusing eyes of my guests, and, although I had exhausted my conversational powers, I hung close to them for fear of the cutting, unkind things they would say if I left them alone.

The next morning, Mr. Scott, owner of the neighboring yacht, prompted by true sportsman’s courtesy, towed us back to Ocracoke, and as we went plunging down the sound in a cloud of spray we realized that the weather had hardened up and the birds were beginning to fly. The sky was full of them; we could hear the noise of many guns—a sound that brought scalding tears to our eyes.

I simply could not bear to leave just as the show had begun; so I reread my wife’s last letter, and, finding it only moderately cool, I took the bit in my teeth and declared it my intention to stick long enough to change defeat into victory, even if I had to sleep in the woodshed when I got home.

“Better stay on for a few days,” I urged the boys. “It will be dangerous to sit up in a battery to-morrow; the birds will knock your hats off. A blind man could kill his limit in this weather.”

I had not read their mail, but I understood when they choked up and spoke tearfully about “business.” While I pitied them sincerely, a fierce joy surged through my own veins; nothing now could hinder me from enjoying a few days of fast, furious shooting. The birds were pouring out of Currituck; there would be redheads, canvasbacks, teal— every kind of duck.

As we tried to work the house boat into the lagoon at Ocracoke, where we could get her out on the ways and count the fish remaining in that fragment of net, an Arctic tornado hit us and blew us up high and dry on a rock pile. It was a frightful position we now found ourselves in, for we had such a list to port that the chips rolled off the table—and we all felt lucky.

But the storm had delayed the mail boat and my companions were forced to remain over another day. The courage with which they bore this bitter disappointment was sublime; they sang like a pair of thrushes as they feverishly unpacked.

Conditions were ideal the next morning and we were away early. Having put down my rig in shallow water, where I could wade up my own birds, I sent the launch back to the village. This promised to be a day of days, and I wanted to get the most out of it.

Almost immediately the ducks began flying, and several bunches headed in towards me. I was puzzled as to why they changed their minds and flared, until a cautious peep over the side showed a small power-boat threshing up against the wind. It had already cost me several good shots, but there was nothing to do except wait patiently for it to pass. However, it did not pass; in spite of my angry shouts and gesticulations it held its course until within hailing distance. Then the man in the stern bellowed:

“Telegram!”

Now, mail is bad enough on a hunting trip, but telegrams are unbearable, and I distrust them. Nobody ever wanted me to stay away and enjoy myself so urgently as to wire me; therefore I openly resented this man and his mission. By the time he had handed me the message I had made up my mind to ignore it, reasoning rapidly that it could by no possibility be of importance, and if it were—as it probably was—I could do nothing about it before the mail boat came that night. Hence it was futile to permit my attention to be distracted from the important business of the moment.

I thanked the man, then urged him, for Heaven’s sake, to beat it quickly, for, in the offing, flocks of geese were noisily demanding a chance to sit down with my decoys, and just out of range ducks were flying about, first on one wing then on the other, waiting for him to be gone.

But that telegram exercised an uncanny fascination for me. I lacked the moral courage to destroy it, although I knew full well if I kept it on my person I would read it—and regret so doing. Things worked out just as I had expected. I yielded and—my worst apprehensions were realized. The message was from my wife, but beyond that fact there was nothing in its favor, for it read:

Your secretary has forged a number of your checks and disappeared. Total amount unknown, as checks are still coming in. Presume you gave him keys to wine cellar, for they, too, are missing. Wire instructions quick. Am ill, but stay, have a good time, and don’t worry.

I stared, numb and horror-stricken at the sheet until I was roused by a mighty whir of rushing pinions. Those ducks had stood it as long as possible and were decoying to me, sitting up. Through force of habit my palsied fingers clutched at my gun, but, although the birds were back-pedaling almost within reach, I scored five misses. Who can shoot straight with amount of loss unknown and certain precincts unheard from? Not I. Those broadbills looked like fluttering bank books.

And the keys to the wine cellar missing! That precious private stock, laid in for purely medicinal purposes, ravaged, kidnaped! A hoarse shout burst from my throat; I leaped to my feet and waved frantically at the departing boatsman, but he mistook my cries of anguish for jubilation at the results of my broadside, waved me good luck, and continued on his way.

As I stood there striving to make my distress heard by that vanishing messenger, geese, brant, ducks, and other shy feathered creatures of the wild poured out of the sky and tried to alight upon me, or so it seemed. They came in clouds and I shooed them off like mosquitoes. One would have thought it was the nesting season, and I was an egg.

I read again that hideous message as I undertook to reload, but I trembled the trigger off and barely missed destroying my left foot—my favorite. Never in the annals of battery shooting has there been another day like that. Those ducks reorganized and launched attack after attack upon me, but my nerve was gone, and the most I could do was defend myself blindly.

I did spill blood during one assault, and I was encouraged until I found that I had shot one of Ri’s live decoys. Beyond that, the casualties were negligible, and when the guides came to pick me up they had to beat the blackheads out of the decoys with an oar.

As we pulled out of Ocracoke at dawn the next morning, the town was full of dead birds, and visiting sportsmen with eager, feverish eyes were setting forth once more for the gunning grounds. But we hated them. Flocks of geese decoyed to the mail boat whenever it hove to or broke down, and we hated them also.

Upon my arrival home I found a wire from Ri reading:

Too bad you left. Nathan killed fifty birds the next day and he can’t hit a bull with a spade.

However, take it by and large, it was a fine trip and a good time was had by all, which proves what I set out to demonstrate in the beginning—viz., you can’t explain a hunter; you can only bear with him and allow nature to take its course.