Along Shining Shores
I hold that Old Tidewater Virginia is the most fascinating spot on our planet. I can prove it by the shorebirds, anyhow.
When the migrating snipe have raised their young in the far South, they come north to spend the summer. Far up on the sky, flying V-shaped, as the wild goose, the curlew leads the way in April. With his keen eye surveying from the heavens the glories of the world, he sweeps over the wild beauty of the tropics, calling now and then his silver trumpet-note of command to his flock.
But when he looks down from the clouds and sees the thousand rivers, creeks, channels and solemn marshes of Old Tidewater Virginia, his voice rings with joy, his wings
droop with ecstasy, and the whole flock break their long silence with such a shout as the Greeks of old raised when, homeward bound, they first beheld the sea.
Gracefully they circle downward, chattering, calling, screaming their delight. They stop and spend six weeks. They know a good thing when they see it, and they see the world from pole to pole.
The curlew is to the shore what the ruffed grouse is to the woods, has about the same weight of body, and carries the same dark brown-and-black-spotted plumage, until sunburnt on his return in August. His bill is about four inches long, unless he is a sicklebill, when it measures from five to nine inches. The jack-curlew is now the only variety seen in Virginia, though an occasional marlin or sickle-bill make the exception to the rule.
The jack-curlew is the wildest, shrewdest and most tantalizing bird with a snipe's bill
that ever worried and fascinated a hunter. His eye is as keen as a wild duck's, and his ways past finding out. I have hunted them for ten years in Virginia, and many an evening have I gone home with but two or three birds for supper, while the sky above me rang with their shouts of derision.
I have watched them for days and weeks going in thousands to a certain spot on a marsh at a certain tide. I mark the spot and wait ten days for the tides to get back to the appointed hour. Then, all in readiness, I sneak away an hour ahead of my rival, whom I half suspect of knowing my secret.
Everything depends on the tides. By the calendar, the tide should make high water at sundown. If it does, and doesn't make too high or too low, and the birds don't find out I'm on the marsh by hearing the gun, or from the report of a scout -- why, then, I'll get some of them. The hunting ground
is nine miles wide and eighty miles long, and a curlew thinks nothing of a ten-mile flight.
Two hours before sundown, I reach the ground. I've marked the spot on a marsh a mile wide and seven miles long, surrounded by a stretch of mud-bars and channels at low tide, which melt into a beautiful silvery bay at high tide.
I go in my naphtha launch, following the winding channels, from twelve to fifteen miles, to get two miles as the crow flies. But I must get to the marsh, put out my decoys on the exact spot on that seven-mile stretch to which the birds are coming, and hide before the first bird appears, and this must be done before the tide rises. The curlew are now scattered over the vast reaches of this eighty-mile bay, eating bugs, worms and sand-fiddlers on the mud-bars and on the creek banks.
I leave the launch at the head of the chan-
nel and drag the hunting dink with guns and decoys over the mud-bar to the marsh.
I take an hour to locate the right spot. I'm dead sure of the place they went the last run of tides, but, if the conditions of weather differ, they may change their notion with the change of wind and stop a mile below or go a mile farther on, and to miss their track five hundred yards is to miss them five hundred miles. They will not listen to a call in their great flock flights on this run of tides.
At length I select the place in which to cast the fate of the day. I set the decoys in the short grass of a bald high place on the marsh, exactly where I believe they will assemble in grand conclave to sit out the highwater. A hole is dug with a spade just deep enough to lie flat on one's back and hide below the surface of the ground, and tall green grass is cut and stuck carefully around the hole until it looks like a hundred other clumps of grass.
The calico birds begin to come in long be-
fore a curlew is seen or heard. I take a crack at them to get my hand in for Mr. Jack Curlew. The calico plover is a fine practice shot, for he is swift as lightning unless he sees fit to decoy perfectly.
At last the mud-flats are all covered and the hour has come for the flight to begin. I am on the lookout for a scout. The curlew send out a scout to survey the ground to which the great flocks are coming. If things look suspicious, he goes back and reports, and they change their flight ten or twenty miles in another direction.
No scout appears. I wait an hour and begin to grow uneasy. The tide is slow, a westerly wind has spoiled the flow, and not a curlew comes within five miles of me.
I try the next afternoon, and the wind jumps around to the east, the tide covers all creation and runs me out of my hole before I get a shot, even at a calico.
Again, not a curlew came to the marsh.
They all went to the sand-dunes on Myrtle Island, fifteen miles below. I watched them for an hour. The heavens were streaked with them as far as the eye could reach -- north, south, east and west. I ground my teeth and vowed vengeance. I have but one more day of this run of tides. If they don't come to the marsh the next night, they will not come till the tide gets around again in two weeks.
Again I've baled out my hole and rebuilt my grass blind, and snugly resting on the rubber blanket, I gaze up at the southern sky, or away over the endless marsh and bay, and wait. My guide has gone a mile with the launch and hidden in the tall grass of the creek.
How still the world!
To the east, I see the dim white line of the ocean beaches, but the wind is from the south and I cannot hear the surf. North, south and west of me sweeps the dark green
marsh, until it kisses the sky-line and fades into eternity. I begin to dream of great things. Nothing small disturbs my vision -- not a house or man or woman is in sight.
I begin to feel pity for the feathered life I've come to take, when my eye rests on a mother fiddler in the mud beside me, peeping out of her hole to make sure no curlew is near before venturing out for food for her children. I clutch my gun and determine to take sides with the fiddlers.
"A curlew's a man bird, anyhow," I muttered. "Confound 'em! let 'em come here and I'll burn 'em up! Besides, I've promised my wife enough birds for the table this week."
Suddenly the shrill call of a curlew scout rang over the marsh, and old Mrs. Fiddler cut a somersault to get into her cyclone cellar.
I slipped the safety-lock of my gun and tried to get under my hole in the ground.
I must either kill that scout or let him go back without seeing me. I tremble with excitement, afraid to answer his call lest I reveal my position. I know he has seen my decoys and determine to keep silent and still as death.
He came high, circled around me twice, and then came straight up behind, about a hundred yards in the air. Just over the decoys he poised, cocked his long-billed head to one side and peered down at me.
I knew he was coming no closer and it was a long chance shot, but I determined to make it before he could jump. Lying flat on my back, I snatched up my number ten and let him have a snap-shot.
He quivered for a moment, and down he came, softly, without a struggle, and fell with his wings spread out three feet on the grass, so close where I lay that I could reach him without rising.
I picked him up and found a tiny scarlet
spot on his big fat brown breast. A single shot had taken effect.
He fell just at Mrs. Fiddler's door, and left a drop of blood in her front yard. When I lifted him, the fiddler emerged, with three trembling little fiddlers clinging to her skirts, smiled and thanked me. And then, seeing a baby snail toddling slowly along the road in front of her house, she ran out, grabbed him by the throat, broke his neck, tore him into bits with her big cruel claw, and handed the pieces to her hungry children.
"It's the way of life," I thought, grimly. "Life feeds on life; the man on fish and animal; the bird on the fiddler; the fiddler on the snail; the snail on the worm; the worm on the cabbage, and the cabbage on the vegetarian!"
And, when we got down to the last cell-life, no eye can tell the difference between the germ that will grow into a vegetarian and the one that will grow into a cabbage.
And yet the vegetarians put on holy airs, and say mean things about hunters and meat-eaters. I've often wondered what the cabbages, beets, turnips, peas and beans whisper to one another about these people in the still moonlit nights of the spring, when they are struggling to reproduce their kind.
I reloaded my gun and lay for another curlew. In about half an hour they began to come. I found I had missed the spot they had selected for their meeting by about three hundred yards. They were going just beyond my blind, three hundred yards farther up the marsh across the creek. But they were leading so close to my decoys that by vigorous whistling I enticed in a dozen large flocks and scores of small groups. When the sun sank I had bagged seventeen. I went home with a song of victory. I felt I could look my wife and children in the face once more. Only once in ten years did I break this rec-
ord. Then I had the remarkable luck of having the wind and tide just right and I got to the right place. Then I carried home twenty-six. Fully fifty thousand curlew came on the marsh that afternoon.
We get a few curlew when shooting grayback, willet and plover on the marshes from blinds. But this can be done only in the early part of the season. One shot from a blind is all that is necessary to educate every curlew who sees the performance. No amount of whistle-calling will get him to come in range of a blind again.
At ebb-tide we shoot the grayback, black-breast, yellow-legs and curlew on the mudbars, where they come to feed on fiddlers and bugs as the tide ebbs off. I have killed a dozen curlew sometimes from an ebb-tide blind.
One never-to-be-forgotten day the grayback came like chickens, and I made a bag of eighty-two on the first of the summer
season. The grayback snipe decoys beautifully and is the toothsome quail of the shore and marsh.
But by far the most interesting sport of the shore is when the red-breasted snipe come suddenly trooping in from the mists of the southern seas about the middle of May. They feed almost exclusively on the mussels of the ocean beaches at ebb-tide. They usually appear about May 15, though their advent varies by a week or so, according to conditions of the spring weather.
I have walked along the surf in the spring on one day without seeing a single red-breast, and have gone back the next morning and found flocks of ten thousand chattering and feeding. They came in the night out of darkness and mystery, and they will go in two weeks, as they came, into silence and mystery.
Where they go the Virginia hunter does not know. Unlike the curlew and grayback,
they do not stop on their return flight from the North Pole in August. The curlew and grayback come in April and leave the last of May. They spend five weeks in the far North and return to Virginia about July 15, and remain till the latter part of August, or middle of September.
Not so the red-breast. He comes in a night in May, gets fat in two weeks and leaves suddenly. He is not seen again until next spring.
May 17 we reached the Life Saving Station of Smith's Island, by the invitation of its genial captain, George Hitchens. It was blowing a furious gale and raining in blinding sheets, with the wind hanging steadily on to the northeast.
The birds had not come, the crew told us, but Captain George said they would come in on the wings of the storm that night. At daylight we caught the old plug of a horse from the stable and hitched him to the cart.
The Smith's Island Light, just over our heads, the greatest light of the Atlantic coast, was still flashing its gleaming message, "45," over the storm-clouded sea.
Within an hour we had reached the bend of the beach, five miles above the station. The tide had just begun to ebb as the sun burst from the ocean through the cloud-banks of the passing storm.
The Captain was right. The birds had come on its black wings. The beach was literally covered with them. We were in rare luck. We were the first on the beach, the first day of their season, and the wind was blowing a steady gale from the sea, just the way we wished it.
Hastily gathering some dead bushes and grass from the sand-dunes, we build a scraggy blind, place our decoys on the edge of the receding surf, and are ready for them.
How beautifully they come!
Sometimes they pitch among the decoys.
First they come in little bunches of two and three, when we take one with each barrel; then the big flocks begin to streak along the magnificent surf and decoy like chickens.
They require no calling. The moment they see our decoys they set their wings in all sorts of fancy shapes and sweep into the happy hunting-ground to share the mussels with our fat wooden birds, whose round shapes no doubt excite their hunger and envy.
Some set their wings in a beautiful bow-shaped curve, some drop them gracefully downward, some swing them gracefully upward and drop their legs as they descend.
Sometimes the sky is black with them, their wings set at every conceivable angle. Then it was impossible to choose a good shot in the confusion of a hundred challenging groups. We generally take the poorest chance on such occasions, and perhaps get one bird out of five hundred.
The ideal flock has from ten to fifteen birds. We wait for the critical moment when they double in their flight after they swing past the decoys. A shot just at this second will often kill a dozen.
At the end of three hours the tide had ebbed off, and the sport is over for the day.
I lie down on the sands, and wait for the flood tide to catch a drum, loath to leave the glorious spot. North and south stretches the long white strip of sand as far as the eye can reach. In front rolls and curls and thunders the surf. Behind me lies in shimmering beauty the mirror of the Broadwater bay, nine miles wide and eighty miles long. There is not a human habitation in sight. Above me the infinite space, flecked now with white, swift-flying clouds -- I dream of a world without railroads, or mail -- the happy hunting-ground the red man saw in visions of the olden time.