Duck Shooting at Cobb's Island

The brant are more plentiful here this season than for many years. I averaged twenty-five a tide during my stay at the Island, but I happened to strike the spot at the right time. Sometimes one will have to wait for a week or ten days before he can have a good day's duck shooting.

There are three absolute requisites to stool brant: the tide, the wind and the sun. If the tide is right and the wind is wrong it will not be a sportsman's day. Should the wind set strong and it is cloudy, then you might as well remain away from the blinds; but when the flood tide is running, a strong wind blowing and a bright sun is shining, then it is that the birds fly and come up readily to decoys. In a winter's season there is certainly not an average of over two such days in the week, and the hunter will have many hours of weary waiting, which on this island, unless he has companionable comrades, is almost unendurable.

Never was there such an illustration of killing the goose that laid the golden egg as this place presents. The Cobbs, by their extortion and high prices charged sportsmen, have effectually killed their island; for five years ago there were dozens of Northern sportsmen who rendezvoused here for duck shooting, now there are none, I being the sole, solitary visitor, and as the ice prevents any boats from leaving the Island, or from hunting, I feel as desolate as Alexander Selkirk on Juan Fernandez. Even Nathan Cobb is getting sick of his enforced idleness, and wanders disconsolately around his decoys, which he can't use This is the first ice blockade that has isolated the island from the mainland since the famous winter of 1857.

I send this squib at a venture, and by strange hands, as we used to do in Richmond, during the war, and termed the uncertain mode by a notice on the outside of the envelope, "Via Grapevine Telegraph." Anyway it will reach you some day, I trust.

The Cobbs have made heavy bags this season, Nathan sending many dozen to Northern markets. I only average some twenty brant on each tide.

To sportsmen coming here I add this advice, don't come alone, but the more the merrier. CHASSUER.

Cobb's Island, Jan. 1.