Parmore's Beach

IF a man of property, a dozen years ago, had made a specialty of investing his money in the natural ducking grounds along the seacoast of Maryland, Virginia, North and South Carlina, what a fortune he could have made by this time by disposing of his shores to shooting organizations. I know of an island off the coast of Virginia that could have been purchased in those days for $7,000. It is seven miles long and several miles wide. In a direct line it is about six miles from the mainland. When I first visited it there was but one house on the island, approachable only at high tide by a muddy creek. This was "t-whenty years ago." The house consisted of two spliced-together cabins off wrecks, and the door was as hard to find as the bower in the Rosamond puzzle. The occupant was a long, lanky, savage, senescent sea captain. He had gotten into trouble and was on the dry-dock, so to speak, in unquestionable seclusion. Being a widower, there was no grown female to make one feel uncomfortable on the island, but the old salt's little daughter, who looked as if she never had her hair brushed in her life, lived in one of the lockers, only coming out periodically to roast black ducks and geese, and play dominoes with her "dad" with a broken set, kept in an old shot bag. Having been the sole proprietor of the shipwreck which cast me on the bleak shores alone, the cold made me muster up courage to approach the stronghold of the man with a dead bad record. My reception was simply diabolical. The old cuss grunted worse than the biggest wild hog on the island, and that weighed over four hundred. He declined to let me in. The efficacy of prayer on this occasion was a dead failure, so I played Jameson's Irish whisky, in an imperial quart bottle, instead, and made a winning from the start.

I lived on the island, ten days, and during that time enjoyed the best black duck shooting I ever heard of. The center of the island was covered in those days with a heavy growth of red cedar. This was traversed by a narrow glade -- a series of shallow fresh-water ponds, about as wide as Broadway -- in which grew an abundance of duck-grass. When the northeast wind would blow, and rain and sleet pelted down, the ducks on the vast Broadwaters would seek the glade for shelter. Standing shivering under a red-cedar snag, I, with an old muzzle-loader, killed 117 ducks one day and 64 the next morning. On Nov. 18 and 19, 1876, I nearly duplicated these bags by shooting 89 and 42. I am not bragging about these bags, any one could have done the same. The ducks simply hovered thirty to forty feet in front of me, and were very gentle. The trick of the whole thing was in knowing how to handle the birds, and by refraining form shooting into the flocks. I got the tip about these ducks from an old shooting friend, a blockade runner in war times, who used to hide his boat up the muddy creek. He has told me that it nearly made him crazy to see the ducks go boiling into the glade, and from fear of discovery be afraid to fire a gun.

I shot on the island four winters. What was rather strange a half dozen very well known New Yorkers were at the same time shooting quail and fowl not eight miles away; often they gunned for geese under the lee of the south end of the island, yet none of them or their men ever located the ducks settling in the island ponds. I systematized my secret down to a fine point and only shooting in the wildest kind of weather for fear of being heard. I baited the ponds with corn and cabbage, the latter for the geese, and only shot two or three times a week. There were some big salt ponds at the north end of the island which afforded fair goose shooting, and when not after fowl I used to go hog hunting with the Captain.

The island was overrun with hogs, which for forty years had been the master of the situation. As cold weather approached they became aggressive, and the Captain never ventured far from home without carrying his long muzzleloader charge with ball and buckshot. I was duck shooting one morning in the glade not far from the house, when I heard the report of my host's gun, and then saw him coming toward me at the top of his speed. Close behind him was a huge boar covered with froth and blood in full pursuit. I had never seen any one run so fast before in my life, except the long legged captain the night he saw the ghost of an old sailor walk out of the surf, climb upon a sandhill, make a fire and sit down to dry himself. That night he came home on a dead run and this time he was even lowering his previous record. The two loads of duck shot I sent into the brute only tended to madden him the more; he had just overhauled his victim, when the Captain seized a low overhanging limb and swung himself up clear of the ground, but as the boar passed under, with one of his long curved tusks he ripped the Captain's leg open from knee to ankle. He had just managed to save his bacon, but he was lamed for life. The boar halted for a second and then went dashing into the woods. The shooting on the island is now a thing of the past. A fish factory grinds away where the geese used to honk. The woods are cut down and the ponds in the glade have long since been filled up with drifted sand from the beach. Yet what a place it would have been to organize a club.