In the Haunts of Wild Fowl
We had dropped our anchor in the deep water at the head of a channel in one of the innumerable shallow bays of Tidewater Virginia. We were in the midst now of the haunts of almost every wild fowl that spreads his wings along the Atlantic Seaboard.
The prayer of the huntsman in search of ducks, geese and brant is for cold, stormy weather.
It is impossible to get many wild fowl in mild weather. They will not decoy, but will drift around the bay in great masses talking, laughing, screaming and joking at fool hunters they can see plainly squatting in blinds surrounded by wooden humbug birds. The never come closer than a mile
in such weather, and what a man says on these day would not do to go in a Sunday School book.
But when a stiff breeze blows and the decoys begin to nod and bob in the water, with life in every movement, then we can fool Mr. Duck and Mr. Brant, stock our pantry for rainy days and make glad the heart of friends in town with the call of the expressman.
I never knew how much beautiful weather there was in winter until I began cruising for ducks and geese. I had an idea before that about half the days of our winter life are bleak and stormy. I have found by nine years' experience that on an average there are about four days in each winter month in which the weather is bad enough to make a good day for ducks. If we get more than four day of stormy weather in a month, fit for good shooting, it is a streak of extraordinary luck. And if one or two of those four
grand storm days do not fall on Sunday, it is downright rabbit's foot luck.
At night in the snug crew's quarters forward, there is the hum of sportsman industry. The boys are loading shells with number two shot for brant.
The wind is howling a steady gale from the north and increasing the length of its gusts with steady persistence.
"Hear them shrouds talkin'?" cried George with a broad grin. "If this wind hangs on here till mornin' we'll burn them brant. Confound 'em, they're the most tantalizin' bird that ever pitched in this bay. I never killed a one of 'em the whole of last winter. There were no younguns among 'em. It's funny. Some years there's thousands of younguns. But last year I didn't hear the squawk of a dozen, and you can't kill an old brant. This year the bay's full of 'em and we'll burn 'em up to-morrow -- see if we don't."
"I hope so" I replied. "They made me mad enough last winter's cruise, flying all over me, laughing and joking about us the whole month."
"Yes, and they kept it up till they left in the spring. Nobody killed any the whole season. But if we don't have brant for supper to-morrow night, I'll eat my old cap."
When George was willing to stake his old slouch cap with its long visor, that looked like a duck's bill, he was in dead earnest.
"If the wind will just hold on!" I exclaimed, with sad memories of high hopes many times shattered before.
"Don't worry. You'll git all you want to-morrow. It'll be a question whether we can git to the blind. Don't you hear them flaws gittin' longer and longer? That's been going' on all day. It'll be as long goin' as it was comin' and it ain't got nigh the top yit."
Sure enough, the next morning, as we ate breakfast by lamplight at 5.30, the wind
was howling and shrieking through the rigging like a thousand devils.
George looked grave. I asked what troubled his mind.
"I'm studyin' 'bout gittin' to that blind. We're goin' to the Boss blind and we'll have a tussle to make it with the wind on our quarter. We ought to 'a' gone to the wind'ard further before we anchored."
And we did have a tussle.
We took off half our decoys from the gunning dink and with two ten-foot oars began to shove our craft out over the foaming storm-tossed waters. It was all we could do to stand up against the wind; and with both oars fixed on the bottom, the strength of two men could barely move the fifteen-foot, light cedar boat. It took us an hour to push her three-quarters of a mile to the blind. It was freezing cold, but we were both wet with sweat when we got there.
The Boss blind is a famous one in this bay,
that stands far out on the mud-flats near the edge of a ship channel. It was first stuck there by Uncle Nathan Cobb, the king of wild fowl hunters in Tidewater Virginia, nicknamed the "Old Boss" by his admirers.
This particular bay has 4,000 acres of mud-flats on which the wild celery grass grows, furnishing rich food for the birds. There are many blinds of cedar bushes stuck over its wide sweep, but the old Boss blind is yet the king of them all. It was placed there fifty years ago with consummate skill, in the track of the brant and ducks, and all the ingenuity of rival hunters has never been able to place a blind anywhere in that 4,000 acres to interfere with the flight of birds that pass it in stormy weather.
The tide was just right. It made high water at daylight. This gave us the whole of the ebb tide, the low water and the first movement of the flood tide of shooting. The tides are right for blind shooting on the
two weeks of full and new moon, and wrong on the two quarters.
As the waters fall off the flats the birds come in to feed on the grass as soon as they can reach bottom with their bills, and, when hungry from a long run of high tide, they come out hours before they can reach bottom in search of shoal places.
We had just put out our decoys as the sun rose, and were pushing into the blind, when a broadbill swept in range before I had loaded a gun.
"They'll come to-day like chickens!" cried George.
"There's a blackduck in the decoys!" I whispered, as he handed me my number ten gun. I bagged him, and then for an hour we were kept busy with the broadbill and blackducks.
At last a flock of brant of about two hundred headed in straight for us. I seized my second gun, loaded with number two shot, and
made ready. They were flying low in the teeth of the gale. Now I could see their long, black necks and snowy feathers around their legs, and they looked as big as geese. As they drew nearer, with every throat in full cry, the noise sounded like the roar of a fire sweeping a canebrake, exploding the joints of two hundred canes a second! I held my breath, and as they swept in range about thirty yards from the blind, I blazed away, bang! bang! I expected to see it rain brant. I hadn't touched a feather!
"Well, I'll be --!" exclaimed George.
I had the dry-grins, and looked down at my gun to see if it was really a gun, when I noticed my hands trembling like a leaf.
"Brant fever," was George's dry remark. "You must git over that, if we are to do our duty here to-day."
"I'll maul 'em next time," I promised.
In half an hour another bunch swung in and I brought down three with the first bar-
rel and two with the second. Then for five hours we had the sport of which I had dreamed.
When the tide had ebbed off and left the flats dry, we counted our game, and we had 17 brant, 16 blackducks and 10 broadbill, a total of 43, as fat and toothsome bids as ever tickled the palate of man.
When the tide began to flow back in flood on the flats the wind had died down to a gentle breeze. We took up our decoys, stowed our birds under decks, set our little sail, and as the sun sank in a sea of scarlet glory swept slowly and contentedly back to the Dixie.
It was red-letter day -- one to tell young folks about in the far-away years when one becomes a grandpa and must ask his son for permission to venture out on a stormy day.
Then followed a week of tantalizingly beautiful weather in which the ducks and geese and brant had it all their own way.
Some days we would get a half dozen -- oftener two or three. But the glorious moonlit nights, with the chorus of birds chattering and feeding about us, had their compensations of soul peace and dreams.
And then the dinners on board! Of course, salt water gives a man an appetite that balks at few things containing nourishment for the human body, yet it is equally true that one can live as royally on a yacht in Tidewater Virginia as in the palace of a king. And the way my wife cooks brant and ducks and fixes diamond-back terrapin on board a boat is a secret beyond the ken of any hotel kitchen.
This is how she says it is done. The birds are dressed and placed to soak in salt water five hours. Then they are rubbed thoroughly with salt and pepper, and basted about two hours in a very hot stove until so tender you can stick a fork into the breast and turn it easily.
We are ready now for dinner at 6.30. The saloon is bright and cheerful, and the stove glows with a bed of red-hot coals. We start the music box, and take our places at the four sides of the table. There are four of us -- my wife, our two boys, aged fourteen and ten, and myself, but we figure for the needs of eight normal appetites. The first course is fat oysters on the half-shell, picked up by the bushel on the flats at low tide by the cook. The oyster plates give way to diamond-back terrapin stew. We catch our own terrapin. They cost us nothing except the fun of catching them. When I strike terrapin at a banquet in New York I generally have to ask what it is. After the terrapin, the cook sends in the ducks -- four browned, juicy, smoking balls on a big game platter! It takes a whole duck for each ravenous appetite -- meat so delicious, so tender and toothsome it fairly melts in your mouth! We serve with grape
jelly, candied sweet potatoes, and steaming hot coffee.
I dream of these dinners the other eleven months of the year. How far away and unimportant the land world seems now! We are fifteen miles off shore -- fifteen miles from a post-office, telegraph line, or a railroad. We never see a newspaper, know nothing about what is going on in the big, steaming, festering cities, and have ceased to care to know. Our world is now a beautiful bay, fed from the sea by two pulsing tides a day. Only the winds and tides are important. How vain and stupid and unreal seem the vulgar ambitions of men and women who herd in those big iron and stone-bound hives and strive with one another!
It was here that the sense of the pity, the pathos, and the folly of this struggle first stole into my heart, and I ceased to care to be great. I used to think that I was carrying a large part of the world on my shoul-
ders, and if I dropped it, things would stop with a crash. Here in this mysterious realm of sun and moon and star, wind and tide, bay and sea, sand beach and solemn sweeping marsh, how small and poor that other world, and how little it seemed to need me!
Swiftly the days fly. Ten days go flashing by as a dream, and we rub our eyes in vain effort to account for them.
We waked one morning and found that old Neptune had hauled his wind to the southeast in the night and drawn about us the grey mantle of mystery, a fog. All day long it hung on, dense and clinging, putting out the light of sun, moon, star and friendly lighthouse. The birds never moved a wing or uttered a cry. They huddled in groups wherever the fog caught them. Far out over the sand beach we could hear the deep bay of the ocean hounds crying their distress. It was no use to grumble. We had learned to take things as they came.
A fog meant a stay indoors: talk and dream and read. From our little library we drew forth our treasures and forgot the fog.
Next morning it was just the same.
"Look out for weather when this clears up," was George's greeting as I walked into the crews's quarters after breakfast.
"What sort of weather?"
"Cold, freezin', goose weather. I see them geese feedin' out there in the sink every day the last week. If this wind hauls into the nor'west to-night, the fog will lift, and we'll talk goose talk in that sink blind in a way that'll make your heart flutter tomorrow."
Next morning it was freezing and the wind was howling a thirty-mile gale from the north.
We went to the goose blind located in the sink, a deep place in the mud-flats that rarely goes dry.
"The wind's just right," said George.
"Every goose oughter pass this blind today. The wind's blowin' straight across their track, the flocks can't hear our guns, and we can hammer 'em the whole tide."
The goose is the wildest and smartest of all the fowl of our coast and most difficult to kill. I had shot only four in several years' outing in Virginia, and was crazy for a storm day in their track.
At last it had come. The wind was blowing now a furious gale -- so strong were its gusts it was almost impossible to shove out of our blind against it.
The first flock of geese show by their flight the track they will follow for the day. The sound of one gun heard by them will change their plans instantly and cause them to take a new course ten or twelve miles in the opposite direction.
But we had them to-day. The wind was at right angles to their course, and they could
hear nothing. The first flock came as straight for our blind as an arrow.
What a sight, as they came honk! honk! in long, streaming lines, their necks, stretched and their big, ten-foot wings, battling with the storm!
Crack! Crack! went four barrels in perfect time, sounding like pop-guns in the howl of the wind, and three big fellows tumbled. When they came swirling down it looked as though we had knocked out a piece of the sky.
We pushed rapidly after them, and yet so terrific was the wind they were swept a hundred yards to the leeward before we could reach them. Then we had a battle royal to get back to the blind. We had barely started shoving with our oars with all the power of every muscle, when a flock of over fifty geese circled over our decoys. And two big flocks followed close on their heels. Hundreds had passed before we got back.
Suddenly the sky was darkened with such a flock of blackducks as I had never seen at close range. There must have been a thousand of them. They sailed straight in and pitched in our decoys and rolled up in a great black sheet within easy gunshot.
Trembling with excitement, I raised to make the one mighty pot-shot of my life and kill a hundred, when George seized my arm.
"Don't shoot. There's a hundred geese comin' right in. Don't fool with blackducks -- this is goose day."
I let them alone and killed two geese out of the bunch that came, but I've regretted that lost shot into those blackducks a thousand times since, when they have been tantalizing me on fair days with their insolent display of knowledge.
When the tide had ebbed off at the end of three hours we had seventeen geese that weighed 214 pounds. We hung them up on the big foreboom of the Dixie, George and I
crouched among them, and one of the boys snapped the camera at us.
It was a day never to be forgotten, and it will be many moons before we see its like again.
It was the harbinger of the greatest freeze Tidewater Virginia ever saw in its three hundred years of English history, and the geese knew it was coming.
Some winters ice does not form at all in these waters. As a rule, it freezes for two or three days in February and then thaws quickly. Sometimes, once in ten years perhaps, the bays will be frozen of a week at a time. But now the mercury suddenly dropped to nine degrees below zero, turning a rainstorm into hail, and freezing our soaked sails as hard as a rock. In three days the bay was frozen solid and the ebb and flow of the tides began to pile the ice against every obstruction in its path. It trimmed our blinds off as smoothly as though a big
steel razor had done the work, and in four days the bay looked like a picture of the Arctic Ocean, and our yacht like a craft caught in the ice in search of the North Pole.
We lifted her big anchors on the cathead sand tried to patiently wait for a thaw. Each day we expected a change, but it only grew worse. Two storms had met on the coast and all weather charts were smashed.
The day before this freeze, guests had unexpectedly arrived from New York, and the drain on our pantry had exhausted the supply of fundamentals. At the end of ten days we were out of wood, out of coal, out of oil and short on rations. Then we found that goose bacon is better than Swift's or Armour's.
The whole sweep of Tidewater Virginia was a white desolation of ice; the Chesapeake Bay was frozen eighteen miles from shore to shore; and the ice was packed out sixteen miles into the Atlantic Ocean.
We had to knock up the small boats, tear the shelving out of the forecastle, and split up our decoys for wood with which to cook two short meals a day. It was fifteen days before the ice field thawed under the Southern sun and rain and began to move out to sea. The rain had at last rotted it enough for our big anchor chain to cut it. So we dropped old "Sleep Easy," and his chain cut the 4,000-acre field in two and it passed harmlessly by.
It was a rough experience, but was worth more than it cost. We had met the ice king clad in his white robes of omnipotent power. We had seen the miracle his breath could work on the face of beautiful waters. In a night he had given to the tide gleaming teeth that could bite an anchor chain in two as though it were a straw. We had seen both anchors on the Dixie's catheads with her sails rolled up. How helpless she looked in this abject surrender!
Strange noises filled the air. One night the flood tide pushed us out of the channel up on the edge of the high mud-flat. On the ebb the ice began to crowd its tons against the Dixie's upper side. Suddenly it pushed her off the edge of the channel where she had been caught, and when she fell into the deep water her masts quivered like reeds and the crash rang through her hull like the roar of an earthquake. We were all sound asleep when it happened, but the jump out of bed was unanimous, and the chorus of inquiry had the flavour of Chimmey Fadden's famous remark. We had a laugh all round and went back to sleep.
Of all the sounds I have ever heard a moving ice field, crunching against the sides of a vessel, is the strangest and most thrilling. It comes like the distant, sonorous roar of a storm sweeping down a mountain gorge, and yet it is so close and has such a chorus of intermingled notes that there is absolutely
nothing like it in nature. The hollow body of the boat becomes the sounding drum of a great musical instrument, and the Spirit of Winter sweeps its strings with trembling, crystal fingers! We sit and listen breathless. No master musician ever composed such music and no orchestra could be found to play it.
The lighthouses, that had been blinking their kindly eyes at us through so many long nights, seemed to have assumed now a strange, glittering stare, and one night, when the storm was at its darkest and wildest pranks, the nearby light was suddenly obscured. Great flocks of geese, brant and ducks, lost and crazed by the storm, were dashing themselves in despair to death against the gleaming lens.
I never cruise in these waters and go home willingly. When the time comes to leave, I feel like a schoolboy driven back to his tasks.
Swiftly a month rolls away. Days seem
but hours, and the fatal one dawns, the very last I dare to spend. There are engagements to be met back in that dimly remembered little world where they have mails, telegraph lines, railroads and newspapers. How I hate it all now! I resolve, when I go back, to make a million dollars, sail away and never return except for coal and water.
The order is given to get under way. The boys beg for one more day, but at last give up, begin to swallow lumps in their throats, and fight to keep back the tears. I know my boys do this, because their father and mother do the same thing when they are not looking.
We are homeward bound now, with her big yacht ensign set aft and her colors at her masthead. Every heart is heavy and no one speaks. We feel as though we are sailing away into a strange world.