Here I stopped, for as I broke open my gun I saw two dented cartridges, and as I pulled them out white smoke rolled from both barrels. There seemed nothing further to be said, at least by a woman, so I said nothing. Jonathan also, though human, said nothing. It is crises like these that test character. I turned my cool back to the east, that the rising sun, if it ever really got thoroughly risen, might warm it, and grimly reloaded. Jonathan continued his call to the birds, and when they returned again I behaved better.
By seven o'clock the birds had scattered, and we left our places to go back to the horse. On the way we encountered two hunters wandering rather disconsolately over the marsh. They stopped us to ask what luck, and we tried not to look too self-satisfied, but probably they read our success in our arrogant faces, streaked with tar and sweet oil as they were. Possibly the bulge of our hunting-coat pockets helped to tell the story.
"How long have you been out here?" they asked enviously.
"Two hours or so," said Jonathan.
"How'd you get out so early?"
"We got up early," said Jonathan, with admirable simplicity.
The strangers looked at him twice to see if he meant to jeer, but he appeared impenetrably innocent, and they finally laughed, a little ruefully, and went on out into the marsh we were just leaving. Why does it make one feel so immeasurably superior to get up a few hours before other people?
We drove home along the sunny road, where the bakers' carts and meat wagons were already astir. Could it be the same road that a few hours before had been so cold and gray and still? Were these bare white houses the same that had nestled so cozily into the dark of the roadside? We reached our own plain little white house and went in. In the dining-room our candles and the remains of our midnight breakfast on the table seemed like relics of some previous state of existence. Sleepily I set things in order for a real breakfast, a hot breakfast, a breakfast that should be cozy. Drowsily we ate, but contentedly. Everything since the night before seemed like a dream.
It still seems so. But of all the dream the most vivid part—more vivid even than the alarm clock, more real than my tumble into wetness—is the vision that remains with me of mist-swept marsh, all gray and green and yellow, with tawny haycocks and glimmerings of water and whirrings of wings and whistling bird notes and the salt smell of the sea.
Yes, Jonathan was right. Dawn hunting on the marshes is different, quite different.