Panting and happy, he lay down on the bank a moment to rest.
"The family won't have to go without dinner after all!" he laughed.
He grabbed the duck by the feet, flung it over his shoulder, and trotted back to his clothes and the gun. It was fun to go home with the bird that he had shot himself. But if there had been no bird, he would have been whistling or singing just as happily.
On one of his birthdays he was out in the wide, lonely marshes five miles from home. It was more fun for him to go hunting, barefoot, than to have a party with a frosted cake and twinkling candles. So, as the nicest kind of birthday present, he had been given the whole day, to do just as he pleased.
To-day, as there was still on the ground the snow of early spring, he wore shoes, but it was cold work plashing about in those slimy pools and the slippery mud among the sedges.
The birds he was after especially were the black-and-white "oyster catchers," which when it was low tide would always be found making a great racket above the patches of mussels which formed their favorite food.
They were handsome birds, with gay red bills, and a bunch of them made a fine showing when the little hunter carried them home over his shoulder.
This time he had shot several of the birds, and then the problem was to get them and bring them in.
There they lay—away off yonder, on a little tuft of, the coarse green meadow-grasses, but between the hunter and the game was a swirling inlet of salt water, and he couldn't tell by looking at it how deep it was.
So, gun over shoulder, he started cautiously to wade out toward that birthday dinner he meant to bring home.