INDIAN DUCK HUNTING
The stoical Siwash stalks, barefooted, over the broad expanse of sand, gathering clams at low tide, or with silent paddle urges his cedar canoe among the canals of the tule patches, looking for a “pot shot” at ducks with his old Hudsons bay company musket. He never wastes any powder on a single duck or risks a wing shot. There must be a whole patch of ducks and they must be close and sitting still on the water before he turns his old gas-pipe fusee loose in their direction. He don’t go for sport, or sportsmanship, this aborigine, so he nearly always gets ducks and generally several of them every time he chucks a double handful of slugs among them.
He is silent as a shadow and piles branches and grass all over his canoe to enable him to do just the right kind of a “sneak” on his unsuspecting victims.
Mrs. Siwash paddles along the canals too, but she is on a peaceful mission and only takes the tules and rushes that grow thick on the tide-flat marshes for no other purpose, in her estimation, than for making mats for her dwelling on the other side of the bay. She knows all the devious windings of every little channel, though some of them are only about wide enough to float her light craft and are hung so close with grass and rushes that you would hardly suspect an open waterway. She knows that this or that blind canal opens out and gives access to a particularly fine patch of rushes a little further on and urges her boat ahead with lazy stroke that makes it glide along even if there is no water to be seen from your point of view.
KLOOTCHMAN GATHERING RUSHES
These little waterways lead everywhere, and in walking about you find yourself unexpectedly confronted by a ditch a little too wide to jump over and a trifle to deep to wade, when you stop to consider that the bottom mud may be any depth you take a notion to imagine it, but at best deep enough to let the water in over the tops of your waders.
In the deeper ones crabs scurry away in a misfit, sideways fashion, peculiarly their own, and flounders fan their shingle shaped bulk down in the friendly slime and there lie buried as the roil drifts away, conforming so closely with the color of the bottom as to be invisible to any one but a Siwash. They can’t fool a Siwash a little bit for he just picks up a spear from his canoe, makes a jab at the muddy spot and eats flounder when he gets hungry.