“Oh, pshaw!” responded Bill, in intense disgust, “I thought it meant a whole bookful of things.”
“The sandpipers, however, come under the family of snipes, and are called tringæ. Among these are enumerated the robin-snipe and the grass-plover, as I told you before, the black-breast, the krieker, or short-neck, and several scarcer varieties. The yelpers and yellow-legs, the tiny teeter, and the willet are tattlers, genus totanus, while the marlin is the godwit limosa. The sickle-bills, jacks, and futes are curlews, genus numenius.”
“And now that you have got through,” grumbled Bill again, “can you whistle a snipe any better or shoot him any easier? Do you know why he stools well in a south-westerly wind, why one stools better than another, or why any of them stool at all? Do you know why he flies after a storm, or why some go in flocks and others don’t, or why there is usually a flight on the fifteenth and twenty-fifth of August? When books tell us these things, I shall think more of the writers.”
“These matters are not easy to find out; even you gunners, who have been on the bay all your lives, where your fathers lived before you, do not know. But now tell us what other sport you have here.”
“On the mainland there are a good many English snipe in spring, while in the fall we catch bluefish and shoot ducks. The black ducks and teal will soon be along; but ever since the inlet was closed, the canvas-backs and red-heads have been scarce.”
“What do you mean by the inlet’s closing?”
“There used to be several inlets across the beach—one about ten miles below—and then we had splendid oysters and ducks plenty. There came a tremendous storm one winter that washed up the sand and closed the inlet, and so it has remained ever since.”
“Can’t they be dredged out?”
“The people would pay a fortune to any man who did that, if he could keep it open. In the fall, we go after ducks twenty miles when we want any great shooting; but we kill a good many round here.”
“How do you catch the blue-fish that you spoke of?”