WOOD DUCK (AIX SPONSA).
There is at least one virtue displayed by enthusiastic hunters of duck—it is that of patience. You may not get a shot for days, or even catch a glimpse of a bird, except your tame decoys, and be tempted to waste a cartridge for change on a stump or a branch; but it is not all monotony, sitting quietly in your camp or in your canoe, or paddling through the marsh, and, Micawber-like, waiting for “something to turn up.” There is a physical and intellectual enjoyment, if you have the capacity to take it in—a pleasant antithesis to the excitement of a shot. If you’re in camp it is expended in a hundred ways. If you do nothing more than lie on your back, with your arms under your head for a pillow, and look up through spreading branches of trees, gorgeous with autumnal tints, into “the witchery of the soft blue sky”—if you only let your mind lie fallow, and your hard-worked body feel the luxury of a genuine rest, it is not time misspent. Toward the close of day the duck exercise their wings and take their supper, and you may then get some good shots. If you are in your canoe waiting for their appearance, I commend to you the magnificent sunset for which the Bay is famed.
Flocks of blackbirds whiz and whir over your head in wild abandon, as if conscious they were not in danger; the melancholy “too, too, too, to-o-t” of the owl is heard in the woods, as if it were mourning for Minerva; kingfishers flutter in one narrow compass of mid-air over their prey, as if trembling with apprehensive joy, and shoot down suddenly like meteors to seize the unsuspecting minnow below; the “schayich” of the “ritualistic” snipe is heard as it rises from the bog in graceful evolutions and gyrations a danseuse might envy; the incense of autumn is borne to your nostrils; a conversazione of swallows is going on throughout the bush near by, while a perfect tempest of twitter rages on a tree-top. Is it love, jealousy or scandal, is it an Œcumenical Council to proclaim the infallibility of the kingfisher or the peacock, or are they only scolding their young ones to bed?
To complete the delight of your senses, you will be sure to add to your knowledge of entomology the penetrating fact that, though the black flies have absconded, the marsh in autumn is “the last ditch” of the mosquito. Here it conjugates the verb “to bite,” in all its moods and tenses, until the frost-king subdues its ardor, or the dragonfly saves the frost the trouble. It does not interest you to know that its wings vibrate three thousand times a minute, and that with these and the rapid vibrations of the muscles of its chest it produces its soothing sound. Its sting is certainly very complex and attractive under the microscope—not so under your skin. You may be ever so gallant, and yet be unable to pardon the fact that only the female mosquitoes bite. You may be reduced to believe with Gay’s fable of the man and the flea, “that men were made for fleas (or mosquitoes) to eat.” The mosquito is far too insinuating in its manner. It depresses one’s mind, but it elevates one’s body. When you’re sitting in your canoe on the qui vive for a shot, its familiar evening hymn is heard in a halo of buzzing around your head. Sting first, like a sapper with his heel on his spade in the trenches in the face of the enemy, it digs into you with a perseverance worthy of a nobler aim. A summer’s sucking has not satiated the thirst of the seniors, while the junior cannibals are eager to try their stings; but the weather has curbed their power if not their desire, and you may slap them into eternity with comparative ease. If there is no food for powder in the air, You can live in hope and wish there was, or you can meditate on your sins, or, what is more popular and pleasant, the sins of your friends and enemies; but it somewhat disturbs the equanimity of your thought and humiliates your dignity to find a corduroy road of mosquito bites on the back of your neck, and suddenly to realize that the last of the Mohicans is determined to “play tag” with the tip of your nose, or to say its vespers vigorously in the hollow warmth of your ear.
If you’ve never shot wild duck, at least you’ve eaten them. Charles Lamb may extol roast pig, but, as Victor says, “Pigs can’t lay eggs, nor can dey fly.” I doubt if the genial essayist ever ate wild roast duck, done to a turn, with sage dressing, plump bellies and legs trussed, hung for a day or two before being dressed, well basted while cooking, and sent to table hot, with apple sauce. Plutarch says that Cato kept his household in health, when the plague was rife, by dieting them on roast duck. Can anything be finer than the mellow sniff that steals up the nostrils from a tender roasted one, that you’ve shot yourself?
The end of the hunting season is the ducks’ Thanksgiving Day. What tales they must hiss and stories they must quack of shots escaped; and of nervous marksmen down whose very gun-barrels they stared and quacked out defiance. How the veterans of the season must brag, and the Gascons of two put on airs, and be envied as the heroes of many battles! How they must raise their wings and show their scars, and be looked up to as ducks of valor and experience!
