The freedman’s musket, battered and patched though it be, must look down upon the handsome, resplendent breechloader as a great orator does upon the garrulous, loquacious youth who talks upon every subject at any time, and at any length, while he only opens his mouth to make knock-down arguments, or to utter words of great import that thrill and convince. When the reverberating roar of that old A. M. was heard, it was safe to bet that something that did not come from the barnyard would fill the shooter’s iron pot that night.
A weather-beaten old darkey said to me once: “It dun cos’ me nearly five cents to load that air musket, countin’ powder, caps, shot and everythin’, an’ I ain’t gwine to let er off ’less I knows I’se sartin to make by de shot.”
The baybird-shooting in the summer, and the duck-shooting outside the Virginia capes, was at its zenith some fifteen years ago. Then, too, the canvas-back, that king of water-fowl, before whose name the gourmand bows in homage, still lingered in the tributaries of the Chesapeake Bay, but now it is nearly extinct. A sportsman may gun for a whole winter in the bay and not kill half a dozen “canvas-backs,” but, if a good shot over the decoys, he can count on the kind known as the “red-head”—and if he knew how to pull out a few feathers, as does the professional pot-hunter, he could easily follow that gentleman’s example and sell them at fancy figures for “canvas-backs,” which in another decade will be as utterly annihilated as the dodo. Still, great is the culinary chef’s art, and if he can, by the magic power of his sauces, herbs and seasonings, pass calf’s head off for green turtle, and the skillpot for diamond-back terrapin stew, then nobody is hurt. His patrons enjoy it just the same, and to the average man the red-head duck tastes as well with his champagne as its incomparable relative.
POTOMAC SHOOTING—OLD STYLE.
ROBIN-SNIPE.
Fifteen years ago—even ten years—many an amateur would pack his trunk with ammunition, and taking steamer for Old Point Comfort, disembark there, and after a few hours’ wait at the Hygeia Hotel, proceed on his way to the eastern shore of Virginia by crossing the Chesapeake Bay. Or he would go outside the capes, and stop at Cape Charles, or Cobb’s Island. Once at his objective point, he could be certain in the right season of having his fill of shooting every day at the baybirds. They were so plentiful that all along the Virginia Broadwater every oyster-bar or mud-flat would be covered with them, and all the shooter would have to do would be to make a blind out of sea-grass, place his decoys around him, and then try his hand on singles, doubles and flocks, striking them on the turn, while a hundred pair of yellow-legs, or willet, would not be considered anything out of the way. As it is now—well, the finest shot in the country could not kill that many snipe in a week, simply because they are not there to kill. The vast flocks of robin-snipe that tarried in their migrations along the shores of the Chesapeake and the Broadwater of the Atlantic coast have entirely disappeared. The curlew still haunt their favorite places, but have become so wary that neither blind nor decoys can lure them, except, indeed, at the earliest dawn of day, before their eyes are wide open. Half a dozen curlew, between sunrise and sunset, in the blinds, is something for a sportsman to be proud of, for no crow is keener-eyed, more suspicious, and keeps a sharper lookout than these birds. Fifteen years ago I have often killed from thirty to fifty from sun to sun, at Smith Island or Cape Charles, but now one has to load his shell with No. 3 shot to bring down the high-circling, distrustful curlew.
The willet is still fairly plentiful. They lay their eggs and rear their young in the neighboring sea-meadows, and though preyed upon by crabs, snakes and raccoons from the time the egg is laid until the bird is able to fly, they still hold their own. They are such sociable birds that whenever a flock of snipe is fired into, one of the dead is almost certain to be a willet.
The ox-eye, another variety of the snipe family, is found in abundance on the shores and sea-meadows, and they owe their preservation, like the sandpipers, to their insignificant size. There are no birds in existence that keep so close together when on the wing as these ox-eyes. A large flock resembles a solid mass, and dire is the destruction that a double-barrel makes as it pours forth its contents of No. 8 shot at point-blank distance and strikes them on the turn. I asked old Nathan Cobb, of Cobb’s Island, which is outside the Virginia capes—a pot-hunter of half a century’s experience, who has grown independent from the proceeds of his gun—what was the greatest number of snipe he had ever killed by one discharge of his double-barrel.