POTOMAC SHOOTING—NEW STYLE.
“Wal,” said Nathan, with his Eastern Shore drawl, “I was out gunning one spring, about thirty years ago, and had a No. 8 muzzle-loader that would hold comfortably six ounces of shot. I ran in on a solid acre of robin-snipe on the beach, and fired one load raking them as they fed, giving them the other barrel as they rose. I picked up three hundred and two.”
I next asked him the greatest number of brant he had ever killed in one day over the decoys, with single shots.
“I bagged,” he answered, “about ten years ago, one hundred and seventy brant, and nearly every one of them was a single shot.”
I can easily believe this, for I have shot in blinds with many sportsmen, at redhead, shufflers, black duck and brant, and I never yet saw amateur, professional, or pot-hunter, whose aim was so unerring and deadly at the flying ducks as Nathan Cobb’s. I do not believe this score has ever been beaten in this country.
At the present day this same story of the disappearance of the waterfowl on the Virginia coast and along the Capes becomes dreary from repetition. It does not pay the sportsman to go to Cobb’s Island now. I spent three seasons there in the winter, during the “Eighties,” and found that the brant were so wild that they would not stool. Then I went to Cape Charles, just outside the Capes, and, though it is a most inaccessible place, the brant would not come near the decoys.
Two winters ago, I tried Currituck Sound, and found palatial club-houses open all about that noble sheet of water. Some of these houses are so splendid in appointment that when you glance around the elegantly furnished rooms, with their damask curtains, Brussels carpets and open grates where the anthracite is piled high, it is impossible to imagine that just outside roll the dark waters of the Sound, while miles upon miles of barren sea-meadows, marshes and swamp separate the house from civilization. All of these club-houses are owned by Northern men—rich in world’s gear, of course—men who count their incomes by thousands, where ordinary bread-winners of the professions count their earnings by tens. Think of having in the magazine of a club-house thirty thousand dollars in guns! Gordon Cumming, starting for a ten years’ game hunt in the jungles of Africa, or Stanley, setting out to fight his way through the “Dark Continent,” with countless hordes of savage “Wawangi” disputing his passage, never had that amount invested in weapons—and all to kill the wary geese and swift-flying ducks.
Even with such perfection of outfit—with guns of every imaginable make from the 12 to the 4 bore, and trained gunners to oversee every arrangement, the clubmen were talking gloomily about the sport fast deteriorating. Pot-hunters, “duck pirates,” countrymen, freedmen—all who lived or robbed along the shores of the Sound had their shy at the ducks, day in and night out, and such a fusillade was never heard since Burnside stormed and carried Roanoke Island, some miles below, in the glinting spring days of 1862. I found good enough sport on the private point of a friend who lived on a large farm by the shores of the Sound. Still the birds were thinning rapidly.
Last winter’s experience with Currituck made me determine never to go to that spot again for sport. I do not think I overstate matters when I say that wildfowl-shooting on the finest grounds in the world is doomed. Gone are the vast flocks, decimated are the swans and geese that were so plentiful in certain localities even three short years ago, and indigo blue are the rich sportsmen who quaff their champagne in silence and puff moodily at their twenty-five cent cigars as they think of the meagre bags they have made, and how matters, now so bad, are always getting worse, thereby proving the old saw which saith “Nothing can be so bad that it cannot be made worse.” The club men should, however, be glad that the snipe will always be with them.