After dinner––and oh, what a dinner! for, having adequate time to do it justice, we drag it on and on, until even Aunt Martha is satisfied––we curl up in the sunshine, undimmed and gloriously warm; we light our briers, and, too lazily, nervelessly content to even talk, lay looking out over the blue water that melts and merges in the distance with the bluer sky above. After a bit, our pipes burn dead and our eyelids drop, and with a last memory of sunlight dancing on a myriad tiny wavelets, and a blessed peace and abandon soaking into our very souls we doze, then sleep, sleep as we never sleep in the city; as we had fancied a short day before never to sleep again; dreamlessly, childishly, as Mother Nature intended her children to sleep.
Then, from without the pale of utter oblivion, a familiar voice breaks slowly upon our consciousness: the voice of Johnson, the vigilant.
“Got your blind all built, boys, and the decoys is out––four dozen of them,” he admonishes, sympathetically. “Days are getting short, now, so you’d better move lively, if you get your limit before dark.” 303
Chapter X––Upon “Wiping the Eye”
“To poets and epicures, perhaps, the lordly canvas-back––though brown from the oven, I challenge the supercilious gourmet to distinguish between his favorite, and a fat American coot. But for me the loud-voiced mallard, with his bottle-green head and audaciously curling tail; for he will decoy.”
I am quoting Sandford. Be that as it may, we are there, amid frost-browned rushes that rustle softly in the wind: a patch of shallow open water, perhaps an acre in extent, to the leeward of us, where the decoys, heading all to windward, bob gently with the slight swell.
“Now this is something like sport,” adds my companion, settling back comfortably in the slough-grass blind, built high to the north to cut out the wind, and low to the south to let in the sun. “On the point, there, this morning you scored on me, I admit it; but this is where I shine: real shooting; one, or a pair at most, at 304 a time; no scratches; no excuses. Lead on, MacDuff, and if you miss, all’s fair to the second gun.”
“All right, Sam.”
“No small birds, either, understand: no teal, or widgeon, or shovellers. This is a mallard hole. Nothing but mallards goes.”
“All right, Sam.”