WILD DUCK SHOOTING.

WILD DUCK SHOOTING.BY W. G. BEERS.

BY W. G. BEERS.

AMONG the memorable events of my youth I can scarcely recall any rival to the days spent on foot and in canoe hunting wild duck. It was the master passion of the boyhood of many I know, becoming in later years a passion to master. It was the acme of enjoyment in the days when one was light-hearted anddébonnaire, and went whistling through birthdays with that enviable serenity so few of us manage to retain.

Wild duck! With the last fall of leaves and the first fall of snow, their quack was music to the ear. Steeped to the lips in classics, one wondered if there were no duck on the coast of Campania, that Tiberius tired of the pleasures around him and sighed in vain for more; or if there were none in Assyria, that Sardanapalus sought to have new amusements invented; or if there were no real ones where Loelius and Scipio made them on water with flat stones.

The first wild duck one kills, like first love, or one’s first proof-sheet, causes a sensation that is never duplicated. The history of its mysterious and ecstatic thrill through the veins, its wild rush through the soul, never knows a repetition. The duck may be in the “sere and yellow,” stricken in years, scraggy on the crown, weak in the wings, tough to your teeth as parchment—aye, indeed, with one foot in the grave and the other shot off, and have long ago ceased to scud between earth and sky for mere fun—just as the first love may have been nearly old enough to have been your mother, and with no more love in her eyes than an oyster; or as the first proof-sheet may have been an immature production to which you are now thankful you did not append your name. But in the heyday of life a vivid imagination throws a halo around our achievements, and though other duck, like other love, may turn out more “tender and true,” yet there lingers about the memory of the first experience an inexpressible charm which no gross soul can know.

I do not think I shall ever forget the first wild duck I shot. It was impressed upon me in a manner too striking. During the school holidays a few of us undertook to dispose of our superfluous energy by a pedestrian pilgrimage around the Island of Montreal, and as a dose for the game we might encounter, we managed, by coaxing a big brother, to muster a single-barreled gun and liberal supply of ammunition.There was a strong suspicion of rust down the barrel, and a disabled look about the hammer, but the owner declared it was good enough for boys, with that sublime faith manifested by watermen who let boats to inexperienced lads, that Providence takes special care of people who cannot take care of themselves. A well-worn inscription on the butt was ominously deciphered as “Memento mori.” I’ve seen more defective guns since—but they had burst.

MALLARD DUCK (ANAS BOSCHAS).

We started from the Place d’Armes, and when we reached “the Cross,” at Hochelega, held a council of war about loading the gun, as a scared squirrel had just darted under a fence and roused our thirst for blood. Opinions conflicted as to whether the powder or shot should be put in first, as one dogmatic adventurer, whose experience in squibs and fire-crackers entitled him to respect, declared with the positiveness of error that the shot should have the preference. Better reasoning, however, prevailed, and to make assurance doubly sure, down went a double charge of powder. “It’s not near full yet,” sneered young Dogmatism. I hoped not; but to make assurance trebly sure, up came the flask again and down went more powder. I remember one of the group, whose characteristic caution provoked us throughout the trip, suggested mounting the gun in an embrasure in the fence, laying a train of powder to the nipple, and testing its safety at discreet distance; but there was a display of fear in the proposal that we, as of Saxon blood, could never countenance, and so we strangled it at birth. It is a memorable fact, that may go some way to sustain the belief that I have mentioned above, that, as if prompted by instinct, the gun refused to go off on several occasions, in spite of repeated cleanings of the nipple, coaxing with grains of powder and fresh caps. We were unable to “distill the soul of goodness” in this apparently evil and obdurate circumstance; so the charge was withdrawn, the barrel cleaned, and to make assurance quadruply sure, the powder was poured down with even more liberality than before.

The third day we reached the upper end of Ste. Anne’s, near the old French fort. At that time the village was even a quieter spot than now, where never a speculatorhad looked with greed upon the soil; its greatest stir made by the visits and voices of the boisterous voyageurs; its rapids sacred to the memory of the poet Moore, and the soft refrain of his “Canadian Boat Song.” Moreover, its surroundings made it a perfect paradise for wild duck.

We were marching along, when some one’s sharp eyes espied a solitary black duck feeding close to the shore, about thirty yards away. Suddenly it rose with a frightened flutter. With considerable difficulty I had managed to cock my gun. I raised it to my shoulder, with a strong fear that it would go off, and an inward prayer that it wouldn’t, took accurate aim by pointing in the direction of the bird, and shutting my eyes—with the Latin inscription brought at that moment vividly before me, as if the letters had elongated from the butt to the barrel—I thought of my past sins and pulled the trigger.

EIDER DUCK (SOMATERIA MOLLISSIMA).

Once I participated in a railroad accident when a locomotive almost telescoped our car; but it was an insignificant impression to the condensed crash and astonishing concussion that followed the snapping of the cap. As if weary of well-doing, the old gun went off with a vengeance, blowing the stock off the barrel with a retrograde movement that met my shoulder on the way with a deliberate intention to dislocate, sent the hammer into the air, singed the hair from around my eyes closer and more speedily than I have ever been professionally shaved on my chin, and gave the trusting hand that was supporting the barrel a shake of extreme familiarity—a left-handed compliment—that was reflected up my arm and down the spinal column until it bred my deepest and most heartfelt contempt. Like Richard, when about to fight for his kingdom, I was depressed, and

“Had not that alacrity of spiritAnd cheer of mind that I was wont to have.”

“Had not that alacrity of spirit

And cheer of mind that I was wont to have.”

After having carried that gun round the island for three days, sparing no pains to keep it dry, to oil its rusty barrel and wash its musty stock, I felt it had been an ungrateful companion, undeserving of the personality with which we had almost invested it, and, to use a modern metaphor, that it “had gone back on me.” It evoked on my part anet tu, Brute! sort of feeling. As I looked at it in silent woe, lock, stock and barrel lying in bits, I felt sore enough at its conduct to have given it a retributive kick, and sent it into the river, but the kicking capacity of my legs had been too materially weakened by the last kick of the gun.

Gun gone to glory, vision of some one’s big brother with possible heavy fist and inevitable “good, round, mouth-filling oath,” hand, head, and, indeed, all my anatomy aching, there was a consolation that poured metaphorical oil on my wounds and alleviated the pangs of pain—I had shot the duck!

You won’t find wild duck at Ste. Anne’s to-day, except some stray ones of over-curious trait, who refuse to be advised by their experienced friends. You’ll be lucky if you hit upon a spot within thirty miles of Montreal where you do not find“pothunters” by the dozen—that New World species of thegenus homowho should have lived in Arcadia, where they would certainly have utilized their propensity to good purpose by driving away the birds which haunted Lake Stymphalus, without the brazen clappers of Vulcan or the arrows of Hercules.

For short holidays, one of the most popular localities, and therefore one which has been well spoiled, was in the vicinity of Carillon Bay. You may enjoy a varied autumn vacation by taking the steamerPrince of Walesat Lachine, landing at Carillon, and staging about twenty minutes to the beautifully situated village of St. Andrews. There beg, buy or borrow a dug-out canoe, small enough to be concealed in cover, and paddle down the charming North River, with its picturesque rocks and pretty shadows, until you cast anchor at the portage of the Presqu’ Isle. Here you will find remnants of old camp-fires, plenty of free fuel, hay-stacks in the vicinity to make your bed, and elderberries ripe in September, luscious in October, waiting in thick and tempting clusters to be eaten on the spot, or taken home and made into wine. Pitch your tent at this point, and portage your canoe through the narrow strip of loose soil and water to some convenient slip in what is called “The Bay.” You fasten a stout stick through a rope or chain on the nose of the boat, and two getting abreast of it where the portage is heavy, or at each end with outstretched arms where the water is deep, you have quite an enjoyable tug, while the novelty of being up to your knees in mud and water, without getting wet if you wear “beef” moccasins, or a delicious indifference to wet feet if you do not, gives you a sensation of “roughing it,” that not even the pain you’ll get across your shoulders can make you impugn.

The Bay, which is two miles across, is picturesque, and, were it not getting too well known, a glorious place for duck. From it you see St. Placide, about seven miles away, its church spires gleaming in the sunshine; and nearer, Presqu’ Isle Point, Borwash Point, Point de Roche, Coon’s Point, Jones’ Island, and Green Island—between which and the end of the Presqu’ Isle you can see any vessels that pass up and down the Ottawa River. Mount Rigaud—mysterious hill, with its “Lake of Stones”—rises to the west, while the few farms and houses of the Bay settlement lie on the uplands to the north. Over the islands the smoke of steamers miles away may be seen, and the plash of the paddle-wheels heard like the distant “rat-tat” of kettledrums.

The most unique echo I know in Canada follows your shot in this Bay, and is one of the “lions”—a roaring lion at that—of the place. It travels in tremulous waves of sound across the water, lurks for a moment in the bush of the Presqu’ Isle, then shoots out abruptly on the other side and flies over the Ottawa to strike Mount Rigaud, where it reverberates from hill and dale, now to the right, now to the left, in a mysterious prolonged monotone, as if at hide-and-seek in the “Lake of Stones.” Then it returns with a scared suddenness, only to fly back in broken flutterings of sound, from crag to crag, from haunt to haunt, again to be repeated, like frightened deer, chased and cooped up on every side, with no escape, till, after several such re-echoes, it calms to a lullaby, and dies away on the distant hills. A marsh fringes the Presqu’ Isle, and on its borders are many good feeding spots for the duck. The grass of the marsh is mowed with scythes and heaped in large stacks, which you can mount to spy for duck that may be feeding among the lily stalks—though, if your experience is limited, or your vision none of the best, you will often be puzzled to know whether the moving objects are lily stalks or duck.

For many years, a few Canadians of French descent, the inheritors of the old voyageur-sportsman spirit of theancien régime, who dread legitimate labor with all their hearts, but love harder work that smacks of adventure, have camped in the vicinity of the Bay, trapping musk-rats, catching fish or shooting duck and snipe. The veritable chief of the clan bears the martial name of “Victor,” and is a character in his way. I first saw him with his breeches rolled above his knees, loading his gun in the marsh. Nature evidently made him in haste, for there is an unfinished look about his face, and enough indentations around his head to give a phrenologist the blues. His nose is mostly nostril, and fiery enough to make the nose of Bardolph look pale, while his eyes are black as a sloe and piercing as a falcon’s. Though he can neither read nor rhyme, he has a taste in common with Byron—he hates pork and loves gin. When he swears—and then he best pronounces English—spiders feign death, and his dog turns his tail between his legs and moans. He is said, like sheep, to undress only once a year. When hechanges his clothes the very pores of his skin open themselves in mute astonishment. If you can hire him by the day as your “Man Friday,” it will add very much to your sport, for he is a walking map of the haunts of duck, and has a perfect genius for waking them up. He will steal with his canoe through the marsh wherever they can go, quietly as a snake in the grass, until he is within gunshot of his game. To crown all, he is the presiding genius ofbouillon; and I canonize him for this, if for nothing more.

Have you ever tastedbouillonmade in camp? It is not “fricasseed nightmare,”mon ami. It is more savory than tongue of lark or peacocks’ brains, or other rarest dish that epicures of ancient Rome ever compounded. Yes, it even throws the wild boar of Apicius or the roast pig of Charles Lamb into the shades of unpalatableness. You take water, fish, musk-rat or squirrel (in lieu of beef), potatoes, onions, butter, pepper and salt, and boil them all together in a pot, in the open air, over a glowing wood fire. Pour off the soup, and you have the nectar of the gods; the balance is a dish I would not be ashamed to set before a hungry king. I would not give one sip ofbouillonmade by Victor for a bottle of the wine in which Cleopatra dissolved her precious pearl.

But where are the wild duck?—for this seems all digression. Ah! there they come, with the flutter of wings which starts something of the same sort in your heart, their long necks stretched out, following their leader in Indian file, or wedged together like the Macedonian phalanx, or spreading out when they come nearer inéchelonor like skirmishers, as if knowing the risk of receiving your shot in close column. You lie low, concealed by the long stalks of the marsh grass—the point of your canoe hidden by the house of a musk-rat. What a quiet few moments as they come within range! You can almost hear your heart beat. Gun at full cock, nerves steady as a rock, ducks coming straight to their fate—look out! Forty yards off, up goes gun to shoulder in a twinkling, eye following the game, a gentle pressure of the trigger—deftly, as if all your care and coolness had been concentrated for that instant in your right forefinger—down drop the legs of a duck, denoting mortal wound, off goes your dog at a plunge, back in boisterous haste and trembling, with a frothy mouthful which he drops at your feet with an almost human sense of importance, and an expressive wag of his tail that quivers delicious delight from every hair! If a “fellow feeling” does not make you “wondrous kind” to that dog—if you do not realize the touch of nature that Darwin declares makes you kin—if, after his companionship, you are not sparing in your chastisement, generous with your pats, and loath to treat him like a dog, you must be a brute, beneath the stature of a trained retriever, and unworthy to have the meanest and most mongrel cur whine at your grave.

Education has ennobled your dog. His senses have gained a keenness you may envy, while more eloquence and gratitude is gestured from his tail than can be uttered by many a human tongue and eye. I will not question the propriety of Solomon’s instructions in training a child, but I protest against its applicability to a dog. A dog that has been bullied into obedience possesses the same sort of training as a boy who has been whipped into morality. They both become white-livered; the dog carries his tail between his legs, and so would the boy if he had one. You may have seen a hot-tempered drover beat an obstinate cow in unsuccessful attempts to make it move, while another simply twisted its tail, and at once stimulated its muscles of locomotion. If you have to chastise a dumb brute at all, you may as well do it mercifully, and on the Italian system of penmanship—the heavy strokes upward and the light ones down; specially so with a dog you wish to be your companion in hunting duck or partridge.

If you have done much duck-hunting you will have discovered that within rifle-range of civilization the instinct of duck is surpassingly keener than outside the pale. In spite of the “blue unclouded weather,” soft calm on the water, and stillness in the air, you cannot catch them asleep any more than a weasel. If you would get within range of them at their feeding-ground you must slip slyly and softly. They sniff gunpowder in the air, and know it from the smell of burning bush. Victor vows they know an empty cartridge-case or gun-wad a mile away. You cannot make them believe your canoe is a musk-rat house, however you try. You cannot put an empty calabash on your head as they do in China, and wade among them, so as to pull them under the water and secure them by a strap. You may fool a Chinese or a Hindoo duck in that way, but not a Canadian. They will play in the water twentyyards away when you have not a gun; but they know the difference between the barrels of one peeping from a marsh and the grass stalks or lilies, better than many people know the difference between a duck and a crow.

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 wildabandon, 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 adanseusemight envy; the incense of autumn is borne to your nostrils; aconversazioneof 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 thequi vivefor 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!

End of Article

Back to Index Next