THE COOT 265 



keep arriving; finally, the little green staithe is gay with 

 laughing men and youths. Soon all the party has collected, 

 some ninety persons, of strange dress and stranger accoutre- 

 ments. There is much talk, and joking, and cheering as 

 they crowd into the open boats — pleasure-boats, old cobles, 

 marsh boats — some propelled by oars, others by quants 

 (poles). So the chaffing flotilla of forty boats, for many 

 have brought their boats over-night from mill-outlets and 

 distant broads and meres, goes shoving and rowing off on 

 to the broad, whose hundreds of acres of water gleam and 

 ripple in the cold morning sun. 



" Going ter shoot anything to-day ? " shouts one man. 



" Ay, bor. Shoot you — shoot each other," cries another 

 gunner, ramming home a load of shot. 



And so the fleet moves off, some of the boats carrying 

 one gun, some two, and some even three ; but as they push 

 out on to the broad (the women and children watching them 

 from the cottages on Stubb shore), their voices die away, 

 for there are the coot sitting quietly at the other end of the 

 broad. Gradually the flotilla forms into a hollow square, 

 stretching across the broad, the right arm of the square 

 being longer than the left. In this formation, which soon 

 becomes a semicircle, the quanters and rowers move steadily 

 towards the fowl. As they approach, the birds begin to 

 move restlessly ; and as the right and left arms close in, 

 the rear of the formation keeping well back, a lot of the 

 birds rise and fly down the deadly blind alley, when the 

 air is rent by volley after volley as they move up the 

 alley and cross the rear-guard, whose line has no end. 

 Bang, bang, bang go the hindermost guns ; birds are 

 falling on all sides with loud splashes into the water ; 

 other flocks come and follow their friends down the deadly 

 gauntlet — forty birds falling at a volley sometimes. There 

 is much shouting and laughing as a dead bird flops on to 

 a quanter's head, or a man's face is blooded; and, finally, 

 when the last bunch has flown over the puntsmen's heads, 



