4 DUCKIN-G DAYS 



tagging my heels like a dog as I now and then shot out 

 a woodcock cover that lay just over the inlet. 



"I hev jest got ter hev sum cranberries ter go long er 

 them air snipe," he announced one noon as w^e finished 

 picking the dozen fat cock the morning's sport had 

 yielded. Across the lakelet stretched the bog and thither 

 he repaired to come in at dusk with a bushel of the crim- 

 son fruit and a smashing pair of black duck which, in- 

 comparable sculler that he was, he had worked up to inch 

 by inch with the stillness of death itself till the pair of 

 canny fowl came just right to suit him, when, as he had 

 expressed it, he had "mellered 'em both out tergether 

 ter one shot." 



Cranberries were up that year, so Joe must needs post 

 off that night to the distant village to market his ripened 

 freight, thereby leaving me alone to my own devices and 

 whatever game might appear for some twenty-four hours. 



With the setting sun a dead calm settled over the 

 lonely pond and for the first time in a fortnight the 

 evening air fairly rang with the message of the coming 

 frost. ''Ye orter hev sum ter work on cum sunup," was 

 the Hermit's parting word as he pushed away into the 

 dusk. He was right. How the birds sense the coming 

 change. A little way to the north a real freeze was in 

 progi*ess and with that w^onderful intuition so sensitive 

 to weather shifts they stood not upon the order of their 

 going but came at once. 



