58 “COME DUCK SHOOTING WITH ME” 
look them over as they pass. Frightened birds are 
always fast-flying birds and you earn all you get of them. 
I had passed up a lot of opportunities to shoot that 
morning. It was very enjoyable to see ducks fly in and 
alight among the decoys and interesting to study their 
habits and learn their calls should they make any. 
Now if I wanted to secure the day’s limit of twenty-five 
ducks it must be done in the next two hours. It was 
possible to get them in the next thirty minutes if the 
coming boat made enough disturbance. The largest 
flock in the air were blue-bills. They were separating 
themselves as widely as possible from the coming boat 
and incidentally heading for me. I peeked over the 
top of the sink box. Blue-bills somehow never paid 
very much attention to my blue-bill call, so it seemed 
best to keep quiet. They came up within eighty 
yards, then turned and appeared to be heading for 
another country. Not knowing what else to do I gave 
them the commonest of all duck calls, the clucking feed 
call, the noise ducks make when feeding. It sounds 
precisely like the ‘‘cluck”’ drivers make at a slow-going 
horse. 
The blue-bills heard it, circled, and flew by a gunshot 
away, flying very swiftly, but it was the final chance and 
I let go two shells. Blue-bills oftentimes bunch up 
forward when coming to decoys. All hands want to be 
in front and see what’s going on. My first shot raked a 
little group of curiosity seekers and three came down. 
My second shell created a large puncture in the at- 
mosphere. The birds were rising rapidly after my first 
shot and the charge went under them. They were too 
far away to shoot again with any hope of success. 
Two of the three birds were only wounded and I had 
to get out in the mud and reshoot both of them. One 
