THE MUD QUEEN 117 
Then we saw a dark spot, a man’s head above the tules, 
moving slowly from the west in our direction. Some- 
one else had seen the geese. Soon afterwards the 
geese began to gabble. They had seen the unknown 
shooter coming from the west. The shooter ducked 
down and hid in the tall tules, but it was too late, 
the geese had seen him and the whole bunch rose 
in the air in one long line, scolding loudly among 
themselves. 
The entire flock rose slowly about a hundred yards 
and then broke up into smaller flocks of from half a 
dozen to fifty birds and began circling and scouting over 
the entire marsh. A bunch of seven came directly 
towards us. Jimmy began calling, ‘‘Hock! Hock! Hock! 
Hock! Hock!” pronounced very rapidly. As the geese 
came on he repeated the call three times. It seemed an 
odd-sounding call for geese, but they answered and came 
steadily towards us, lowering until they were directly 
over us and about fifty yards high. Then Jimmy gave 
the word ‘‘Now.”’ The caller of the word always has 
the edge on the other fellow and Jimmy’s gun exploded 
a fraction of a second before mine. Two geese came 
down following our first shots and our remaining shells 
accounted for two more, one falling a hundred yards 
away and the other still farther out. This last bird 
started to fly when Jimmy went after him and it took 
another shell to settle the account. Four geese out of 
seven was not bad. 
The rest of the geese were still circling over the marsh 
but far out of gunshot. When Jimmy returned we put 
out our four geese on the sandbar in the creek as decoys. 
There was one lone stick in the sandbar, where some 
ducks had sometime in the past been stuck up as decoys. 
We had one goose standing with his head up, a sentinel. 
