264 DUCK SHOOTING. 



large as a goose, and the better sentiment of the best 

 class of gunners will favor shooting at the geese as they 

 are about to alight, and then giving them the other bar- 

 rels as they go away. 



While much of the goose shooting on the South At- 

 lantic coast is done from boxes planted on the shoals or 

 the beach, it is sometimes done from sand-bars, locally 

 called ''lumps," in which pits are dug and these sur- 

 rounded with a fringe of bushes or sedge. Shooting 

 from such a shelter with a stand of live decoys is de- 

 scribed by Mr, E. J. Myers in Forest and Stream in the 

 following words : 



Into the blind, because the skiff has already faded 

 out of sight in the gray mist, and amid noisy splashing 

 and washing one old gander is already stretching his 

 long neck and straining the leather thong which ties 

 him to the stake driven in the shallows out of sight. 

 Out of the duskiness and gray shadows come muffled 

 sounds as of the heavy wing strokes of the flying geese, 

 that resolve into nothing as we settle ourselves down to 

 patiently wait. Brighter grows the daylight from be- 

 hind the sandy ridges dividing the ocean from the 

 sound, and the great bars shooting to the zenith light 

 the watery waste into vermilion and carminated blood, 

 and, a glowing red ball of fire, up comes the sun. In- 

 voluntarily made a sun worshiper, I rise; when Hay- 

 man roughly pulls me down, and points with gun bar- 

 rels directly at the sun just suspended over the rim of 

 the horizon. Lo ! there, as if they were issuing from its 

 glowing, incandescent mass, a V-shaped dotted line is 



