PASS SHOOTING. 327 



it did not take him long to kill the twenty-five birds 

 which make the limit per diem for a shooter in the State 

 of North Dakota. With the Chief and myself it was 

 different. We got a good deal bigger run for our 

 money than anybody else, because we shot worse. It 

 now began to be a struggle of courtesy between us all. 

 "I never touched that bird; it's yours, my friend," 1 

 would say to the Chief. "Your bird, sir," he would 

 reply, with equal courtesy; and so we would argue 

 over it. 



Bowers and I nearly scared the Chief to death by 

 covertly piling up a lot of our birds in front of his pit 

 and then proceeding to count them before him. We 

 made it out to be twenty-nine birds, and the warden 

 told him it would cost him $400 ! 



It would seem that one should soon kill his limit on a 

 flight like this, and so he can, even though he be new at 

 the sport of pass shooting — the hardest shooting in the 

 world, and not to be compared with the easy work of 

 shooting over decoys. Yet I have noticed that even the 

 best shots will spoil 100 shells to pick up twenty-five 

 ducks on a pass like this, and it takes a little while to 

 shoot 100 shells, especially after the first flurry is over 

 and one steadies down and behaves like a shooter, pick- 

 ing his shots and taking care. We had shot a little 

 over a couple of hours before we thought it best to 

 rectify our rough counts of individual bags and to go 

 after the birds which had fallen dead back of us in the 

 reeds. Bowers and I went over the crest of the ridge 

 to look for some birds we had killed on the hard 



