70 SHOOTING THE DUCK 



colour are on distinctly more favourable terms with 

 duck than they would be if their barrels carried a 

 surface gloss. The old Norfolk fowlers used pur- 

 posely to rust their gun-barrels on this account, and 

 in times of snow to cover them with whitening. 

 What guns those fen wild-fowlers carried ! The 

 ' handful ' served as the shot-measure when loading. 

 Little is it to be wondered at, considering the stand- 

 ing belief that a gun was only properly loaded when 

 at its discharge the gunner could just hold it and 

 just remain on his feet, that the bursting of these 

 weapons should have been comparatively common. 

 Magnificent shots were often made at flight-time 

 and by night. In some of the villages bordering 

 the marshes of Norfolk the men were duck-shooters 

 almost without exception. Haddiscoe is a notable 

 example. There, some sixty or seventy years ago, 

 the whole village, headed by the parson, would turn 

 out at flight-time and scatter themselves over the 

 marshes. 



Some of the fowlers (says a local chronicler, Mr. Last 

 Farman, when writing on the village in question, a few 

 years back), can be seen at the present day carrying scars 

 imprinted fifty years ago. In these days of overloading it 

 svas nothing unusual to find the old shooting-iron standing 

 bolt-upright like a telegraph pole in the soft, boggy soil 

 at the rear of the sportsman's prostrated form. . . . The 



