Bow - Shooting. 



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speaking, so sure am I that its history must appear apocryphal, and I 

 have no means of proving its truth. Our tent was pitched in a clump 

 of palmetto trees, on a low jut of shore overlooking the frith of a lagoon 

 of the river. A visiting party, composed of Mr. Willis Lloyd Parker 

 and friends, of London, England, had just left us, making us a part- 

 ing present of five bottles of pale sherry ; so we planned to have a 

 quiet dinner to the memory of our guests. Will was to go down the 



OUR CAMP ON INDIAN RIVKR. 



river for wild-fowl, while I pushed up the lagoon in a canoe, hoping 

 to get a young turkey or two from a flock I had seen a few days 

 before on a sort of island. Caesar remained at the tent to take care 

 of things. An hour of leisurely pulling over a still dead sheet of 

 dark water brought me to where the lagoon forks at a sharp angle, 

 flowing on either side of a densely wooded tongue of land, to where, 

 a mile away, a barely perceptible shallow slough runs across from 

 prong to prong, thus making a triangular island, barely separated 

 from the main-land by this slough, over which deer or turkey could 

 easily pass at low tide. I had caught sight of a late-hatched brood 

 of turkey just at twilight one evening as I was passing this point, 

 but they turned and ran into a thicket, and I did not care to follow 

 them with only a few minutes of day-time to spare. I had come 

 prepared for them now, and, looking about for a landing-place, I 

 drew the canoe into a reentrant angle of the shore, and secured it 

 just as the sun of a semi-tropical winter day made glorious all the 

 points of the flat verdurous landscape. Strapping on my quiver and 

 stringing my bow, I plunged into the marshy wood where vines, moss. 

 low-hanging boughs, tufts of palmetto and saw-palm made progress 

 at times a matter of great labor, and attended with so much noise 



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