A NIGHT'S BIG GUNNING 345 



not a feather moved until I reached a narrow part of the 

 fleet. Then, with a great to-do, a bunch of mallard rose 

 from a dense clump of reeds within a dozen yards of me. 

 The duck were flying straight away, and holding, as I 

 imagined, dead on to the leader, I pulled. He went away 

 apparently unscathed, however, and a loud — and, I need 

 hardly say, unexpected — yell of, " Mind where ye be 

 a-shootin' to ! " from somewhere close at hand, so " put 

 me off " that I also muffed with my second barrel. 



Cussing my bad shooting and overstrung nerves, I 

 walked up the fleet until arriving at a little sedge-grown 

 bay, where I found the marsh bailiff and his son seated 

 in a leaky old punt, '' bobbing " for eels. 



I very soon learned that the marshmen had disturbed 

 any fowl which might have inhabited the remaining length 

 of the fleet, by poling their clumsy craft along the same. 

 To have taken further trouble with the water would, 

 under such conditions, have proved futile, and, having 

 made glad the hearts and stomachs of the eel -fishers with 

 a wee drappie of Scotch whisky from my flask, I retraced 

 my footsteps to the gut wherein I had moored the punt. 



For a long hour did I sit, gun in hand, in that muddy 

 little rill, with never so much as seeing a dunlin even, and 

 I was in the act of pushing into the creek when the cackle 

 of a mallard caused me to drop the setting-pole and to 

 grab up the cripple -stopper. Fortunately, my head, 

 as I crouched in the punt, was well below the top of the 

 gully ; and very soon the whistling of pinions greeted my 

 ears. Looking upwards, I saw a bunch of ten or twelve 



