WILD WILD-DUCK 311 



blocked cricket balls upon an artificial wicket. Your real clever 

 wildfowler of the shore is not born, he is made by a lifetime of 

 experience. He and a new-comer may start out in opposite 

 directions, and the local may in a night and a day kill far more 

 widgeon and duck than he can carry home at two goes (most 

 likely he will take them in a boat), and your new-comer without 

 assistance may never have been within shot of fowl all the time, 

 and probably will only escape the rising tide by the help of 

 Providence. 



A would-be shore shooter, then, can only succeed by placing 

 himself in the hands of the best local fowler he can get to take 

 on the job. This remark is equally true with regard to the old 

 sportsman from elsewhere as it is of the novice down for a 

 holiday. It is not here only a question of the weather, but 

 largely also one of geography. Every creek through the mud 

 flats has to be mapped out in the mind of him who would make 

 use of creeks in order to stalk wild fowl. Every bank at low 

 tide must be an hour-glass, to indicate just when it will dis- 

 appear and the feeding fowl will be washed off their legs and 

 will have to find other feeding-ground. Those fowl know 

 already where they are going for food the instant they are 

 flooded out, and your real fowler knows it too, and maybe is 

 lying up in a mud hole to intercept them. A mud hole does 

 not sound like a bed of roses, but, by one who understands it, 

 can be made quite comfortable for a winter night's sport with 

 the mercury registering 15 degrees of frost. Indeed, it is not 

 much good at any other time. It is only in the very wildest 

 and worst of nights and days that wild fowling is at its best. 

 There must be snow for choice, and frost also, even on the sea- 

 shore. In fact, the weather must be so hard that the fowl can 

 only feed on mud flats that are tide-washed, for the reason that 

 everywhere else the ground is too hard, and too much covered 

 with snow and ice, to enable ducks to reach the mud bottoms 

 of fresh water, or to enable widgeon and teal and geese to feed 

 elsewhere at all. About once in ten years we have six or eight 

 weeks of such weather, and then the favoured spots swarm with 

 fowl of all kinds to such an extent that for miles and miles 



