126 BIRD HAUNTS AND NATURE MEMORIES 



weird tale to tell if the skin-clad figure had not laid aside 

 his paddles and hailed them; as it was, the stranger with 

 his uncouth garments, his big gun, and flat-bottomed 

 craft, was long the talk of the neighbourhood, until he 

 became a well-known character in all the Deeside villages 

 and the city of Chester. 



Old " Billy " grounded his son James in the sport, but 

 it was through perseverance that the son became master 

 of the art. In these days of light, narrow, well-decked 

 punts and complicated breech-loading swivel-guns it 

 is not easy to realise the skill that was necessary to work, 

 single-handed, the broad, pointed craft, with only a few 

 inches of protection from the waves, with the great 

 muzzle-loader firmly fixed upon its block. There was no 

 fine balance or recoil minimiser in the old gun, only strong 

 rope breeching; both punt and gun had to work together 

 on the bobbing wavelets to secure a successful shot. 

 James was less amphibious in his sporting garments 

 than his father; he was content with a ragged black over- 

 coat, and a black felt pot-hat; yet he could bring down 

 more fowl than many a man with more perfect modern 

 appliances. He was very full of the deterioration of the 

 estuary as a wild-fowl haunt; the fowl no longer came, for 

 they were too much disturbed and could " get no har- 

 bouration nowadays." 



The pink-footed is now the goose of the Dee; these he 

 had sold so low as is. 3d. per head in Chester or to the 

 farmers and cottagers of Wirral. Not only did he shoot 

 them, but at times he would set traps, common rabbit 

 gins, in neatly hidden holes in the slub. " Laughing 

 g eese " white-fronteds he knew well, and he had great 

 tales of the former abundance of barnacles, though he 

 persisted in calling them brents, a common confusion. 

 Half-a-crown was the price of a barnacle in Chester 

 market; the true brent, though he knew it, was seldom 



