FIRST LIST OP THE BIRDS OF THE SOUTH KONKAN. 9 



Up he comes again after a short dive fifty yards the other 

 side of you. As soon as you can get that idiot with the 

 paddle to turn round you give chase. Down goes the Otter 

 again. At last you get a snap shot forty yards off. Off 

 goes your first barrel, and you see the shot strike the water 

 in a wide circle round his poor devoted head. You hear 

 the flapping of many wings, as, startled by the shot, 

 up gets a large flock of Teal from a bed of green rushes, 

 not twenty yards from the boat. You had passed them with- 

 out disturbing them ten minutes ago. A lovely shot, but 

 hardly worth taking with an S. S. Gr. Never mind ! they 

 will settle again, and you give strict orders to your man 

 not to take his eyes off them till they are down. Besides, 

 you know ycu hit that Otter, and are determined to bag him. 

 But the leery brute had dived at the flash, and after a fruit- 

 less search of some ten minutes, you see him a hundred 

 yards ahead, quietly land on the mud bank, and. with a 

 derisive snuffle, canter off, unharmed, into the mangrove 

 swamp. So you give him up. After all what's the good 

 of an Otter ? If you had got him, you would only have 

 kept his skin, till, like everything else in this climate, moths 

 and rats had destroyed it. 



But now your friend and admirer of the blind Baglas is 

 quite sure that the Teal, after circling round several times, 

 have settled somewhere in the main channel. So, after a 

 circuitous route in and out of all sorts of winding channels, 

 you at length emerge once more in the open river, and there, 

 sure enough, are the Duck well in the middle of the stream 

 with no cover within two hundred yards on either side of 

 them. While you are debating whether you will go straight 

 at them, as if you didn't mean it, in the hopes of a long 

 shot, you see another flock of larger birds, Wigeon or Pin- 

 tail, close under the lee of the shore, not very far ahead. 

 There is no time to be lost, for the sun 



" Now sinks behind yon ridge, 

 And the usual evenin? midge 

 Is settling on the bridge 



Of your nose." 



There are high rushes close to the waters' edge, for the 

 tide is half way in. So you determine to land and stalk 

 through the slush. You mark the point opposite which the 

 Duck lie and land, dropping all the loose cartridges in your 

 pocket ia the mud. As you do so, you tramp along some 

 hundred and fifty yards in about as pitiable a condition as 

 a fly in treacle, except that the mud doesn't taste or smell 

 quite so sweet as the syrup, and suddenly you come to one 



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