Duck-shooting 15 



I took off my coat and put all of my possessions 

 in the line of cartridges on it. Pretty soon a flock 

 of shovellers swept overhead and called forth the 

 first shots. At the reports there was the mighti- 

 est splashing ever heard ; the whole mass seemed 

 in motion ; a few seconds and they were on us. 

 " Pick out the canvas and red-heads," yelled the 

 man who had been there before. " Pick out 

 nothing," hollered his next-door neighbor, as he 

 fired both barrels into the air and loaded and 

 fired again. It certainly was bedlam let loose. 

 All I can remember about this particular moment 

 is, that everybody was shooting as fast as he could 

 load, and ducks were overhead all the time, con- 

 tinuous lines of them ; the air was black ; shovel- 

 lers, teal, mallard, gadwall, every other kind of a 

 duck that grows in Dakota, but somehow very 

 few stopped. How long this flight lasted it isn't 

 necessary to say, but our guns were so hot we 

 could hardly hold them. In a short time there 

 were fewer birds ; small flocks, separated by breath- 

 ing intervals, gave us an opportunity to get 

 collected and straightened out. We attended to 

 business better. A bunch of red-head, about the 

 last left, appeared just overhead. The first man cut 

 down his two, and the rest of us did up the flock. 

 We picked up six. Straggling flocks of teal and 

 shoveller, occasionally mallard, used up the last 

 cartridges, and we gathered up the spoils. On 



