66 AMERICAN GAME. 
it is not liable to the objections brought against the for- 
mer mode, while it affords sport sufficient to glut the 
greediest sportsman, who shoots for sport, not for pot or 
market. 
Niches are cut in the mud-banks, or points, across 
which the fowl fly from the beach to the feeding-grounds, 
and vice versa; into these niches the Egg Harbor skiffs, 
which the gunners use, are backed up, and in these, 
their decks plentifully strewed with sedges, clad him- 
self in dingy sedge-colored raiment, the fowler lies, with 
his heavy guns expectant. His decoys are moored in 
the water around him, and as they bob up and down 
with the bobbing of the tide, they closely resemble a 
real flock of fowl riding at anchor in the shallows. 
Here, so soon as the saffron tints of morning begin to 
steal upon the gray of the eastern sky, the hoarse honk ! 
of the gander reaches the latent gunrer’s ear—his quick 
eye glances to the windward, and faint and far on the 
bright dawning back-ground he discerns, dimly pen 
ciled, the form of the anxiously desired wedge. 
“ Aw-unk! aw-unk!” he sets up aloud the well-sim- 
ulated cry, crouching down closer in his sedge-covered 
egg-shell, and cocks his two ponderous single-barrelled 
duck guns. “Aw-unk! aw-unk!” the leading gander 
answers— Aw-unk ! E-e—awnk!” 
Near by they come and nearer; now he can mark the 
circular sweep of their vast oary pinions, and now they 
spy the stools, and now they stoop toward them—then 
