Old Cumtuck 



Market hunting on Currituck Sound shaped 

 the people and pride of Currituck country, 

 as surely as it shaped national conservation policy 



By T. Edward Nickens 



T 



JLt must have been the Christmas of 

 191 1 or 1912 when Santa Claus brought 

 Roy Mervin Saunders Sr. a BB gun. "It 

 was a little Daisy air rifle," Saunders says, 

 sitting in the tidy living room of his small 

 house in Chesapeake, Va., where he has 

 lived for nearly 60 years. 



Saunders clutched that prized BB gun 

 with tiny hands as he boated across 

 Currituck Sound, from the Poplar Branch 

 boat landing toward a marshy spit called 

 Red Head Point. His father, Ellie Wilson 

 Saunders, watched over their newfangled 

 one-cylinder Mianus engine. His 

 granddaddy, Daniel Wilson Saunders, kept 

 his hand on the tiller. The boat was hand- 

 built, a semi-deadrise skiff about 21 feet 

 long. It was an unseasonably mild winter 

 morning nearly 90 years ago. 



As long as he could remember — 

 which wasn't so very long, for Saunders 

 was not yet 6 years old — he had been at 

 his daddy's heels, begging to go along on a 

 duck hunt. The Saunders men were noted 

 gunners of Currituck Sound, market 

 hunters who killed ducks, geese and swans 

 they then sold to game dealers for 

 shipment to Northern markets. 



"At that time, you could kill any- 

 thing," Saunders explains. "There was no 

 limit whatsoever. You could kill all you 

 could kill, and you could sell 'em." With 

 his BB gun in hand, Saunders was on an 

 adventure he would never forget, his first 

 trip across Currituck. 



The wind was light and from the 

 west. Shooting was only fair, Saunders 

 recalls, until the wind rose and shifted to 

 north, and bitter cold bore down on the 

 sound in a weather shift not unknown on 

 Currituck. Then ducks and geese filled the 

 air. Their numbers were startling. 



Saunders' father and granddaddy 

 would shoot at as many as three flocks of 

 geese before laying down their guns to 

 collect the birds. Saunders busied himself 

 with his Daisy rifle, but before long he'd 

 run out of BBs and was shivering cold. 

 Ellie Saunders began to worry about the 

 little boy. He hustled him under the bow of 

 the boat and packed dead ducks and geese 

 all around him. 



"Then they went back to shooting and 

 kept piling fowl all around me," Saunders 

 says. "Covered me up till I couldn't see 

 daylight, but I could hear, and I could hear 

 'em shooting." Throughout the long 

 afternoon Saunders waited in a warm 

 chrysalis of dead birds, listening to the 

 boom of his daddy's 12-gauge double- 

 barreled shotgun and the grumbling 

 thunder of his granddaddy's 10-gauge, till 

 darkness silenced them for the day. 



As Saunders tells this story he is 92 

 years old, dressed in plaid pants and a 

 plaid shirt. He gestures vividly — fingers 

 fluttering like ducks raining from the sky, 

 hands holding an imaginary gun to trace a 

 goose's arcing flight. "I'm an odd fellow," 

 Continued 



COASTWATCH 7 



