Photo — J. L. Darrell 
THE END OF A SUCCESSFUL DAY 
A 
Wild Bill’s Mate 
Thrilling Narrative of Duck 
Hunting 
I T was Thanksgiving Day, and as I 
sat by the window enjoying the 
contented feeling that only a 
turkey dinner with all the “fixings” 
and a good Havana can bring, I noted 
far off across the bay over White Flat 
a wedge-shaped bunch of geese. How 
those honkers ever run the gauntlet of 
gunning stands on Duxbury Beach was 
a mystery; either Hunt’s or Brewer’s 
usually stopped all of them. 
They were tired, and as they 
cut off the yards that separated 
them from the main land a 
plan formulated in my brain. 
White Flat would be uncov¬ 
ered in another hour, and Tom 
and I had hogsheads sunk off 
there in the mussel - beds. We 
had no live geese decoys, to be 
sure, but we had plenty of 
ducks, and sometimes geese 
would come to the latter, es¬ 
pecially if the big fellows were tired. 
Laying my cigar aside for the moment 
I called Tom on the ’phone and made 
my proposition. Tom was ready, in 
fact Tom is always ready when there 
are prospects of getting a duck or a 
goose. I hung up and my wife looked 
at me with a little of uncertainty if 
not disappointment in her eyes. It was 
Thanksgiving Day and it should have 
been ours together. 
“Are you going?” she asked. I 
think so,” I said slowly, not meeting 
her eyes, “but we’ll have next Thanks¬ 
giving together all day.” She did not 
reply for a moment, “All right then, 
By FRANK LINWOOD BAILEY 
Frank,” she said, “but there might not almost in line with my house. Many 
7 . . . • c J tttU Tatyi onn 
be another one.” Then I laughed and 
kissed her and hurried into my gunning 
togs. Taking my Winchester Auto¬ 
matic from the cabinet, I ran hastily 
over its mechanism, fondled it lovingly 
for a moment, then slipped it into its 
water-proof case. The wind was blow¬ 
ing hard and the journey promised to 
be rough and wet. Tom came a few 
M ’ * 
III 
“The water crept slowly to our knees. Tom 
broke the silence: ‘We’ll swim for it at the 
last,’ he ventured almost in a whisper, yet 
he knew there was no hope.” Frank Bailey 
is not only a duck hunter but a story teller. 
moments later, then we caught and 
stuffed a dozen live decoys into a crate 
and were soon pulling across the bay 
towards a flat whose mussel-bed nose 
was just beginning to show above the 
white-caps. 
It was a hard pull, but the little 
dory with a stiff quartering breeze 
under the stern made excellent time 
and fifty minutes later we landed our 
stuff near the buried hogsheads. Tom 
rowed the dory a good two hundred 
yards away, anchored it and waded 
back to where I was rigging up the 
decoys. Already we could hear shoot¬ 
ing from a distant flat landward, 
times my wife had asked why Tom and 
I did not make use of this flat nearer 
home, but the shooting was not as 
good there, so we stuck to our present 
location. Tom removed the water from 
his hogshead and placed five ducks and 
a drake around it, while I took a pail 
that we had brought and scooped the 
water from mine. Then I secured 
“Wild Bill,” my best drake, 
behind me, his mate I placed 
just in front, I knew they 
would “talk” better if I sepa¬ 
rated them by a good margin. 
“Wild Bill’s Mate” had a his¬ 
tory. Her mother was half 
mallard, while her father was 
pure black drake, and wild, I’ll 
tell you how it happened. Her 
mother having quite a touch of 
wild in her used to feel the call 
of every spring migration. The 
I bought her of—and I paid a 
fancy price—said he used to watch her 
every day in April. She would stand 
facing the ocean, her gaze directed 
southward watching for the first flight. 
Her pen was about fifty yards from 
the shore and many times during the 
spring months flight ducks could be 
seen and heard off in the bay. One 
day, late in the afternoon when the 
wind was blowing half a gale, a wild 
black drake alighted unusually near 
the shore. The duck saw him and 
quacked a welcome. He heard her and 
sent back three long calls. Her head 
came up like a flash and she stood 
man 
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