Wild Fowl
Cram, William Everett
October 23, I929 THE COMMONWEAL 643 WILD FOWL By WILLIAM EVERETT CRAM HEN as a boy I first went hunting, I was urged by the combined impulses of hunter and naturalist. At that time...
...Starved lives...
...Woodchucks and crows kept persistently out of range that afternoon, and I hesitated to kill blackbirds or squirrels in the summertime...
...so my word must stand or fall as the credulity of the reader shall determine...
...It was the busy haying season and Cleopatra had ridden out into the field load after load, perched on the tall stake at the front of the hay-rack...
...No urge toward finer things...
...An experience of my own while hunting may strike the reader as hardly believable...
...breeding in great numbers in the then almost inaccessible north, black ducks, widgeon and teal came south in successive flights during October and November...
...But to catch the least part of its richer and deeper truths, one must take it in its poignant and at times heartrending entirety, and abandon one's self to an understanding of those unspoken things which batter and caress, shake the foundations of one's being and then softly mold the wreckage into what we lightly call character--and know inwardly to be the flame of spirit...
...No indeed...
...When I crossed the bridge and followed her, she took wing once more, but only for a few yards before falling to earth again...
...whose autumn migrations coastwise used to darken the sky, but the beach plovers, sanderlings and peeps are here in their season in ever-increasing numbers, and exhibit a lack of fear almost equal to that of the sea-gulls...
...Duck had evidently been well aware of the presence of the fox and the hawk, and when my sudden appearance deceived her into thinking that one or the other of these two enemies was upon them, she adopted the quickest and surest method of hiding...
...A black duck with her family of a dozen or more flappers was swimming in the shadow of the bridge, and when I suddenly appeared above the river bank, they all began swimming in circles and splashing the water with their short wings...
...At the close of this north-bound flight, there came an interval of only about two months before the beginning of the fall shooting season, the first of August...
...They would cut a slender hardwood sapling forty feet long, bend it into the form of a half-circle, and make it fast flat on the ground...
...They would like very much to see The Cinderella Princess--one of three plays the manager then has running--would prefer it, in fact, to another play of serious realism...
...Lighting on the broad rim of my straw hat, she scrambled round and round it, chattering with excitement, then took refuge beneath it, perched on my shoulder until the crowd of her pursuers had scattered...
...Then I fired, and wading out among the rushes, keeping track along the line of shot-punctured reeds, picked up my water-fowl and carried it home to my hungry little falcon...
...They were the last I have ever seen...
...October 23, I929 THE COMMONWEAL 643 WILD FOWL By WILLIAM EVERETT CRAM HEN as a boy I first went hunting, I was urged by the combined impulses of hunter and naturalist...
...The only witnesses of my shot were the redwlnged blackbirds and dragon-flies...
...In this way she led me to the edge of the woods a hundred yards away from water, and then flying up into the air with all the swiftness of a perfectly well duck, she returned and led her flock away...
...Usually when I approach the reedy pools where they swim, they just slip into hiding in the sedge...
...She caught a few grasshoppers and then started out across the pasture on a bird hunt, but quickly returned pursued by an angry mob of king birds, blackbirds and swallows...
...A playwright and a manager are discussing theatre audiences, with the inevitable conclusion that they are made up of hopelessly commonplace people, who have never known romance in their own lives, and so seek through the theatre a species of vicarious romance with which to brighten their existence...
...Wood ducks (ranked by many artists as the most beautiful bird in the world) nested high up in hollow trees along the river banks...
...At last I heard a water-rail crying among the rushes...
...then carefully sighting, we pulled the trigger...
...Young wood ducks in their first summer's plumage of soft brown and white, were actually easier to see than were their gorgeously marked elders...
...Twenty-four hours was then the length of a hunter's day, the first faint glimpse of daylight showing in the east at 2:30, at that season in this latitude, and from then until dusk shut down there was always the chance of flushing wood duck, bittern, lophan and poke, as you followed the margin of meadow stream from one mill-pond to another...
...One Indian summer day ten years ago, I stood at gaze, charmed by the lovely reflection of blue sky, cardinal flower and pickerel weed on the still water...
...How else can one describe a play which takes two very ordinary lives and gives them that curious illumination which comes only from the most intimate picture of what they have passed through together...
...Now occasional pairs have their nests in upland pastures here and there, and there seems good ground for believing that being unmolested, they may increase in numbers in the years to come...
...The sentimentality I spoke of does not come in the writing of Monckton Hoffe, nor in the superlatively sensitive acting of Ernest Truex as the husband and Marda Vanne as the wife...
...nor did she venture on another bird hunt alone after that for weeks...
...As I had not used a gun long enough to count on making a successful flying shot, I waited and waited, crouching at the border of the sedge vainly trying to get a glimpse of the bird which was continually changing its position, but would not come in sight...
...Certainly the fox would have found much greater difficulty in catching one of them than if they had hidden among the rushes...
...No imagination...
...Then she got up and started waddling lamely toward the woods...
...In those days no other ducks nested here...
...These broods of wild ducklings before they can fly are very amusing...
...In what an infinite variety of ways the wild birds and beasts endeavor to fool their enemies...
...Very ordinary people indeed...
...My little sparrowhawk Cleopatra had been calling all day for fresh meat...
...I recall the days when a herring gull was deemed a prize by the old hunters who often risked long shots in the hope of bringing one down...
...The form in which the story is told is simple enough...
...Scene by scene you are told of the passing magic--of their accidental meeting in the park during a thunder shower, of their swift and sudden love, of their mute and frightened marriage before a magistrate, with two scrubwomen as witnesses, of their rise to a moderate livelihood, o.f the daughter in their lives who has loved too soon and in a way forbidden, of her death in childbirth just as bankruptcy is facing her father, of the irony of his trial when he is reprimanded for spending too much on the education of his daughter, now dead, of the slow and painful return to a modest income with a little house in the country--the very house now about to be leased to the scornful manager...
...The killdeer plover I used to read about, but very seldom saw...
...The butcher's cart passed our place only once a week, and as we used no ice then, the problem of keeping her supplied was difficult, for she would go hungry rather than taste meat that had hung long enough to suit the human taste...
...Now the owners of private yachts are protesting that an open season on sea-gulls is necessary to thin them out and teach them that an expensive private yacht is not meant to be used as a roosting place for such untidy birds...
...Yes--an amazingly simple story, simply told, but with a fidelity to emotional values that almost sets you quivering, does, in fact, force you to a tension relieved only by the silent growth of an unquenchable flame...
...Not one of them was visible for more than the briefest glimpse, for the air was filled with spattering water drops for a height of two feet over a space of a rod or more...
...Theirs have been very ordinary and simple lives...
...The passenger pigeon was gone before my tlme, hut I greatly enjoyed hearing my grandfather tell of their immense flights 644 THE COMMONWEAL October 23, I929 when he was a boy, and how he and his brother netted them in the rye lot at the edge of the woods...
...Grain was then scattered for bait, and with a string fastened to the trigger the boys lay in hiding in the bushes, until down from the sky darted wild pigeons by the thousand, crowding and fluttering thicker and thicker and covering every inch of the ground in their eagerness to get the bait...
...Then the string was pulled, and the sapling, released from its tension, snapped to its original position carrying one edge of the net along with it, and ensnaring perhaps a hundred pigeons, while the others, rising in air, disappeared beyond the tree-tops...
...Wary and swift of flight, they seemed to have a better chance of survival than did the slower winged black ducks, for their brilliant coloring served rather as concealment than otherwise, blending as it did with the reflection of cardinal flower, pickerel weed, wax flower, vervain and pond lilies among which they swam...
...No romance...
...The law for the protection of game birds has in many cases proved surprisingly successful...
...But one morning last summer as I walked across the pasture, I noticed a fox sitting near the river bank, and high up in a dead elm, a hawk on the lookout for game...
...At last I raised my gun, aiming at the sound, until it seemed to come to my ears right along the gun barrel...
...As the two are talking, a middle-aged couple come to see the manager to arrange about leasing him their home for the summer...
...In Goodrich's Natural History, published in 1876, an illustration shows a net exactly similar to this, set on the bank of an English stream and tended by two English boys...
...The black ducks, which slept in great flocks out at sea during the day when the waves were not too rough, and flew in to feed in the marshes and salt ponds at night, furnished night shooting until daylight came again...
...After the last hay load was in the barn I took my gun--a short-barreled muzzle-loader which had a way of scattering the charge better suited to close range than for longer shots...
...Next the bow of sapling was lifted and bent over and caught beneath a trigger where the pegs held the other edge of the net in place...
...Sea-gulls serve as the most striking illustration in this direction...
...As they leave, the manager looks at the playwright, as who should say, "there you are," and the playwright agrees...
...inland to the fresh-water meadows before a storm...
...and yet their numbers continually grew less, and a permanent closed season was established in the hope of saving them while they were yet fairly abundant, but without avail...
...But this is only Monckton Hoffe's way of opening up to you a charmed secret--the real truth about the lives of this middle-aged couple...
...The snap of the percussion cap would be followed by a cloud of smoke and deafening report and a mighty kick on the shoulder, and the charge of mixed shot would go spattering along water, but the dipper almost invariably vanished just before the shot reached him, to bob up serenely from below far out of gunshot...
...For in the trials, hopes and tragedies of this couple, you find one thing magnificently unshaken and rising always stronger--the mute understanding and love that unites them, unsung, almost unrealized, yet worthy of a poet whose instrument is strung with the chords of life itself...
...While her youngsters were still splashing for all they were worth, the mother duck swam away from them into quieter water and took wing with much apparent difficulty...
...The smaller marsh birds, yellowlegs, plover and peeps, as well as the upland plover and killdeer, have in the space of the last few seasons, increased considerably, undoubtedly owing to the year-round closed season recently imposed...
...In the late summer I now hear once more the clear musical whistle of the upland plover, and frequently see them in field and pasture, though for an interval of a score of years or more, I was almost convinced that they had gone the way of the passenger pigeon and the Carolina paroquet...
...At that time the season for shooting water-fowl and marsh birds began in the spring with the first north-bound flight of water-fowl following up the open water of stream, mill-pond and meadow...
...eastward to the salt mud fiats if the night promised to be starlit and calm...
...I have little doubt that my grandfather's great-grandfather used one like it as a boy in England before he sailed across the salt water to these New England shores...
...But the season for marsh birds opened July I5 in those days, so I followed the water course in the hope of getting a shot...
...It was the coming into use of the breach-loader and smokeless powder that turned the tables against them, and I fear the species is almost extinct...
...When the manager asks them some pointed questions about their lives, they laughingly disclaim anything faintly resembling romance...
...the young ducks doing just as she did, probably through instinctive imitation...
...flying low for a few rods beyond the farther bank and then falling into the grass, she rolled over on her back with web feet wagging in the air...
...Not one field-mouse had run out from beneath the haycocks as they were pitched onto the rack...
...I cannot learn of any sign of the return of the golden and black-breasted plovers...
...then suddenly became aware that the very heart of the picture was a pair of wood ducks in full plumage...
...A water-fowl which used to furnish amusing and harmless sport, both to the hunter and the hunted, was the little grebe, dabchick, hell diver or dipper...
...It is satisfying, too, to observe how much less wary they are now than formerly...
...THE PLAY By RICHARD DANA SKINNER Many Waters HERE are moments, it is true, when the American presentation of Monckton Hoffe's play, Many Waters, verges on that softer sentimentality which ultimately obscures deeper feelings...
...In the days of the muzzleloader we used to lie on the bank of the mill-pond waiting impatiently until one of these little tailless swimmers, clothed in fur almost like that of a muskrat, would swim within range...
...The net was fastened at one edge along the sapling, and the other pegged down with forked sticks...
...As darkness came on the night herons, commonly known as "quarks," left their roosts in the tall timber, slowly flying in scattered flocks to their feeding ground...
...It comes merely in certain details of presentation, in incidental...
Vol. 10 • October 1929 • No. 25
