Page:Bird Haunts and Nature Memories - Thomas Coward (Warne, 1922).pdf/176

126 weird tale to tell if the skin-clad figure had not laid aside his paddles and hailed them; as it was, the stranger with his uncouth garments, his big gun, and flat-bottomed craft, was long the talk of the neighbourhood, until he became a well-known character in all the Deeside villages and the city of Chester.

Old "Billy" grounded his son James in the sport, but it was through perseverance that the son became master of the art. In these days of light, narrow, well-decked punts and complicated breech-loading swivel-guns it is not easy to realise the skill that was necessary to work, single-handed, the broad, pointed craft, with only a few inches of protection from the waves, with the great muzzle—loader firmly fixed upon its block. There was no fine balance or recoil in the old gun, only strong rope breeching; both punt and gun had to work together on the bobbing wavelets to secure a successful shot. James was less amphibious in his sporting garments than his father; he was content with a ragged black overcoat, and a black felt pot-hat; yet he could bring down more fowl than many a man with more perfect modern appliances. He was very full of the deterioration of the estuary as a wild-fowl haunt; the fowl no longer came, for they were too much disturbed and could "get no harbouration nowadays."

The pink-footed is now the goose of the Dee; these he had sold so low as 1s. 3d. per head in Chester or to the farmers and cottagers of Wirral. Not only did he shoot them, but at times he would set traps, common rabbit gins, in neatly hidden holes in the slub. "Laughing geese"—white-fronteds—he knew well, and he had great tales of the former abundance of barnacles. though he persisted in calling them brents, a common confusion. Half-a-crown was the price of a barnacle in Chester market; the true brent, though he knew it, was seldom