Page:The Way of the Wild (1930).pdf/296

 Murray, rising with the sun, looked out of the one window of his hut and observed with satisfaction that the water was well up in the marshes so that only the tips of the tall grasses showed above the surface. It was a perfect morning for rail shooting—the kind of morning when he could kill two or three dozen marsh hens, as he called them, before the tide dropped. The law forbade the selling of game birds, but Jen had never been a stickler for the law. In fall and early winter the marketing of clapper rails was one of his regular sources of income.

Poling his light bateau across the flooded flats, within an hour he had bagged twenty birds. Some he shot in the water as they swam from one raft of floating sedge to another; others he knocked over in the air as they rose in slow, fluttering flight before his boat. Then, though the water was still high, there came a lull in the shooting. Jen, finding no more birds in the open, turned his punt toward Half-Acre Island. Always when the big tides came many rail took refuge on that little hummock in the midst of the marshes. A walk around its edge should net Jen a dozen or more.

The marshman poled to the hummock and stepped ashore, holding his gun ready. Slowly he worked his way around the island's margin, knee-deep in the tall grasses and weeds. A rail flushed