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Updated: June 7, 2025
There may be some play to this that we don't savvy." "Rats! They've got a bellyful, I tell you. Five's the bunch, ain't it? all but that one we got. I ain't going to stay cached here all day. I want some grub." But McHale persuaded him to wait ten minutes. Then, after exposing a hat and a rolled-up coat as decoys without the least result, they emerged from their fortress.
Suspicion, the offspring of fear, is eminently characteristic of most wild animals. It is, I think, impossible to read the account given by Sir E. Tennent, of the behaviour of the female elephants, used as decoys, without admitting that they intentionally practise deceit, and well know what they are about.
We loaded a boat with the decoys that night, and in the morning, on the first sign of day, towed a box out in position, and anchored it, and disposed the decoys about it. Two hundred painted wooden ducks, each anchored by a small weight that was attached by a cord to the breast, bowed and sidled and rode the water, and did everything but feed, in a bed many yards long.
Next night I was at the same spot with a good duck call, and some wooden decoys, over which the skins of wild ducks had been carefully stretched. An hour after dark he came again, attracted, no doubt, by the continued quacking.
Several fine flocks came in to the decoys; and La Salle, using the double-barrel first, and firing the huge duck-gun at long range, killed three, and sometimes four, out of each flock, while Kennedy groaned in anguish of spirit. At last he could bear it no longer. "Keep close, Kennedy; there's another flock coming, and the finest I've seen this year.
"You must get your wet things off and into bed at once." This came as a command. "Bed! Where? Whose bed?" Was he an Aladdin with a magic lamp, that could summon comfort in that desolation? "Monsieur," I choked, "I owe you a thousand apologies. I came near killing one of your nine decoys. I mistook them for wild mallards." He laughed softly. "They are not mine," he explained.
Five other decoys furnished as many parallelograms of seventeen by eight and a half, which made good two and three quarter inch pipe, and afforded nearly seven feet in length when affixed to the cylinder. It was nearly four o'clock when the work was thus far completed. "If we only had a flat stone to set it on," said Waring.
But the Captain suddenly developed an inexcusable and fiendish energy. "No, you don't," said he. "You come with me and Redmond and get out the decoys." "What for?" I temporized, feebly. "To keep the moths out of them, of course," replied the Captain with fine sarcasm. "Do you mean to tell me that you can sit still and do nothing after seeing all those ducks this afternoon? You're a fine sportsman!
I felt no call thereto, and no necessity to mix myself up in such matters; for I then believed that the politics of our times were a great misfortune to many a poet. Madame, politics are like Venus; they whom she decoys into her castle perish. It fares with the writings of these poets as with the newspapers: they are seized upon, read, praised, and forgotten.
Perchance these ladies are accompanied by pure-minded daughters, all unthinking of the frightful contamination of the numbers of so-called "ladies of fashion" habitués and hirelings, decoys simply in the pay of the gambling propriétaire. It is impossible to know the moral injury it will do these innocent young girls.
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