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The Acadian was confirmed in his conviction that the surveyor's invitation for him to come to Houma was part of a plot to entrap him. While he still looked the two men got into the canoe and St. Pierre paddled swiftly away. The pot-hunter let down the hammer of his gun, shrank away again, turned and hurried through the tangle, regained his canoe, and paddled off.
"What day of the month do you make it out to be?" "The second of December." "December!" The packer lay still considering. "Game all gone down?" "I am not much of a pot-hunter," said Paul. "There may be game, but I can't seem to get it. The snow is pretty deep." "Wouldn't bear a man on snowshoes?" "He would go out of sight." "Snowing a little every day?"
As he was a selfish fellow, I suspect that I was indebted for his services to interested motives. He was a pot-hunter, like myself, and would instantly swallow anything I shot, could he but reach it first.
"Behold!" they would say, "Tell is quite the pot-hunter," meaning by the last word a man who always went in for every prize, and always won it. And Tell would say, "Yes, truly am I a pot-hunter, for I hunt to fill the family pot." And so he did. He never came home empty-handed from the chase.
As we have shown, the Italian is a born pot-hunter, and he has grown up in the fixed belief that killing song-birds for food is right! To him all is game that goes into the bag. The moment he sets foot in the open, he provides himself with a shot-gun, and he looks about for things to kill. It is "a free country;" therefore, he may kill anything he can find, cook it and eat it.
The pot-hunter, who had got rid of his game, ventured near his former patron. It might be the engineer could give him work whereby to earn a day's ready money. He was not disappointed. The engineer told him to come in a day or two, by the waterways the pot-hunter knew so well, across the swamps and prairies to Bayou Terrebonne and the little court-house town of Houma.
The mallard pair had few enemies to dread, their island being so far from shore that no four-footed marauder, not even the semi-amphibious mink himself, ever visited it. And the region was one too remote for the visits of the pot-hunter. In fact, there was only one foe against whom it behoved them to be on ceaseless guard.
Those silent, tremulous strands of black that in the morning sky come gliding, high overhead, from the direction of the great sea-marshes and fade into the northern blue, are flocks that have escaped the murderous gun of the pot-hunter.
Napoleon III was not really a "good hunter," though he was something of a marksman and took a considerable pride in his skill in that accomplishment. Entering the democratic era, Jules Grévy seems to have been only a pot-hunter of the bourgeoisie, who practiced the art only because he wanted a jugged hare for his dinner, or again simply to kill time.
As the two travellers stood alone for a moment next morning, the engineer said: "You seem to be making a study of my pot-hunter." "It's my natural instinct," replied Mr. Tarbox. "The study of human nature comes just as natural to me as it does to a new-born duck to scratch the back of its head with its hind foot; just as natural and easier. The pot-hunter is a study; you're right."
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