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She was so completely the image of the barnyard fowl that I was slow to realize that here was the most notable game of that part of Virginia, for the sight of which sportsmen's eyes do water. As she was fairly on the wing, I sent my robin-shot after her; but they made no impression, and I stood and watched with great interest her long, level flight.
Almost immediately, in twos and threes, ducks rose and flew slowly over the water, starting up suddenly out of the rushes, and then passing over the sportsmen's heads, a row of silhouettes against the saffron sky. Raisantzeff had the first shot, and with success. A wounded duck tumbled sideways into the water, beating down the rushes with its wings.
Sportsmen's dogs and sheep dogs flee in terror from this mournful place, and when one leans over it one perceives a disgusting odor of putrefaction. Frightful dramas are enacted in the darkness. When an animal has suffered down there for ten or twelve days, nourished on the foul remains of his predecessors, another animal, larger and more vigorous, is thrown into the hole.
He entered the backwoods village of Bytown literally on the wings of the wind. It whirled him along like a big snowflake, and dropped him at the door of Moody's "Sportsmen's Retreat," as if he were a New Year's gift from the North Pole. His coming seemed a mere chance; but perhaps there was something more in it, after all.
When man can exist without killing myriads of animals with every breath of vital air he draws, with every draught of water he imbibes, with every footstep he prints upon the turf or gravel of his garden when he abstains from every sort of animal food and, above all, when he abstains from his great pursuit of torturing his fellow men then let him prate, if he will, of sportsmen's cruelty.
But, provokingly enough, from the sportsmen's point of view, it never dropped far enough astern to bring it level with the bait, while, on the other hand, when it approached the yacht it was careful to keep far enough below the surface to render anything like an accurate aim impossible; indeed it behaved as though it instinctively knew that danger threatened it.
One finds that the apparent subaltern is really a musician, or a musical critic, or an Egyptologist, or a solicitor, or a cloth manufacturer, or a writer. At the outbreak of the war my guide dyed his hair to conceal its tell-tale silver, and having been laughed to scorn by the ordinary recruiting people, enlisted in the sportsmen's battalion.
Rose had said that I should see it written over the door in blue letters and that it was opposite a place where they sold sportsmen's and anglers' requisites, a shop with a sign that would be certain to attract my attention. I therefore walked along with a sure step and suddenly, at a street-corner, saw a great silver fish flashing to and fro in the breeze at the end of a long line.
It was painted white, and it had a narrow front porch, with a scroll-saw fringe around the edge of it; and there was a little garden fenced in with white palings, in which Sweet Williams and pansies and blue lupines and pink bleeding-hearts were planted. The wedding was at the Sportsmen's Retreat, and Jacques was there, of course. There was nothing of the disconsolate lover about him.
It was not his aim to give his foes the least chance to fight back, the slightest hope of battle. He would use any advantage, descend to any wile. This was not to be a sportsmen's war, but a grim battle to the death, inexorable and merciless. These things were all fully known to him before ever he left the hillside, and like a man asleep, walked down to his camp.
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