'What do you mean, as I wish? You know the water. The ice broke like sheets of plate glass as the boat drove into it, and onto it, and astern the boatman shoved them ahead into the broken passage.Īfter a while, the shooter, who was working hard and steadily and sweating in his heavy clothes, asked the boatman, 'Where is the shooting barrel?' He felt the firm bottom of the shallow lagoon, put his weight on the top of the wide oar-blade, and holding with both hands and, first pulling, then shoving, until the pole-hold was well to the stern, he drove the boat ahead to break the ice. Holding the blade he reached forward and punched the handle through the ice. He took the long oar the boatman handed him and reversed it so he could hold it by the blade. 'Be careful,' the poler in the stern said. To the north he heard the sound of breaking ice from the other boats. He could hear the ducks passing in the darkness, and feel the restless lurching of the dog. He stood up and braced himself carefully. 'Give me an oar,' the shooter in the sixth boat said. Then it would break as sharply as a pane of glass, but the boat made little forward progress. It was rubbery and bending against the thrust of the boatman's oar. It was all ice, new-frozen during the sudden, windless cold of the night. Now, the sixth boat turned south into a shallow lagoon, and there was no broken water. A fifth boat had already turned off into a side canal. Somewhere, in each boat, there was a sack with one or two live mallard hens, or a hen and a drake, and in each boat there was a dog who shifted and shivered uneasily at the sound of the wings of the ducks that passed overhead in the darkness.įour of the boats went on up the main canal toward the big lagoon to the north. The shooter sat on a shooting stool fastened to the top of a box that contained his lunch and shells, and the shooter's two, or more, guns were propped against the load of wooden decoys. In each boat, in the darkness, so you could not see, but only hear him, the poler stood in the stern, with his long oar. They started two hours before daylight, and at first, it was not necessary to break the ice across the canal as other boats had gone on ahead.

Across the river and into the trees