again and the treacherous duck on the ice started to talk to them.
Let them turn once more, the Colonel said to himself. Keep your head down, and do not move even your eyes.
They are going to come in.
They came in well, with treachery speaking to them.
Their wings were suddenly set to alight, as when you lower the flaps. Then they saw it was ice and they rose, climbing.
The shooter, who was not a Colonel now, nor anything but a gun handler, rose in the wooden barrel and got two. They hit the ice almost as solidly as the big ducks.
Two is enough from one family, the Colonel said. Or was it one tribe?
The Colonel heard a shot behind him, where he knew there was no other blind, and turned his head to look across the frozen lagoon to the far, sedge-lined shore.
That does it, he thought.
A bunch of mallards, that had been coming in low, were flaring up into the sky, seeming to stand on their tails as they climbed.
He saw one fall, then heard another shot.
It was the sullen boatman shooting at the ducks that would have come to the Colonel.
How, how can he do that? the Colonel thought.
The man had a shot-gun to shoot any cripples that might be escaping where the dog could not get them. For him to fire at ducks that were coming to the Colonel’s blind was, in shooting, as bad a thing as one man could do to another.
