Hostages to Fortune by William Humphrey Page A

the river and passed under the trestle into the bay. Under reduced power they crossed the open water to the marsh. There Tony cut the motor and took it aboard and stood with his long push-pole. In their jump-shooting it was always Tony who poled. There was a knack to it, a final twist of the pole against your hip, gondolier fashion, that momentarily turned the pole into a tiller and steered the boat through the tortuous narrow channels, a knack he could never get.
    They entered one of these channels tunneled by tall purple loosestrife and cattails. Their heads frazzled and faded, these latter looked like oversized cotton swabs. Darkness was lifting as they glided silently along the channels and through still pools that shone like quicksilver. At their edges floated pinfeathers plucked from themselves by preening ducks. He could just see to shoot now and he loaded his gun and stood, bracing his right leg against the seat, rocking in rhythm to Tony’s steady stroke of the pole. Their progress resembled that of the lone gallinule that swam in spurts ahead of them, its head bobbing.
    It would be a day early in the season but it would not be opening day. That they passed up. Too many green and greedy gunners then, who opened fire on birds impossibly out of range and scared them off from gunners into whose range they were being decoyed. The bay sounded like warfare then, and sometimes erupted into it, with shots exchanged not far above heads. Now you shared it with fewer, more dedicated, more experienced, and more courteous sportsmen.
    They rounded a bend and a pair of mallards flushed, beating the water with their wings in their takeoff. They were thirty yards away when his swing picked up and momentarily blotted out one with the muzzle of the gun. Then the sky reappeared momentarily and in that moment he fired. The boom reverberated around the bay and without pause he swiveled, picked up, at forty yards, the second bird, covered it, swung past, taking a slightly longer lead this time, fired, and followed through on his swing. Whether he had touched either bird he did not know. Or rather, he knew he had, but he had not seen it happen.
    â€œKeep that up,” said Tony as Nero swam back with both birds by their necks in his mouth, “and you’ll have time on your hands waiting for me to fill my limit.”
    The shots had disturbed the birds in the area and they took to wing out of range. Without putting up another they reached their blind on the edge of and commanding its own spot of open water. They set out their stool of decoys, concealed the boat, and climbed into the blind. They had built it on weekends in early autumn, boating out on a falling tide with poles for the stilts and boards for the floor and the walls and hemlock boughs to camouflage the whole thing, working when the bay was drained, then boating back when the tide had risen to float them. Just out of gunshot range from one another, other blinds were going up on those weekends. Come opening day of the season, the bay looked like the site of some primitive tribe of bog dwellers. Yours brought back to you the clubhouse you had built with some playmate as a boy.
    They stood back to back and each scanned his section of the gray sky. To the west the mountains loomed loftily, their tops still indistinct, as though the day came up from earth and forced the night to lift. Guns were beginning to sound now, most often automatics emptying their legal limit of three shots, in fire so rapid the echoes, trapped by the low-lying cloud cover, got in one another’s way.
    â€œWood ducks!” Tony hissed. “Wood ducks!”
    He too had spotted them, a flock of seven or eight, and had identified them by their speed and by their characteristic bunching and scattering in flight and by their habit, unique to them among ducks, of turning their heads in flight. Both froze, hunching to conceal the white of their faces, not daring to look to the side farther than