And then finally there is the hunt after waterfowl to which I must also dedicate a few lines. This hunt can take place only during winter and the colder part of the spring, before the birds migrate from their quarters near the city to the lakes—the suburbs here serving them merely as a kind of emergency halting-place in obedience to the demands of the stomach. This hunt is less exciting than the rabbit hunt is likely to be, but like this it has something that is attractive both to hunter and to hound, or rather to the hunter and his master. The master is captivated by these forays after the wild fowl chiefly in consideration of the landscape, since the friendly nearness of the water is connected with them, but also because it diverts and edifies him to study the form of life practised by these swimmers and flyers, thus emerging a little out of his own rut and experimenting with theirs.
The attitude towards life assumed by the ducks is more amiable, more bourgeois, and more comfortable than that of the gulls. Nearly always they appear to be full and contented, little troubled by the cares of subsistence—no doubt because they always chance to find what they seek, and because the table, so to speak, is always set for them. For, as I observe, they eat nearly everything—worms, snails, insects, or even green ooze from the water, and enjoy vast stretches of leisure which enable them to sit and sun themselves on the stones, with bills tucked comfortably under one wing for a little siesta or preening and oiling their plumage so that it does not come into contact with the water at all, but rather causes this to pearl off from the surface in a string of nervous drops. Or you may catch them going for a mere pleasure ride or swim upon the racing stream, lifting their pointed tails into the air, and turning and twisting and shrugging their shoulders in bland self-satisfaction.
But in the nature of the gulls there is something wild and hectic, dreary and sad and monotonous; they are invested with an air of desperate and hungry depredation. Almost all day long they go crying around the waterfall in bevies and in slant transverse flight, or curving about the place where the brownish waters pour from the mouths of the great pipes into the stream. For the swift, darting plunge for fish which some of these gulls practise is scarcely sufficiently rich in results to still their raw and ranging mass-hunger, and the titbits with which they are frequently forced to content themselves as they swoop above the overflows and carry away mysterious fragments in their bent beaks, must sometimes be far from appetising. They do not like the banks of the river. But when the water is low they stand and huddle in close crowds upon the rocks, which are then free of water, and these they cover with their white feathery masses—just as the crags and islets of the northern seas squirm and writhe with untold numbers of nesting eider-ducks.
When Bashan, barking from the shore across the intervening flood, threatens their security, then it is a fine sight to see them all rise simultaneously into the air with loud cries and caws. But there is no need of their feeling themselves menaced; there is no real danger. For quite apart from his inborn aversion to water, Bashan harbours a very wise and entirely justifiable fear of the current of the river. He knows that his strength could not possibly cope with this and that it would infallibly bear him off, God knows whither or to what distances, presumably as far as the Danube, where he would arrive, however, in an extremely disfigured condition. This is a contingency of which we have already had ocular evidence in the shape of bloated cadavers of cats which were en route to those far-off parts. He will never venture into the river farther than the first submerged stones that line the bank—even though the fierce and ecstatic lust of the chase should be tugging at his limbs—even though he should wear a mien as though he were about to plunge himself into the waves—yes, the very next moment! Full confidence, however, may be placed in his caution, which remains active and vigilant beneath all this external show of passionate abandon. There is a distinct purpose behind all these mimetic onsets, these spectacular preparations for action—they are empty threats which in the last analysis are not really dictated by passion at all, but are calculated with the utmost sangfroid merely to intimidate the webfooted foe.
But the gulls, true to their names, are far too poorly equipped in head and heart to be capable of mocking his efforts. Bashan cannot get at them, but he can send his barks against them, send his voice thundering across the water. This voice has the effect of something material—an onset which flutters them and cows them and which they are unable to resist for long. True, they make the attempt to do so; they remain seated, but an uneasy movement goes through the writhing mass. They turn their heads, ever and anon one of them will lift its wings upon a chance, until suddenly the whole crew, like a whitish cloud, from the core of which come bitter and fatalistic caws, goes rustling and rushing up into the air—with Bashan jumping about hither and thither on the
