But when things went right we had a beautiful shot.  The ducks towered straight up, trying to get above the level of the brush, affording a shot at twenty-five or thirty yards’ range.  We always tried to avoid shooting at the same bird, but did not always succeed.  Old Ben delighted in this work, for now he had a chance to plunge in after the fallen.  As a matter of fact, it would have been quite useless to shoot ducks in these circumstances had we not possessed a good retriever like Old Ben.

The Slough proper was about two miles long, and had probably eight or ten “holes” in which ducks might be expected.  The region of the Slough was, however, a different matter.

It was a fascinating stretch of country, partly marshy, partly dry, but all of it overgrown with tall and rustling tules.  These reeds were sometimes so dense that one could not force his way through them; at others so low and thin that they barely made good quail cover.  Almost everywhere a team could be driven; and yet there were soft places and water channels and pond holes in which a horse would bog down hopelessly.  From a point on the main north-and-south ditch a man afoot left the bank to plunge directly into a jungle of reeds ten feet tall.  Through them narrow passages led him winding and twisting and doubting in a labyrinth.  He waded in knee-deep water, but confidently, for he knew the bottom to be solid beneath his feet.  On either side, fairly touching his elbows, the reeds stood tall and dense, so that it seemed to him that he walked down a narrow and winding hallway.  And every once in a while the hallway debouched into a secret shallow pond lying in the middle of the tule jungle in which might or might not be ducks.  If there were ducks, it behooved him to shoot very, very quickly, for those that fell in the tules were probably not to be recovered.  Then more narrow passages led to other ponds.

Always the footing was good, so that a man could strike forward confidently.  But again there are other places in the Slough region where one has to walk for half a mile to pass a miserable little trickle only just too wide to step across.  The watercress grows thick against either oozy bank, leaving a clear of only a foot.  Yet it is bottomless.

The Captain knew this region thoroughly, and drove in it by landmarks of his own.  After many visits I myself got to know the leading “points of interest” and how to get to them by a set route; but their relations one to another have always remained a little vague.

For instance, there was an earthen reservoir comprising two circular connecting ponds, elevated slightly above the surrounding flats, so that a man ascended an incline to stand on its banks.  One half of this reservoir is bordered thickly by tules; but the other half is without growth.  We left the Invigorator at some hundreds of yards distance; and, single file, followed the Captain.  We stopped when he did, crawled when