Dusky looked up as Blacky flew over him, but Blacky said nothing, and Dusky said nothing.  But if Blacky didn’t use his tongue, he did use his eyes.  He saw just on the edge of the shore what looked like a lot of small bushes growing close together on the very edge of the water.  Mixed in with them were a lot of the brown rushes.  They looked very harmless and innocent.  But Blacky knew every foot of that shore along the Big River, and he knew that those bushes hadn’t been there during the summer.  He knew that they hadn’t grown there.

He flew directly over them.  Just back of them were a couple of logs.  Those logs hadn’t been there when he passed that way a few days before.  He was sure of it.

“Ha!” exclaimed Blacky under his breath.  “Those look to me as if they might be very handy, very handy indeed, for a hunter to sit on.  Sitting there behind those bushes, he would be hidden from any Duck who might come in to look for nice yellow corn scattered out there among the rushes.  It doesn’t look right to me.  No, Sir, it doesn’t look right to me.  I think I’ll keep an eye on this place.”

So Blacky came back to the Big River several times that day.  The second time back he found that Dusky the Black Duck and his relatives had left.  When he returned in the afternoon, he saw the same man he had seen there the afternoon before, and he was doing the same thing, —­ scattering yellow corn out in the rushes.  And as before, he went away in a boat.

“I don’t like it,” muttered Blacky, shaking his black head.  “I don’t like it.”

CHAPTER XX:  Blacky Drops A Hint

   When you see another’s danger
   Warn him though he be a stranger.
    — Blacky the Crow.

Every day for a week a man came in a boat to scatter corn in the rushes at a certain point along the bank of the Big River, and every day Blacky the Crow watched him and shook his black head and talked to himself and told himself that he didn’t like it, and that he was sure that it was for no good purpose.  Sometimes Blacky watched from a distance, and sometimes he flew right over the man.  But never once did the man have a gun with him.

Every morning, very early, Blacky flew over there, and every morning he found Dusky the Black Duck and his flock in the rushes and wild rice at that particular place, and he knew that they had been there all night, He knew that they had come in there just at dusk the night before, to feast on the yellow corn the man had scattered there in the afternoon.

“It is no business of mine what those Ducks do,” muttered Blacky to himself, “but as surely as my tail feathers are black, something is going to happen to some of them one of these days.  That man may be fooling them, but he isn’t fooling me.  Not a bit of it.  He hasn’t had a gun with him once when I have seen him, but just the same he is a hunter.  I feel it in my bones.