The latter my boy shot before I knew what he
was doing. He took my reproof in good part, protesting that he had had
only a glimpse of the bird, and had taken it for a possible gallinule.
In the course of the trip we saw, besides the species already named,
great blue and little blue herons, pied-billed grebes, coots,
cormorants, a flock of small sandpipers (on the wing), buzzards,
vultures, fish-hawks, and innumerable red-winged blackbirds.
Three days afterward we went up the river. At the upper end of the lake
were many white-billed coots (_Fulica americana_); so many that we did
our best to count them as they rose, flock after flock, dragging their
feet over the water behind them with a multitudinous splashing noise.
There were a thousand, at least. They had an air of being not so very
shy, but they were nobody's fools. "See there!" my boy would exclaim, as
a hundred or two of them dashed past the boat; "see how they keep just
out of range!"
We were hardly on the river itself before he fell into a state of
something like frenzy at the sight of an otter swimming before us,
showing its head, and then diving. He made after it in hot haste, and
fired I know not how many times, but all for nothing. He had killed
several before now, he said, but had never been obliged to chase one in
this fashion. Perhaps there was a Jonah in the ship; for though I
sympathized with the boy, I sympathized also, and still more warmly,
with the otter.
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