"Well, they began to yelp 'Look out for him! Look out for him!' and the ducks knew what that meant. All that great blanket of ducks uncovered the pond with one motion. Grandfather said it was just like a curtain rising straight up, for they were all black ducks. There is no other duck can go straight up in the air. Other ducks slide off on a slant against the wind." How Jotham manages to put the lonely quaver of the yellow-leg's call into that phrase "Look out for him! Look out for him!" with its four-note repetition is more than I know, but he always does, and you can see the big flock swing through the mist as he says it. ***** "Grandfather was pretty mad to lose that chance at good game and he made up his mind that he'd take it out of the telltales, so he began to whistle 'em back. He was a master hand at any wild call and pretty soon he lit the flock. There they were, a rim of yellow-legs all around the pond, a perfect circle except in one place, where some dogwood bushes made down to the water's edge. Then granddad had a great idea. He saw his chance to kill every one of those infernal telltales where they sat. He studied on the size of that circle for a minute. Then he put the long barrel of that old gun between two swamp cedar stumps and bent on it carefully. He kept doing this, looking at the circle, then bending the gun barrel till he had the gun bent just on the curve of the circle of yellow-legs sitting round the pond. Then he smiled for he knew he had 'em. He crept carefully into the dogwood bushes till he was in just the right place, took a good aim round that circle, and then he unlatched on 'em. "Well, he'd figured that circle just right. The shot swung round it and killed every one of them seven hundred and sixty-two yellow-legs right where they stood. But tarnation! He'd forgotten all about himself, he was so interested in the science of it. The back of his neck was right in that circle and the shot came round true as could be and hit him right there. The force of it was pretty well spent going so far and killing so many yellow-legs, but it dented some bits of dogwood leaves right into his system and he had dogwood poisoning pretty bad. He used to have it every year after that, about the time the first northeaster set in." Anybody who knows Muddy Pond will know that Jotham's story ought to be true, for the pond is there to prove it, just as he describes it. *****