Marçais would have preferred to stay there. He liked woodland sport, pheasant shooting in the open with some one beside him to load his gun and point out the game: "A cock on the left, Herr Count," "A hen on your right!" But this kind of thing was not to the liking of the Grand Duchess Aurora, who detested everything official on such occasions and in any case showed a marked preference for water-fowl. Soon the stunted trees grew rarer, great wastes of marsh appeared, under a sheen of grey and pale green. The sun above was already a glowing ball, low down on the horizon. Two servants were waiting for us at a little rustic hut. They took our horses. Marçais had his dog, Dick, a big Auvergne pointer, hard of mouth and apt to range rather far, though it came to heel well. The Grand Duchess's ugly black and red spaniel seemed a kind of dog brother to Taras-Bulba. In sheer joy Aurora dropped the reins and sprang from her horse. I can still see her opening her "Hammerless" and slipping in the two mauve cartridges. I can still hear the sharp click of the brass rim against the steel of the barrel.... At fifteen, armed with an old fowling-piece, I had already tasted the extraordinary delights of shooting over marsh. When, later, I was in the army, firing at disappearing targets had seemed to me mere child's play compared to the fine right and left at diverging snipe I managed to pull off more than once in those early days. To the north of Dax there is an immense marsh bounded by the wretched hamlets of Herm and Gourbera. You reach it through a gorge known as "La Cible" because the Emperor's gamekeepers used to shoot there in bygone days. Here was the same misty waste. How well I remember the soft squish of the wet ground, as if the earth itself were dissolving, and the tall yellow grasses, which are sharp as a knife and cut your hands if you're foolish enough to touch them. I knew all the birds and beasts, all the varied life of those stretches of mud, treacherous beds of green moss, reed-fringed ponds--the whole great expanse that looks so flat and monotonous. Like the fair sportswoman of the Volga marshes, I knew all the birds that haunt these wan regions: the black, or water-rail, which hops about in leafless trees; the red-rail, or corn-crake, which runs at lightning speed through the high grass, throws the best dogs off the scent, reduces the sportsman to breathlessness and makes you think you are after a hare, until it suddenly decides to take wing, from which moment it becomes an easy prey, poor, silly thing. There were many species of duck, which sweep dizzily overhead in their curious oblique and rigid flight; shovellers, pochards, sheldrake, with their pretty red heads; shrill-voiced teal, which fly in couples and have a trefoil of three black feathers on their ruddy breasts. There were lapwings, black and white, like magpies, which rise up swiftly with their croaking cry and then swoop wildly to earth to dodge your shot.