The survivors would take to the air and away. But in a few minutes another whisper would come down the wind, a vaster flock would swing on down, and a hundred more birds roll along the ribbon of the coming tide at the muzzles of our guns. Our guns would go off again as they bunched. And away I would leg it for new sinews of our bird stew.
When my uncles and I were loaded down by strings of small birds so we could barely waddle, we stumbled boatward with the kill and walked the meadows home, and threw down our bag and covered the farmhouse floor. We called to the womenfolks and girls. They came and plucked our birds. Masculine hands, even tough small boy hands, were too clumsy for such plucking of feathers like moonbeams. It took cousins of moonbeams to strip the feathers from these strands of moonlight. It took the women and girls hours. But they got the slim birds bare at the last. Maybe forty-fifty sandpeeps, only a bine to a bird. But oh, it was an Eden of a bite! The women cleaned them, cut off their heads and feet, breezed up the sprucewood fire in the kitchen stove, and heated the kettle. We, uncles and I, sat up and sniffed the air for the aroma of cooking, watered at the mouth, and waited.
The she-ones sautéed the birds in butter first, at the kettle's dry bottom, in new farm butter. Then they added wisps of baby onions—not more than two small innocents of onions to a half kettleful of waders. They let the onions crimp brown with the sizzling meat. Then they added water to cover all and brought the whole mess to a boil. After that, they rolled out flour dumplings, mixed from a pint of flour and a teaspoon of salt, to the thinness of the little waders' breastbones, put these rose leaves of flour in, one by delicate one. Fifteen minutes, then the kettle was set on the back cover of the stove to simmer slow for half an hour or a little longer.
Dinnertime came at last. We sat to our soup plates. We spooned the hot breasts of the birds to our lips, ran the fragile breastbones free of meat with our tongues, and swallowed what was swallowable. The leg and wing meat was cooked off the lacework of bones and had flaked itself up in the brown broth. We had to look alive for bones that might choke us, especially we boys. Very small bones did no harm to swallow. We were experts at separating meat from minute bones with our teeth and tongues. For we had all been trained for years to eat boiled alewives and blow out the lacework of their bones as we gulped down their flesh.
I don't know of any eating as delicate as bird stew. Over the years I can still taste it. It was like swallowing sunbeams.
You can get something of an approximation to that old bird stew of outs by cooking plump young quail or partridge the same way, in the same heavy iron kettle, with the same tissues of moonlight in translucent dumplings. But the effect will never be quite so fine, for these birds of my bird stew were saltwater-bred, fattened on minnows and infant smelt and baby herring. The romance of the sea was in them, the innocence of infants of the sea was in their bones, they were a symphony of bird and fish, neither wholly, but a transfiguration of both. The fish they ate were too young to be fishy and the birds too slender and alive ever to grow tough or fibrous.
But the mash hens topped the whole delicious tribe of waders. They were sheerly poetry on two slender legs.
The shooting of them was even more poetic. For these were waders of flood tide to be shot only by sunset, by moonlight, by starshine. We lay at our lengths to shoot them when the evening had stretched long shadows over the world, when the stars were winking into being, or when the moon was rising. We chalked the barrels of our guns along the sight-line and waited. We heard the low calls of the birds in the dark trees, heard the soft velvet of their wings overhead, We trembled, grew taut, and waited. We heard them light at the sea's edge, maybe, in the gloom, but saw no sign of them yet. We waited until one of the birds crossed the path of light made by a big low star, by the thin young moon at the west, or by the rising world of a full moon at the east. Wc saw a shadow cross the path of light. We fired, and the quiet vault of evening pealed around us, a score of mash hens screamed. We ran—that is, I ran. bayed on by my uncles' bird-hungry, throaty bellows—down to the rim of the tide. And there, if you were a good shot, or a good uncle of a shot, you found a thing like a flake of the moon or the tender part of a star lying in feathers, and you thought of home and supper.
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