Or maybe you were in a boar, backing water with your oars soundlessly, with an uncle to curse you softly if you made so much as a low splash, with a night sky under your boat as well as over your head, floating through a dream, between moonlit islands looming like ghosts, the strange, continuous rustic of tide all around, drifting out of moonlight into dark caverns of shadows under overarching spruces, through tunnels of trees. You heard the brush of wings overhead. You dropped your two oars, snatched your gun from the gunwale, your uncle and you reared up, drew a quick bead up along the line of chalk on your barrels at a vanishing strand of moonlight, let go, and heard ten later guns let go and echo and roll around a startled, still ocean world. And down from the boughs drifted the strand of moonbeam and plopped in the water by you or, if you were as expert as my Uncle Andrew was, into the boat at your toes.
Once when I shot under a vast hemlock in which 1 heard the rustle of night wings, something vast as a planet came down on me and half filled the dory. A beak large as a scimitar fastened itself into my astounded Uncle Andy's trouser leg. And there, between us as we floated out into the moonlight, was a dying bald eagle. His white shawl of a neck-ruff caught the moon, and his two eyes were like amber stars going out. I was sorry. So was my uncle, and his trousers. It was unlawful. It was unpatriotic. But an American eagle had no right to be acting like a shy mash hen. It was his fault. They had to take a reef in Uncle Andrew. They had to take seven stitches in his pants-leg.
The bird stew the mash hen made had more meat to it than any sandpeep stew. Yet it was as tender meat as that in the smallest and sweetest sandpeep. You cooked the mash hen in the same butter and same iron kettle of the pioneer age, surrounded by the same halos of dumplings and martyred onions. There was more to bite into when you ate him, with the taste of faraway tender onions, faraway moonlight, and faraway sea in your mouth.
Once I fell asleep before the mash hen stew simmering on the stove was done. I woke in an agony to find supper was over and all the eaters had gone to bed. It was like the evening at Waterloo for me. I could smell the savor of the lost supper all through the quiet, moonstruck house. I lay empty in an empty, still house, with such sorrow in me as only a boy of eight can know. I finally fell asleep, but it was with tears in my eyes.
But next morning—glory be!—my mother brought me out my bowl of bird stew. She had saved my bowl of it for me. My mother was a mother like that, always remembering even the smallest boy of us. I sailed into that stew. And wonder of wonders! my mother had saved me all the best tidbits, the liver and heart and gizzard, saved them away from under the mustaches of my uncles. They were all there. And miracle on miracle! that stew tasted a hundred times better, warmed up in this way in the morning, a hundred times sweeter than ever before. I never had known such a flavor and savor. It was the top of all my boyhood breakfasts. 1 did not know it clearly at the time, but I had stumbled upon the science of making even the finest bird stew better. Let it stand overnight, warm it up in the morning, and it gains a hundredfold in magic. Wild birds, like wild codfish and wilder lobster, grow geometrically in flavor when the stews they arc in are aged overnight.
You go get you some of this year's partridge and make a bird stew of them my way. They won't be so miraculous a dish as my boyhood's waders. But your stew will be a monument of happiness just the same.
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