But, when he went out for his initiation, in the raw blackness before
daybreak, and lay in the blind, with only his guide for a companion, he
felt far away from artificial luxuries. The first pale streamers of
dawn soon streaked the east, and the wind charged cuttingly like drawn
sabers of galloping cavalry. The wooden decoys had been anchored with
the live ducks swimming among them, and the world began to awake. He
drew a long breath of contentment, and waited. Then came the trailing
of gray and blue and green mists, and, following the finger of the
silent boatman, he made out in the northern sky a slender wedge of
black dots, against the spreading rosiness of the horizon. Soon after,
he heard the clear clangor of throats high in the sky, answered by the
nearer honking of the live decoys, and he felt a throbbing of his
pulses as he huddled low against the damp bottom of the blind and waited.

The lines and wedges grew until the sky was stippled with them, and
their strong-throated cries were a strident music. For a time, they
passed in seeming thousands, growing from scarcely visible dots into
speeding shapes with slender outstretched necks and bills, pointed like
reversed compass needles to the south. As yet, they were all flying
high, ignoring with lordly indifference the clamor of their renegade
brothers, who shrieked to them through the morning mists to drop down,
and feed on death.