A flight of wild duck crossed our bows at some little distance, a wedge-shaped phalanx of craning necks and flapping wings. I happened to be steering while Davies verified our course below; but I called him up at once, and a discussion began about our chances of sport. Davies was gloomy over them.
“Those fellows at Satrup were rather doubtful,” he said. “There are plenty of ducks, but I made out that it’s not easy for strangers to get shooting. The whole country’s so very civilised; it’s not _wild_ enough, is it?”
He looked at me. I had no very clear opinion. It was anything but wild in one sense, but there seemed to be wild enough spots for ducks. The shore we were passing appeared to be bordered by lonely marshes, though a spacious champaign showed behind. If it were not for the beautiful places we had seen, and my growing taste for our way of seeing them, his disappointing vagueness would have nettled me more than it did. For, after all, he had brought me out loaded with sporting equipment under a promise of shooting.
“Bad weather is what we want for ducks,” he said; “but I’m afraid we’re in the wrong place for them. Now, if it was the North Sea, among those Frisian Islands——” His tone was timid and interrogative, and I felt at once that he was sounding me as to some unpalatable plan whose nature began to dawn on me.
He stammered on through a sentence or two about “wildness” and “nobody to interfere with you,” and then I broke in: “You surely don’t want to leave the Baltic?”
“Why not?” said he, staring into the compass.
“Hang it, man!” I returned, tartly, “here we are in October, the summer over, and the weather gone to pieces. We’re alone in a cockle-shell boat, at a time when every other yacht of our size is laying up for the winter. Luckily, we seem to have struck an ideal cruising-ground, with a wide choice of safe fiords and a good prospect of ducks, if we choose to take a little trouble about them. You can’t mean to waste time and run risks” (I thought of the torn leaf in the log-book) “in a long voyage to those forbidding haunts of yours in the North Sea.”
“It’s not very long,” said Davies, doggedly. “Part of it’s canal, and the rest is quite safe if you’re careful. There’s plenty of sheltered water, and it’s not really necessary——”