A visit to a decoy, by Philippa Sedley

An original piece of travel writing written in a nineteenth-century voice; a period simulation, not an archival document.

In this extract from a travel book published in 1854, a woman describes visiting a duck decoy, a hidden pond where wild ducks were trapped for sale, in the marshes of Somerset.

Of all the curiosities which the traveller may be shown in this flat and watery country, none is guarded so jealously as a decoy. Mr Tapp, the decoyman at Sedgemere, would admit my brother and me only on condition that we neither spoke, coughed nor wore anything white, and that we kept a piece of smouldering turf in our hands the whole while, so that the ducks should smell the smoke and not ourselves.

The decoy itself is a still pond of some two acres, hidden in a thick wood of alders. From each corner runs a curving ditch, which Mr Tapp calls a pipe, covered over with netting upon hoops and growing narrower and lower until it ends in a bag of net no bigger than a sack. Along the sides of each pipe stand screens of reeds, so placed that a man may move behind them unseen.

On the pond that morning sat, by Mr Tapp’s reckoning, nearly a thousand wild ducks. His little red dog, Piper, was the whole of the trick. At a sign from his master it trotted in and out between the screens, showing itself for a moment and then vanishing, and the ducks, who are as curious as old women at a window, swam after it into the mouth of the pipe to see what it might be. Then Mr Tapp stepped into view behind them, they rose in alarm, and flew straight on into the narrowing net.

Forty-two birds were taken before breakfast, to be sent by the carrier to the London markets. I confess I admired the dog a great deal more than I liked the business.

(a) What did the visitors have to hold in their hands throughout the visit? (b) What did the dog do to lure the ducks into the pipe? (c) What does the final sentence suggest about the writer’s feelings about the decoy?