Around Goose Island

The Nellie, a hunting skiff, swung to her anchor with a sputter of the Evinrude, and was at rest. Around Goose Island, gray fog hung like cling wrap over a glass bowl of green beans in creamy mushroom soup. The blue-gray-green water, which only occasionally evinced the temerity to slip-slap wistfully at the gunwales, had the uncanny glare of a badly decoupaged brick. A crisp cold front had passed overnight; the air was filled with the calls of migrating ducks and geese; the waters surely abounded also with schooling bass, frisky now, finally, following their corpulent summer. One cormorant, then ten, then one hundred passed in wavering lines, like oil-stains across the November sky. The only thing for it was to come to with our thermoses of Celebes Kalossi coffee (black, neither cream nor sugar), and wait for some unseen flock of geese to escape the fog's greedy palms and pass near our reach . . .

I'm hoping to win the 2010 Federal Duck Stamp competition with this entry:


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