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From a mile or so off, the rising ducks looked like smoke from a grassfire. And pres-ently they started to come over, high and low, in knots of four and five and tens and scores, in waves and droves. It was entrancing in the purest sense of the word, and at times I was too overwhelmed to shoot.

We were on an island no larger than a two-car garage, my bird boy and I, in the midst of the vast marshes of the Rio Parana. It could have been on the moon for all I knew-the better part of an hour upriver from the little town of Esquina, up this tributary and that, through backwaters and sloughs, until the only directions I could identify with any certainty were up and down. Grass on every side, horizon to horizon, and not a tree anywhere in sight. Had my kind-hearted guide, Tata, chosen to head back to town without me, my bones would be there still.

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