by Jay Cassell
“Is that it, Andy?” the Old Man asked. For answer Andy took us to his back porch and exhibited a possession limit of snow-sprinkled redheads. Andy said indeed this was it, but if the weather kept up it might drive every duck out of the country before morning.
“Bosh!” said Mister President. “Only the shallow lakes and potholes will freeze. The ducks’ll have to wet their feet in big water tomorrow morning.”
Such a man, that Andy. Once he walked two miles in the rain with a heavy jack to hoist us up and put on our chains.
The snow kept up. At Gordon we turned off. The Old Man was wide awake now.
“She’s a good un,” he said, watching the county trunk. “Come so quick they haven’t got all the snow fences up. If you see a drift back up and give ‘er tarpaper.”
Tarpaper was required in several places. I complimented him on the power under the hood of his newest contraption but he was not enthusiastic—“ They ’re all too low, no good in a two-rut road. They’re making them so low pretty soon you can use a gopher hole for a garage.”
It grew dark. The driving flakes stabbed at the windshield. By the time I was ready to turn off the county trunk onto the town road the Old Man had demanded the driver’s seat. He knew that the in-road would be well filled with snow. I protested but he said I could drive “the day you learn your driving brains are in the seat of your pants.”
There were a few spots on that narrow road between the jack pines where we barely got over the rises. The car was pushing snow 12 inches deep when we stopped at the top of the last hill.
We went ahead and got a fire going. When I got to the cabin with the first load the fireplace was roaring and he was coaxing the kitchen range to life. By the time I had hauled in the last of the gear and shoveled the snow off the stoop he had water hot enough for tea. While we ate supper the temperature slid from 28 to 24.
We hauled in wood, broke out blankets and took a hooded motor from the shed down through the snow to the lake. We took a boat off its winter roost and set it handy by the edge of the tossing lake. We brought down guns and decoys, put them in the boat and covered everything with a canvas tarp. Then there was time to size up the night.
It was a daisy. There was snow halfway to the knees on the beach. The flashlight ’s circle revealed a black, tossing lake. From the hill at our backs the wind screamed down through the pine trees.
“How ’d you like to be a field mouse on a night like this?” Hizzoner reflected.
We went back up the hill. The last thing Mister President did was study the thermometer. I heard him say, “She’s dropped to 22 and it’s only 8 o’clock.” After that the fireplace crackled, the wind cried, the blankets felt awfully good . . .
In the morning there wasn’t a breath of wind. Of course he was up before me, useful and belligerent. Everything was ready, including the country smoked bacon. I started to open the door to inspect the thermometer and he announced, “Fifteen about half an hour ago.”
I studied him jealously as I have often. There he was, 30 years older than I, tough as a goat, alert as a weasel. He’d just finished an exhausting business trip. Forty-eight hours before he had been 600 miles from this place. He ate six eggs to my four, eyeing me with the indulgent authority a bird dog man feels for a new pup.
“The hell with the dishes and put on all the clothes you’ve got,” he directed.
The lake in the darkness held an ominous quiet, like a creature which had threshed itself to exhaustion. We flung off the tarp with one flip to keep snow off gear, slid in the boat, screwed on the motor and roared out.
We were afloat on blackness, rimmed with the faint white of snow on the shores. Mister President huddled in the bow in the copious brown mackinaw, its collar inches above his ears. He fished in pockets and drew on mittens and when his hands were warmed he fished again and presently a match glowed over the bowl of his crooked little pipe. I saw that he was grinning, so I throttled the motor and yelled, “What’s the joke?”
“No joke,” he came back. “Just a morning for the books.”
The run to this place requires about 30 minutes. Dim landmarks on shore were illuminated just enough by the snow. We cut wide around the shallow point bar and went south for the shallow end of the lake. The Old Man has bet that he can, blindfold, land an outboard within 100 yards of the shallow bay point from our beach. There are no takers.
A little daylight was making as I cut the speed and turned toward the shore. The President said. “Go back down the shore further from the blind. The boat’ll stand out against the snow like a silo.” We beached 200 yards from the point.
There was plenty of time. When the Old Man is master of ceremonies you get up early enough to savor the taste of morning. And what a morning! Just once in a coon’s age do the elements conspire with latitude to douse North Wisconsin with snow of mid-winter depth in October. It is a very lovely thing. We toted up the gear to the blind. I was impatient to get out in the shallows in my waders and spread decoys. The Old Man detained me.
“I suppose,” he said, “that when a man quits liking this it’s time to bury him.”
He was determined to size up the morning, and he did size it up. Between hauls on the blackened brier he continued, “Once before I saw this point just as pretty. Back in 1919. Just about the same depth of snow, same old lake black as ink, trees ag’in the sky . . .”
I had paused to honor his rhapsody, so he snorted, “Get them boosters out there, dang yuh, while I rebuild the blind!”
Rebuild it he did, pausing now and then in the growing light to tell me where to place the next decoy. In the blind I found he had the rough bench swept off, the blind repaired and a thermos of coffee at hand. He sat on the right side of the bench and both our guns, his automatic and my double, were held away from the snowy wall of the blind by forked sticks. It was unmercifully cold for sitting. He explained his thesis for the day—
“The potholes chilled over in the night. The ice crep’ out from shore. The ducks huddled up, getting closer and closer as the ice reached for ‘em. First good daylight they’ll look around at each other and say, ‘Let ’s go. This place is getting too crowded.’”
“You don’t suppose they’ve all left the country?” I ventured. There was scorn in his reply.
“The best ducks stay ‘til the last dog’s hung.”
A burst of bluebills went over and planed into the lake, far out.
“They were up awfully high for cold weather ducks,” I said. “I’m afraid if they move they’ll go a long ways today—if there are any left around.”
“They’ll be lower,” he said.
A pair dropped in from in back of us. It was apparent they’d come in from any quarter in the absence of wind. I reached for the gun and slid out a toe to kick my shellbox. The Old Man put a mittened hand on my right knee. I could feel his fingers squeeze through leather and wool. Following his eyes I saw what he saw.
They were at the left, about a hundred ducks, an embroidery of ducks, skeined out in a long line with a knot at the head. We crouched down and the Old Man whispered:
“Pothole guys, friz out. Might be from Minnesota. Maybe Ontario. They’ll swing and size ‘er up and the whole dang bundle will—”
Swi-i-i-ish!
While we had watched the mid-lake flock fifty or so had slid into the decoys, bluebills everyone. The President from his corner eyed me and whispered, “Flyin’ high, did you say? No, don’t shoot! We’re gonna have fun.”
The mid-lake flock swung in, decoyed by their confident cousins. The President of the Old Duck Hunters’ grinned like a schoolboy. He was on his knees in the trampled snow, close against the front wall of the blind. So was I and he was laughing at me. Fifty ducks sat in the decoys, another hundred were coming in, and the Old Man said to me:
“Hold out your hand so I can see if you’re steady.”
At the moment that the landed birds were flailing out the incomers were tobogganing in with their wing flaps down. The Old Man
arose and shouted:
“Hello, kids!”
His deliberateness was maddening. I emptied the double before he brought up his automatic. I reloaded and fired again and he still had a shell to go. He spent it expertly on a drake.
Then the ducks were gone and I was trying to stuff a round brass match safe into the breech and the Old Man was collapsed on the bench, laughing.
“Up high for cold weather ducks!” he howled.
There were seven down, two far out, and as I raced back for the boat Mister President heckled, “Wish I had that East Lexington boulevard Snootzer here and I’d learn him to be a dog!”
As I rowed out for the pick-up he shouted across the water, “Do you get a bottle of turpentine with every Snootzer you buy?”
As he had predicted, it was a day for the books. The clouds pressed down. They leaned against the earth. No snow fell but you knew it might any minute. There were not just clouds but layers of clouds, and ramparts and bastions and lumps of clouds in between the layers.
We sat and drank coffee. We let bluebills sit among the decoys. That was after Hizzoner decreed, “No more ‘bills. Pick the redheads if you can. If you miss a mallard I’ll kill yuh.”
The quick dark day sped by. To have killed a hundred diving ducks apiece would have been child’s play. Canvasback, whistlers, mergansers, red heads, and bluebills by the hundreds trouped over the hundred-year old decoys which are the sole property of the Old Duck Hunters’ Association.
“I’d give a lot for a brace of mallards to color up the bag,” he said.
The Lady Who Waits for Mister President likes mallards.
Be assured, mallards were present, as well as those dusky wise men, black ducks. They would swing in high over the open water and look it over. They did not care for any part of our point blind in the snow.
“Wise guys,” Mister President said. “They see the point and two dark objects against the snow in the blind, and one of the objects wiggling all over the place. That’ll be you.”
We went back to the boat and fetched the white tarpaulin. He threw it over the top of the blind and propped up the front of it with cut poles. The tarp erased us from above and seven laboring mallards swung closer. Before throwing off the tarp, Mister President whispered: “Slow down sos’te to nail ‘em.”
Back went the tarp. I missed a climber, then crumpled him. Hizzoner collected three. He just spattered them. Because these were for the Lady Who Waits.
We picked up and hauled out, raising rafted diving ducks in the long run back.
We hoisted the boat onto its winter trestles, upside down, to let it drain and dry. We put the gear beneath it and slung the tarp over it. We went up the hill and stirred the fires.
I got supper. I worried about the super-duper on the hilltop at the road’s end but he said he had drained it. I lugged in more wood and heaped up the fireplace.
He said in the morning we might have to break ice to get out from shore. He said, “We might not see much more than whistlers.” He said to steep the tea good. He said not to forget to climb down the well and open the bleeder on the pump “because she’s going to really drop tonight.” He said he thought he’d “take a little nap ‘fore supper.” And finally he said:
“Draw them mallards, will yuh, son? She likes ‘em drawed.”
From Stories of the Old Duck Hunters. Reprinted with permission of Willow Creek Press. Readers interested in books by Gordon MacQuarrie should go to www.willowcreekpress.com.
The Wings of Dawn
GEORGE REIGER
Outsiders call us sadists or masochists; sometimes both. Others—mostly ourselves—describe our activities in romantic, even heroic, terms. We take ourselves very seriously and tend to forget that much of duck and goose hunting is fun and sometimes ridiculous.
For two days last season, I scouted a piece of salt marsh where several black ducks and mallards appeared to be in residence. I decided to go in the next day at dawn with my layout boat to try to decoy a limit. All night long, a northeast wind pushed the ocean through the inlets and over sod islands so that by first light, with my retriever tucked between my knees and myself tucked horizontally into the 9-foot punt, the tide began to float the boat off the point where I had hidden her.
I worried lest the boat’s rocking would alarm ducks and wondered whether the brisk breeze wouldn’t blow the punt completely clear of the reeds. I sat up, took one of the oars, shoved it hard down into the mud, and tied the painter to it. Now let her blow!
A half hour passed with no ducks to the decoys. Geese were fly high overhead, and ducks were trading in the distance. But the storm tide had lifted the boat well above the grass, and little white-capped waves slapped the hull and rocked my half-dozen decoys.
I was on the verge of packing it in when a pair of black ducks appeared low over the marsh obviously looking for company. I squiggled lower, hissed at my dog to stay down, and watched the birds approach from under the brim of my cap. My face was blackened, my pale hands were gloved, and only the stark bar of blued metal and wood resting across my camouflaged chest would spark the birds’ suspicions.
Ordinarily they should have come straight in. But with all the marsh under water, they were wary of the curious “log” bumping near their rock-and-rolling buddies. Something wasn’t right. They decided to swing by, look the situation over, and think about it.
“Just one,” I pleaded. “Just one would make a perfect day. But, Lord, wouldn’t a double be sweet!”
The ducks were gone half a minute. Then I noticed them to my right, flying wide of the decoys, but lower. When they turned upwind, no more than ten feet off the water, I knew they were coming—100 yards, 90, 80, 70 . . .
When the birds were less than 60 yards away, the oar suddenly pulled from the mud, surged into the air, slammed down on my head, startled the dog into jumping overboard, and the boat shipped a barrel of icy water that poured in like electricity around my crotch. I watched the black ducks blow away: 150 yards, 200, 300 . . . Then the sky broke loose and sleet obliterated the scene.
With the punt drifting away from the decoys, the dog paddling and whimpering in circles around me, and freezing water sloshing around my hips every time I made the slightest move, I did what any sane man would do: I laughed. I laughed and cussed and laughed again at all the follies of our magnificent recreation.
Halfway through the season, I left a dozen decoys out overnight in a pond. When I returned at dawn, I found two teal missing from the rig. Considerable searching turned up only one where an otter had pulled the bird—dragging the line and weight behind it—30 yards from the edge of the water. Somehow this otter, or a companion—the busy, back-and-forth tracks of otter never make such things clear—had contrived to carry off the other decoy to do with it what only an otter can tell.
I was fascinated; I was charmed. What a bizarre fate for a teal drake facsimile: that it becomes an otter’s plaything. When I told one of my neighbors about the experience, he snorted and asked if I had shot enough ducks that day to make up the loss. But then, this man doesn’t pretend to be a sportsman.
Two Washington, D.C., friends came down to share a seaside outing with me. An hour after dawn I was looking behind the blind and out to the ocean when I spotted a pair of puddle ducks coming down the coast. I provided the following, over-the-shoulder commentary for my companions:
“They’re not too high—They should see the decoys—They have seen the decoys!—They’re coming lower—They’re going to circle—You should see them by now—They should be right over you—Why doesn’t somebody shoot?!”
I turned and found both my companions peering around their end of the blind trying to see where I had been looking. No one was minding the store out front.
“Where are the ducks?” they whispered.
I looked up and saw a pair of gadwall hovering and staring down at me with something approaching bemusement.
“There!”
Guns began blazing and seven shots later we
had one of the two birds.
“All right, guys, no more Gong Shows. Each person watches a different direction, and we’ll use compass points to indicate where the birds are.”
“Good idea,” said Paul. “That’s south.”
“No, that’s east.”
“South.”
“Paul, I live here; that’s east.”
“You’re both wrong,” announced Mel, uncapping a tiny compass he had tucked among his spare shells. “That’s eastsoutheast.”
Debating the fine points of the compass kept us busy until a goldeneye buzzed over the decoys without a shot being fired. We then decided to wrap up the compass conversation and concentrate on duck hunting. We compromised by calling “south” and “eastsoutheast,” east and boxed the rest of the imaginary compass card accordingly. Going through the drill made us feel better. It was as though we had actually learned something—as though this time we were prepared for any and all contingencies, even though experience indicates that each fiasco in waterfowling is somehow unique and unforeseeable.
Suddenly we heard the distant murmur of geese.
“North,” said Mel, “and coming this way!”
“More like northwest,” said Paul, “and the wind will carry them wide.”
“Start calling,” I ordered. “And stay back in the blind. We don’t want to spook them while trying to get a look.”
The sound of Canada geese carries a long distance under most any atmospheric condition. Biologists suspect the birds may use their calling to echolocate their way through fog. When Canadas are flying downwind toward a tries of expectant hunters, the honking seems to come from a public address system mounted on the roof of the blind—even when the birds are still half a mile away.
But this time there was no rubber-necking. This time we were ready. My companions and I scrunched into the corners of the blind and matched yelp for yelp the calling of the geese behind us. We didn’t go into action until we saw a wingtip flash about 30 yards above the edge of the plywood roof.