Fowl Water

Anyone that has spent time around hunters or fisherman have heard stories about days so good they’d make Hemingway blush. The story usually starts with something like… “the birds came pouring into the decoys so fast we hardly had time to reload shotguns”. Tall tales that are typically lit by neon or campfire flames and hyperbolized by alcohol and atmosphere. I’ve heard stories for years from wing shooters and fisherman alike and I always thought that they were laced with a certain amount of bullshit. Portions of these stories had to be true though, right? This guy at the bar wouldn’t just lie to me like that, would he? Maybe there are some things you just have to see to believe.

My journey as a hunter started at a lodge in Eastern Colorado. I was a senior in high school collecting on a debt owed by my buddy’s dad. The guy was a family friend that was a member at a lodge in Fort Morgan and had the privilege of directing the local Ducks Unlimited Banquet. I use the word privilege loosely…If you have ever been to one of these events you know how unruly they can get, and you further understand the need for plenty of helping hands. That’s where we came in. Paul had his son and I help with the silent auction tables and make sure that people kept bidding throughout the event. This was a pretty easy job because as the night went on liquor turned average rednecks into experts on things like wildlife paintings and pewter scenes of horses packing elk. In exchange for our efforts, he promised us a prime rib dinner (provided that night by Ducks Unlimited) and a weekend of field hunting geese at the lodge.

At this point in my life I was a true newcomer to hunting with virtually no experience beyond crows and a ten-pump daisy. I honestly don’t remember if the hunting was any good that weekend or not. I remember allegedly missing a drake pintail (I had no clue what that meant at the time), killing a handful of goldeneyes and shooting one large greenhead that would turn out to be my buddy’s senior taxidermy project. While the trip itself was relatively benign, it left a lasting impression.

After graduating high school, I left the Rocky Mountain West and headed north in search of an education, and more ducks. People think it’s ridiculous, but duck hunting was one of the reasons that I chose to go to school in Idaho (and by people, I mean my mother). Well Mom, I think it’s ridiculous to not take those types of things into consideration. If I’m going to spend four (or five) years of my life living somewhere it should at least accommodate some of my hobbies. I had several family members within a three-hour drive of campus that duck hunted every weekend from October to December, so making the decision of where to go to school wasn’t all that difficult for me. There was something about getting pounded with snow in a duck blind in the middle of November that sparked my interest. It didn’t matter that I was soaked to the bone and colder than a well digger's ass…All I cared about was shooting ducks.

The lake we hunt is a long, North to South body of water that covers an area about the size of Billings, MT. Summers are placid, and winters are frigid, but the few months in between make for a system that is primed for waterfowl hunting.

I got a phone call from an uncle on a Wednesday afternoon in mid-October letting me know that the boat would be leaving the dock at 5:30am on Saturday. That was typically how these excursions worked…the guys with boats would start texting on Monday and by Friday they had a rough roster for the weekend. It was usually a mix of family and friends that have all known each other for a long time and were honestly a little too comfortable around one another. Duck blinds and hunting camps have a funny way of bringing out some of the more shameless traits in men, characteristics their wives thought they had broke them of.

We had a little trouble filling the boat with eager hunters on this particular outing because the reports were calling for unseasonably cold weather and high winds. While these conditions can lead to a bang-up day, they can also create some precarious boat rides. I was young, dumb and green enough that I really didn’t care what the water looked like, as long as we got on some birds. It is not out of the ordinary for portions of the bank to be frozen by this time of year, but the lake typically hasn’t frosted over yet, so we weren’t overly concerned about ice.

The spookiest thing I have ever heard in my life is the sound of cracking ice on a lake at 5am. It seems to resonate out into the bay and slowly dissipate to a faint popping that you can feel where your spine meets your skull.

When we pulled up to the boat launch that day there was no ice on the lake. Not because it wasn’t cold enough, but because the waves were crashing onto the bank and the currents wouldn’t allow any ice to build. At the time, I remember looking at the two more experienced hunters in the party trying to glean their level of concern. I figured that if they thought it was too dangerous to go out that they would call it off. That thought process has led me up far too many old ladders in my time and I’ve since learned to stop making such assumptions about my family.

The four of us loaded our gear and piled into the boat for what should have been a relatively short jaunt across the bay. The plan was to follow the shoreline for a few hundred yards and then cut across the lake to a spot that we had hunted before. The boat driver was a college roommate of my Dad’s and a longtime family friend. He is a gruff, unfiltered bachelor with a raspy voice that doesn’t seems to fit his appearance at first glance. He drives his boat like G.W. McClintock in his last scene of True Grit and doesn’t tend to listen to much bitching…so the best thing to do is put up you hood and find something to hold on to.

As we made it down the shoreline, we were fighting to keep the boat parallel to the bank because of the waves and we had to quarter towards the lake so we wouldn’t take on water. Eventually our driver got tired of fighting it. He squared the boat towards the middle of the lake and pinned the throttle. The swells continued to grow, and it felt like we were riding on a school bus with square tires. It was a constant pattern of riding the waves up and then smacking the hull of the boat back down on the water. Every time the hull of the boat smacked back down it hurled a cold mist up over the bow and on to the backs of our jackets. Except for the driver…he got pelleted right in the face with a cold spray that had turned to ice in the 18 feet from the bow to the stern.

By the time we hit the middle of the lake I could see an unnerving level of concern on the rest of the faces in the boat and we came to a rolling rest. The debate at hand was whether we were going to saddle our pride, turn around and spend the day watching college football or motor on into the storm to collect what we came for. The group consensus was clear…we had made it halfway… aside from common sense, there was no sense in turning back now.

It was the coldest most nerve-wracking boat ride I’ve ever been on and if it wasn’t for the ducks…it would go down as one of the dumbest things we have ever done.

When we got to the bank, we slowly made our way out of the boat and found that the entire beach was frozen. I had no idea sand could freeze like that. The boat ride took longer than anticipated so we were slightly behind the clock with shooting time bearing down on us. We scrambled quickly to build a blind and set decoys, but everything appeared to be moving in slow motion that morning. I unloaded my gear and, as I always do, went to take off my coat. No matter how cold it is outside I always take off my coat when I’m building a blind or setting decoys because I don’t want to start sweating and I don’t want to get my coat wet. A cold day on the beach with a wet coat is a miserable experience. The only problem was that I couldn’t get my jacket off because my zipper was frozen solid. I was able to slide it over the top of my head and stand it up on the beach like a small trash can. As bad as I wanted to sit in amazement, I didn’t have time and it was too cold to be standing on the beach with no coat.

We were able to toss out a couple dozen decoys before shooting light, but the blind was still in a pile on the beach. We ended up having to use rebar and a double jack to set some corner posts in the frozen sand, so we could drape camo mesh across the front for a half ass blind. It ended up not mattering. At the end of the day I think we could have sat in lawn chairs on the beach dressed like spring break tourists and we still would have limited out by 10am.

I hate to be cliché, but there were multiple times during the hunt that we were re-loading shotguns as ducks were decoying to our setup. They were locking in so hard and so fast that it almost felt unfair.

Now – Just to be clear. This was an event that I have never experienced since that day and I likely won’t again for a very long time (if ever). We got lucky. The wind and rough water were funneling birds into the small, protected cove where we were lying in wait. The ducks had no other place to go to get out of the weather and we just happened to be sitting at the mouth of the conveyor belt.

As the saying goes - sometimes it’s better to be lucky than good. On that cold day in October I think we were both.

People often discount hunting and fishing successes by chalking them up to luck instead of perseverance. Many times, we “get lucky” because we find ourselves in the right place at the right time. This may be true but, the part that cannot be attributed to luck is the fact that we were willing to face elements that left others on the couch with a hot toddy. Embracing Mother Nature’s torment allows us to put ourselves in places where the animals are, and other people aren’t.

No good hunting story starts with staying home. Don’t be afraid to embrace the agony because the payoff is a lifetime of stories that people around campfires and poker tables probably won't believe.