Oscar let Jackie loose to tour the bank while he and Fabio pulled brush from the pickup beds and filled gaps in the blind. It wasn’t careful work, and the flashlight beams swung carelessly despite the stirring of a thousand nearby wings. Ducks jumped and set even as we tossed the decoys, a few dozen blocks loosely resembling rosy-billed pochards, Agustín conducting the operation with calm certainty.
“Settle into the blinds,” he said. “We’ll shoot our limits and have a full breakfast back at the lodge about nine.”
Given what I know about duck hunting and the improbable limit of 20 birds per gun, I couldn’t have imagined that possible. Agustín pulled the trucks back under the canopy of ombu trees, cut the lights, and let the world go quiet again.
Rooster and I had the blind and Jackie that morning. The marsh opened up in the gray dawn, with a webwork of flooded pasture, bottomland, and the spreading delta of the Paraná River. For miles in every direction the land of Entre Ríos was a waterfowler’s Shangri-la, the birds just beginning to sift out in black skeins, the lodge lights on the hill not a half-mile distant still visible. Finding my place within all this left me so dizzied that Rooster’s first shots caught me off guard. Two big ducks splashed in front of the blind while the remainders passed on down the channel, and Rooster pulled fresh cartridges from a pail staked into the mud.
“Keep that shiny face of yours down and start shooting,” he said, “and you might even get a duck or two.” I sheepishly closed my gun and lowered my hat brim just in time to see some low skimmers approaching from the right. The teal, speeding for other regions, saw our blocks and hit the brakes, and I dumped one nearly in our laps. Rooster had two kickers on the water alongside mine, and Jackie was off and running.
The ducks came in waves of hundreds then thousands, an exponential bounty receding into the Paraná Delta: rosies; white-cheeked pintails; silver, speckled, and ringed teals; Brazilian ducks; and the high-flying flocks of white-faced and fulvous tree ducks. Ducks filled the sky, along with ibis and coots, parakeets and marauding caracara. It was a waking landscape so full and vibrant, it overflowed, and we took advantage of the bounty. At 8:30 our limits were nearly full, and the big ducks, the rosies, had become a load for three men.
Nearly 40 ducks in a morning is more than enough, and by the end you feel it, though the birds keep flying. Of course, as we sat there, letting it all sink in, a column of ducks unlike any we’d seen rose up a few hundred yards out, banked, and funneled before us. Out there on the spit of dry ground, we could just make out the shape of a man working through the thicket at the water’s edge, moving slowly, pushing a thousand waterfowl into flight. Oscar laid a heavy hand on our shoulders, indicating that we should hold our shots.
“Who is that?” I asked Rooster, who asked Oscar the same in Spanish. Oscar pointed a gnarled finger, squinted, smiled. “Agustín,” he said, laughing, and waded out to pull the blocks.
Agustín met us back at the trucks as we were loading, swinging along under the shadow of the ombu trees with a drake rosie in each hand.
A wealth of opportunity awaits: Agustín Bustos and his dog Perón share the Perdiz fields with Rooster Leavens and the author.
“Cripples,” he said, flinging them into the back of the truck. “Breakfast?”
We rode up the hill in satiated silence. To our backs, the ducks multiplied.
IN THE PERDIZ FIELDS WE FOUND THE CORAZÓN OF ARGENTINA and saw Agustín at his best, becoming a corner-piece of the frame. Perdiz is the catch-all name for the family Tinamidae, the grassland birds that are the prize of the Argentine uplands. The speckled blighters that haunt Los Ombués are specifically the spotted tinamou, or Nothura maculosa, and they became my favorite. I won’t remember the details of the birds themselves without Brian’s photos, nor the bending shots, nor the inexplicable misses. What I’ll remember is Agustín astride a dog, holding him suspended on the brink of animation, affording us time to sneak in from the flanks and become a piece of the panorama.
The fields surrounding Los Ombués feel ancient and long-worked. Fenced and bordered by thickets, and dropping downhill from the lodge, the fields are a patchwork quilt of cutover sunflowers, green winter wheat, and tilled soil ready for planting. There are forgotten corners, too, making this a human landscape, not a mechanized one, and the places where the tractors don’t go are thick with tangle. There are makeshift pastures here and there, sheep and goats and pigs intermingling, rooting and grazing on the remainders of the season. There are small houses and stuccoed sheds where smoke rises, and on occasion a child’s face pokes out from behind a fence post.
We parked the trucks at the edge of a wheat field, and assembled our gear on the tailgate. Three massive ombú trees proved the sole interruption in a 100-acre field of consistent, shin-deep green wheat. Knowing little of perdiz, I couldn’t define any likely holding areas in the landscape, other than the scrub edges and hedgerows. But Agustín’s best dog turned his block head into the wind and disappeared into the wheat, locking on point almost before we’d closed our guns.
Perón was a blue Belton setter with continental lines. He’d have looked perfect painted in oils, though confining him to canvas would deprive him of his motion. Walking up tight beside him, I scanned ahead, looking for any indication of a bird. Perón rose and repositioned at Agustín’s command, still fixated on the cone of scent, Agustín equally fixated on him. We followed as he repositioned several times, and Agustín urged us on until the electricity grew palpable under Perón’s nose. Then, as Agustín soothed him, a clattering flush rose 20 feet ahead, and another just after it as a brace of perdiz jumped into the wind.
With all that space and a wide-open flush and two birds bigger than bobwhites, I managed to miss with both barrels, though Rooster dropped the left-hand bird. Perón returned it to Agustín, who bent to praise him then stood to show us the bird: speckled brown and black, long-legged and -necked, designed more for running than the birds I’m used to. Somehow, they’d streaked through the wheat without a wave of implication, and they’d dragged Perón a good hundred yards in pursuit. Rooster and I handed the bird back and forth, trying to make sense of it. That tinamou are the long-lost cousins of the ostrich did nothing to make them more familiar, but Agustín’s call from the right brought us back. Perón was pointing again, his head a swatch of roan above the wheat, and he’d risen already to move farther up the scent cone. This we recognized at once, and we closed our guns to play our roles.
IT’S NEARLY FULL DARK IN THE TREES with just a streak of light along the distant shore, though the birds are still moving, or so it sounds. Jimmy and Rooster are lost to the darkness, but Jimmy’s cigarette flares from the direction of their muffled laughter.
There is more here for me, in the delta marsh of the Paraná River, in the bird fields of Entre Ríos province. But the prospect of more feels still in its infancy, still built upon the first taste of something new and wonderful.
As the birds move and the day descends, I pick a Rosie drake from the pile, smoothing the water droplets so it glimmers. And there it all is in my hands: a glorious composition of dog work and flushing birds, a pastoral place of wine and salt and woodsmoke, of friendship that lingered beyond the setting sun.
We shot and missed, and hit a few, too, and held each bird as a precious memory, a feathered sliver of the whole.
Reid Bryant credits Agustín Bustos with teaching him to appreciate those moments in the duck blind, or in the dove field, when the guns go quiet and the skies empty out. Reid hunts and fishes and tries to listen carefully from his home in Vermont. Visit him at www.reidbryant.com.
