MUCH AS AN ANCIENT FISH WADDLED OUT OF A PRIMEVAL OCEAN AND FOUND NEW WAYS OF DOING THINGS ON LAND, I knew that if I was to evolve as a duck hunter, I needed to explore new environments, and life responded by throwing me into the path—almost under the wheels—of another kind of duck hunter. Vic was mildly eccentric, accident prone, full of tics and twitches, and absentminded. We once spent an hour of valuable hunting time looking for his glasses, not once considering the pair he had pushed back on his head was the “lost” pair he was looking for. Vic thought deer hunting coarse, squirrel hunting trivial, and fishing mainly for kids. For him, wing shooting was the pinnacle of sport, and ducks were preeminent. Although he was a true southern gentleman in some respects, I would discover that Vic’s style of duck hunting, put gently, lacked finesse. Soon I was swept up in a modified version of sneaking and bush-whacking, the only duck-hunting experience I’d had to that point. Vic hunted out of a comfortable if not swanky river camp, had a boat with a motor that ran some of the time, a neurotic Lab named Duke, and a sawed-off L. C. Smith 20-gauge that wore the patina of long abuse. He liked to run the river wide open with a point man in the bow to warn him of floating debris while he looked for places where rising or falling water levels had concentrated a few ducks. When we spotted ducks, he would shoo ’em out with the boat, and hide in nearby brush, hoping they would return. Vic claimed he could tell from the way the ducks took off whether they would come back. A dispassionate observer could see that he was wrong about as many times as he was right, but Vic remembered only his successes, which goes along with Montaigne’s belief that prognosticators didn’t keep records of their miscalculations, while they rank their hits as remarkable.
Of my many hunts with Vic, all were memorable, some frightening, but one bolstered my status in his impressionable eyes and nudged me toward another evolutionary leap.
“I looked up to see a big duck barreling through the treetops and sent a load of steel 3s from the Wildfowl Magnum in its direction. The duck faltered, then disappeared into the timber.”
A bluebird day, not good for ducks, but Vic had great confidence in one spot, and we were standing in knee-deep water before our lunch settled. After an hour of looking into empty skies, he began tossing sticks for Duke to retrieve, his patience worn thin. I was watching their antics from a distance and glanced up for the hundredth time into a sky I expected to be empty. Except this time it wasn’t. A pair of mallards, winging over at treetop level, was almost on me. I was still shooting the Parker 16, and I’ll let Vic take it from here: “Ol’ Duke was bringing mah stick when ah hu-ed two shots—Bam! Bam!—and when ah looked up, two mallards were spinning tail-over-teakettle out of the sky. They hit the water ten feet apart, and Duke was on ’em just as quick. Purtiest double ah evah saw!”
I was never sure why this so impressed Vic, as he was a good wing shot and had certainly made his share of doubles. Maybe it was as much vindication of his belief that this indeed was the spot and pride in his dog’s quick response as my lucky shots. We sloshed back to the boat, mallards in tow, with the Lab eyeing the ducks a little too keenly. (Duke had been known to eat a duck.) Vic fired up the outboard and went from zero to all-out as soon as it caught. The next few seconds were a study in chaos.
Duke lunged for the ducks, Vic pounced on Duke, and we nearly capsized when the unhelmed boat rammed a giant cypress at full throttle. Major evolutionary changes often follow catastrophic events that result in mass extinctions, and having survived my own near extinction, I knew it was time to move on.
FAST-FORWARD A FEW SEASONS. I traded the Parker 16 for a 3-inch Charles Rosson 12-bore fitted with Briley choke tubes to handle the now-mandatory steel shot. As a deal clincher, the words wildfowl magnum were engraved on the big gun’s fences.
As if on cue, one of my professorsturned-friend, Douglas, introduced me to a new kind of duck hunting. A serious-minded man in a way that wasn’t in the least dull, Douglas had come to his way of hunting ducks naturally. His parents, Walter B. and Hazel, had taken out second mortgages to preserve an important Native American site near Moundville, Alabama, until Walter B. could persuade the state legislature to establish it as a state park. An avid duck hunter and conservationist, Walter B. bought a tract of land on the Tennessee River, bulldozed a couple of ponds into it, and erected an austere concrete block cabin in a nearby stand of dogwoods. Decades later, after he had passed, Miz Hazel became the matriarch of Dogwood Lodge. She kept her cot in the kitchen near the wood-burning stove, hunted well into her 90s, and was featured in Ducks Unlimited magazine. By then, Douglas had risen to prominence as a scholar and university administrator and had established himself as a champion of worthwhile conservation causes.
My years at Dogwood Lodge were a revelation. Douglas was the first hunter I knew who lived the higher philosophy of hunting I had read about but had rarely seen practiced. His respect for the ducks he pursued was innate, as unaffected as his next breath. You could see it in the way he watched passing ducks critiquing his setup—as if he were trying to see the world through their eyes—and at fireside when he spoke of long-ago mornings at Dogwood, when ducks crowded the ponds in numbers not seen since. It was most apparent, though, in the way he touched and handled ducks brought to bag, gently smoothing their feathers as he held them. No shortcuts were taken at Dogwood. Any talk of breasting out the day’s bag was met with an uncomprehending stare. Ducks were rough-picked by hand, then immersed in melted paraffin and peeled. Our reddened fingers were homage paid for the ducks we worked so hard to attract, call, and shoot.
I warmed to Douglas’s ways, and we got on well from the start. One bitterly cold morning when the ducks were ignoring our best efforts to entice them, the discouraged and frigid hunters began trickling back to camp not long after sunrise. I was warmly dressed and enjoying being out under the high Vs streaming overhead from the nearby refuge so decided to stay a little longer. One by one, the ducks began noticing the Dogwood ponds, and after a while I slogged back to camp with a limit of gadwalls. In Doug’s world, perseverance was an admired quality, and seeing it rewarded brought a smile.
I knew Doug to be a great reader and would have bet he had an intimacy with Montaigne, who, quoting the emperor Julian, remarked that “a philosopher and a man [I confidently insert duck hunter here] to be admired, should never take his ease.” On another day, perhaps my most memorable at Dogwood, I looked up to see a big duck barreling through the treetops and sent a load of steel 3s from the Wildfowl Magnum in its direction. The duck faltered, then disappeared into the timber. No one ever wants to lose a duck, but Dogwood protocol required the shooter to stop shooting until every possibility of recovering the crippled bird was exhausted, so I waded into the timber though I had little hope of success. Coming to the water’s edge, I almost turned back, then decided to go a little farther. The duck lay a few yards ahead in a bed of sycamore leaves, its neck curled back toward a wing, a single drop of blood at the tip of its bill. It was colored like a hen mallard though larger and darker, and the speculum was almost violet. Could it be a black duck? I had never seen one but knew Douglas thought them the rarest and best of ducks, exemplars of the noble character and wild blood he saw in all waterfowl. Doug’s father had killed the only black duck taken at Dogwood long years ago, and I suppose Doug associated the birds with his earliest memories of the camp and of the hunters who had gone before. I offered to have the bird mounted and hung over the fireplace, but Doug declined. He knew that most of his Dogwood days were behind him, and his children’s interest in the place was only sentimental. He didn’t want to hang his iconic bird on a wall that would be demolished when the place was sold, preferring instead to keep it where his father’s black duck had been safely held all these years—his imagination.
Douglas was a man of science but also a man of faith. Although he would embrace Montaigne’s ahead-of-its-time claim that “miracles arise from our ignorance of nature, not from the essence of nature,” his sense of wonder remained undiminished. When I encountered the following passage in Montaigne, which some might consider preachy, I saw Douglas looking out at me from the weave of its words: “Whoever considers as in a painting the great picture of our mother Nature in her full majesty; whoever reads such universal and constant variety in her face, whoever finds himself there, and not merely himself, but a whole kingdom, as a dot made with a very fine brush, that man alone estimates things according to their true proportions.”
So has my path—evolution, if you will—as a duck hunter been entirely one of contingence, or is its trajectory better defined as progress from a rudimentary to a more refined state? Certainly I wriggled into a new skin (adapted) to better fit every happy opportunity (environment) that came along. Still, I began as the kid feigning delight over badly cooked mergansers and, after shedding a few skins, became the man standing in a blind with Douglas. Kind of like a trilobite scuttling happily along the seabed, caroming unknowingly toward the Ninth Symphony.
Once more, I default to my French friend who, after penning a thousand strongly opinionated pages on everything imaginable, warned readers against the pitfalls of hubris with his most universally recognized quotation, “What do I know?”
Remembering this never fails to bring a quick smile and jolt me out of my reverie. My Parker 12-bore (yes, I traded in the Rosson) leans in a nearby corner under a rumpled coat redolent of marsh grass and wet feathers, and on my speed dial is the number of an old friend with a boat and a marsh and an energetic young son who can help make it all happen. The season is almost upon us, and I have a few more skins to shed.
Rusty thinks his evolution as a duck hunter has mirrored that of life in general, seemingly random but decidedly better than before.
