Mud Marshall and I stagger inside and organize our gear while Slim horses the big boat back down the canal to deeper water. The Marshall has a bag of cork magnum black ducks, me a peach crate full of cedar ringbills. Dabblers or divers, we got it covered. He’s got a double gun, too, an elegantly engraved L. C. Smith, formerly the property of a respected Charleston physician. Slim comes back and we switch to a smaller boat inside the impoundment, a 14 footer with an eight-horse engine. There is a rind of ice on the canal. The motor churns and grinds like a blender making frozen margaritas.
Slim eases to the blind; we crawl inside, uncase the guns, and break out the shells. Lacquered paper, ounce and a quarter of bismuth fours, fiber wads, no shot collars. Slim sets the blocks, dabblers in one cluster, divers in another. Perfect. He motors away, and we can hear the prop chawing ice long after we can no longer see him. A lone shot echoes across the marsh, then another, miles away.
“How long till legal shooting?” I ask.
Lawman to the bone, Mud Marshall checks his watch. “Eleven minutes thirty seconds.”
Teal overhead, too dark to make them out, a sound like ripping canvas, like incoming artillery.
KING GEORGE I GRANTED THE SANTEE COUNTRY—20,000, 30,000 acres at a crack—to a number of his cronies, most of whom had no real interest in emigrating to the wilds of Carolina. They subdivided and resold to more adventurous types who developed plantations—timber, turpentine, pine pitch, blue-dye indigo, cotton, rice. “King’s Grant” property lines extended to the low-water mark, while “modern” deeds, drafted after the Revolution, pinched off private ownership at the high-tide line. And then there are nearly 150 miles of dikes. If you can prove King’s Grant and a dike has been maintained, the marsh remains private. If dikes have been allowed to fall into disrepair, as many often were for many years, the marsh reverted to public domain.
“…this is the secret Santee, a world scarcely imagined and seldom traversed, a treasure for those brave enough or privileged enough to seize it.”
The question of who owns what, as you might imagine, has kept a battalion of barristers in bourbon for well over a century. In many cases, the result is still unclear. Subtleties of the law aside, you can bet this much: If you cross a dike, or even set foot on one, you will be trespassing, an offense not taken lightly hereabouts.
Yet vast tracts of public marsh remain, along with uncounted miles of sinuous public waterways, as well as two large formerly private islands now managed for limited public hunting by the Department of Natural Resources.
Public or private, this is the secret Santee, a world scarcely imagined and seldom traversed, a treasure for those brave enough or privileged enough to seize it. Marsh to the curve of the world, the checkerboard of dikes, canals, and drains. Timber bridges, solitary crumbling brick chimneys from the old steam sawmills and rice mills, massive cogged iron wheels slowly sinking beneath the pungo. Wrecks of barges and schooners and great piles of stone along the riverbanks, where captains cast their ballast ashore before loading the casks of rice. Plantation homes aglow in the sunrise along distant bluffs—Kimloch, Rochelle, Rice Hope, and Hampton, where George Washington sat on the piazza in 1791 to talk Thomas Pinckney into being ambassador to Great Britain.
And the old brick church deep in the cypress, tupelo, and pine, where Washington and Uncle Thomas knelt and prayed together. Thomas Pinckney, they say, didn’t want to leave the Santee, and who could blame him for praying up a reason to say no? His prayers weren’t answered to his satisfaction, and he went off to London in 1792. He came home and was elected governor, but then he lost the presidential election of 1800 to Thomas Jefferson, and retired back to the Santee. So maybe his prayers were answered after all.
Prayers.
The sun warms us, ever so slightly. “Here they come,” Mud Marshall whispers. Another flock of teal, 30, 40 strong, downwind at 50 miles per hour, individual birds rapidly swapping places within the flock like teal generally do. I am trilingual: mallard, wood duck, and goose. Mud Marshall is quadralingual, adding a teal whistle to the calls around his neck, ranked up like the pipes of an old-time church organ. You might fool a mallard with a black duck decoy, a scaup with a ring-bill, but teal are prejudiced toward likenesses of their own kind.
The teal swoop but will not light. Then Mud Marshall turns them with a deft whistle. I double and he shoots once, then fumbles the second trigger on the Smith as the survivors roar off down the Santee.
“Doc says I have an eye dominance problem,” he explains.
I believe him. Mud Marshall is deadly on turkeys with his semiauto and a crack shot with his Beretta over-and-under, but two barrels side by side are a challenge.
“If my manhood was directly connected to my ability to shoot a double,” he muses, “I would be spending my life singing in the soprano section of the choir.”
Don’t worry, Mud Marshall, here come the gadwalls. We shoot and miss, shoot and hit. Hit or miss, we laugh and love every moment along the secret Santee.
Things slow down after sunrise. The ducks that have flared have landed elsewhere, and live ducks attract birds like no decoys ever could. But then the redtail hawks begin working the marsh. Swooping and hovering, they move the ducks a second time. The marsh erupts with another rattle of gunfire.
Santee Slim comes back with the boat, and we pick up birds and decoys. We gather back at the storm tower for a warm-up and libations.
Ten a.m. Brown liquor doesn’t taste right until afternoon, unless you are froze half stiff and coming out of a Santee duck blind.
And then it tastes damn fine.
Back on high ground again, I retire to one of the tenant shacks, artfully restored, heart-pine floor with a fireplace I like to think was made from bricks salvaged from one of the Santee storm towers. The window frames are painted blue, and blue keeps out ghosts, as everybody around here knows. But I want the ghosts to speak to me.
Thomas Pinckney, tell me about Thomas Jefferson. You unnamed slaves, tell me anything you know. George Washington, what did you see? But the blue has the ghosts mute, from slaves to our first president, and none of them can utter a single damn word. We gather at the Rice Hope big house, a camaraderie of other duck hunters sitting down to a communal meal. Steaks off the grill, potatoes from the wood-fired oven, a fresh garden salad. The assemblage is poised with knives and forks hovering, when our host asks for a blessing. Mud Marshall rises from his chair, raises a glass, and quotes from E. E. Cummings.
I thank You God for most this amazing day: for the leaping greenly spirits of trees and a blue true dream of sky; and for everything which is natural which is infinite which is yes.
The Santee is brown this time of year, but the poet couldn’t know this. I tell Mud Marshall this poem was read by astronauts from space, and there was a lawsuit by atheists to keep them from reading it. But he doesn’t know this, either.
None of this matters. The blessing pricks our hearts, and we give thanks for all we have, here along the secret Santee.
Roger Pinckney has shot ducks in three continents and lays them regularly upon the table, dutifully providing for his wife and children, even though wild duck costs $300 a pound. His new novel, Blow the Man Down, is due out in 2012 from Evening Post Publishing.
