Lonely Shores

he spooky ambience of a typical coastal Alaska duck hunt often derives from the quality of the light. Come September, dawn never really breaks that far north. Instead the sun slinks along the horizon like a misbehaving retriever trying to delay an inevitable reckoning with punishment, resulting in creeping shadows with softened edges, rich autumn colors when the skies are clear, and mysterious depths of gloom when they are not. And waterfowl largely abandon their usual diurnal flight patterns, which can mean fast shooting at any time of day.If nothing else, this observation provides an excellent excuse to burrow deeper into the sleeping bag on chilly mornings, and I'd taken full advantage of the reprieve. I might have slept in even longer but for old Sky's insistent whining at the cabin door, and when it finally became apparent the dog was not going to light the oil stove no matter how badly I wanted him to, I crawled out of my down womb, padded across the floor in my long johns and let him out. He pretended urgent bladder issues, but I suspect he really just wanted me to get up and take him hunting. Which I finally did, but not before I'd enjoyed a typical duck-shack breakfast: a leftover slice of the silver salmon I'd coaxed from a nearby river the night before sandwiched between pieces of stale bread and washed down with steaming coffee stiff enough to take the finish off of a gun barrel. After girding up my loins (hip waders, duck call, survival gear, an extra handful of shells), I followed the dog outside into morning light even eerier than usual. A dense layer of fog had rolled in from Cook Inlet overnight, reducing the ceiling to shotgun range (and gratefully relieving me of any obligation to think about flying home in the event of a quick limit). High above the fog bank, the sun was shining off the snowy flanks of the Alaska Range, creating the illusion of a sunrise in the west. The dog was my only companion that morning, and I appreciated the solitude. Company has its place in the Bush, but one unintended consequence of human conversation is a reduction in the emotional impact of the wilderness. My two partners in the duck shack were both staunch friends of the kind whose company only grows better during periods of enforced confinement, no rare occurrence there, thanks to the vagaries of Alaska flying weather. But it had been a long week back on the civilized side of the Inlet, and I appreciated the loneliness of the place even more than I would have appreciated their companionship. Well past the rambunctious puppy stage of his career, Sky settled in quickly at heel as we began the slog across the tide flats. The fog and featureless terrain offered ample opportunity for disorientation (the word lost is not part of the Alaska outdoorsman's vocabulary), but I knew those flats the way suburbanites know their own lawns. After a half-hour of mud and muck, we arrived at a favorite pothole. To my delight, since my last visit one of the Inlet's 20-foot tides had deposited a large driftwood log right next to the water: a new duck blind courtesy of nothing but the moon's gravitational pull. I remembered the days when Sky would have insisted on "helping" as I deployed the decoys, but now he was content to sit and watch. Finally I kicked out a nest in the dead grass beside the log and settled in to wait. The senses seldom serve as well as during quiet moments in a duck blind. With temperature and dew point identical, the fog thickened and dissipated constantly, teasing the eyes like a stripper. During one lucid moment, I noted a fresh set of tracks in the mud at the far end of the pond, telltale evidence of a brown bear's recent passage. Somewhere in the distance, a chorus of ratcheting cries rose from a flock of sandhills. Cranes are legal game in Alaska, but I knew better than to get my hopes up. Wary as Eastern gobblers, they seldom make the kind of mistakes I'd need to put "Eskimo turkey" on the menu. And finally the penetrating aroma of a tide-flats duck hunt: wet Labrador retriever, salty air, the endless layers of organic decay that mark the base of the food chain. The strife I'd left behind 60 miles to the east as the Super Cub flies might as well have belonged on another planet. Now all we needed were some ducks. I have been a duck hunter about as long as I have been anything. I vividly remember straddling my father's shoulders as he ferried me out to the blind through the dark on my first duck hunt, circa age 3. Since then, although my interest in countless other activities has waxed and waned, waterfowling has remained the magnetic north toward which my internal compass always points. My ordering of life's priorities-dissipated or impassioned according to one's point of view-has provided opportunities to hunt just about everything with webbed feet from Africa to the South Pacific. But when it comes to ducks, I left my heart in Alaska, where I lived and worked fulltime for eight years and to which I still return at every opportunity. Of course this is a why essay-as opposed to where or how to-and to tell the truth, that's sometimes a good question. I certainly have shot more waterfowl more quickly in other places. But bulging game vests never have been the point for me, and any measure of success in the field that depends upon consultation with a wristwatch is a flawed concept from the start. So let's forget quick limits. It's the places that matter most, and there's just no place to hunt waterfowl like Alaska. The word "adventure" suffers readily from inflation in outdoor prose, but it's seldom inappropriate up north, where almost any undertaking, including simple attempts to secure a duck dinner, can turn into an adventure intentionally or otherwise. Granted, not everyone enjoys uncertainty, risk and the demands of physical effort, especially for the sake of a quarry the size of a mallard. There have been times when I didn't enjoy these things myself, at least until the worst of whatever went wrong was over. But adventures make better memories than limits, and when the last shell has been fired and the last teal eaten, memories are all we have left. In Alaska the adventure often starts before you chamber the first shell. Getting there may not be half the fun, but it usually accounts for at least half the white knuckles. Although I used to shoot plenty of ducks on the Kenai River flats before work in the morning, in the Far North road-accessible waterfowling is the exception rather than the rule. More often duck hunting meant beach landings in the airplane or battling high seas on the Kodiak coast as well as long hikes through wild terrain in virtually every adverse weather condition imaginable. By the time we got to wherever we planned to start hunting, we already knew that we'd earned our birds. And we still had to figure out how we were going to get back home... On one memorable Kodiak outing two hunting partners and I brought along a small inflatable raft so we could row across the mouth of the tidal lagoon in front of camp, saving ourselves a three-mile hike to the other side. Several days into the hunt we were crossing the channel in the dark on a brisk outgoing tide when I heard an ominous grinding sound ahead. Turns out the overnight temperature had been cold enough to freeze the brackish water at the head of the lagoon and the falling tide was flushing broken ice pans down the channel-a realization that came a little too late. The leading edge of the first pan sliced through the rubber raft and popped it like a balloon, leaving us laden down with gear and heading straight for the North Pacific. The Coast Guard gives healthy young recruits 10 minutes in such water before they can "no longer participate in their own rescue," and we'd used up most of those minutes by the time we reached shore. The things fools will do to kill a few ducks. Spend enough time waterfowling up north and you eventually will have to deal with Alaska's giant coastal grizzlies. Despite all the time I've spent with them, I've only had a few ominous encounters with brown bears and have faced greater threats from black bears, moose and especially my own stupidity (see above). But no animal on earth can demand attention faster or make a shotgun feel smaller. The 20-gauge devotees I hunt with may deride my stubborn devotion to 12-gauge guns, but most of them have never looked down a ventilated rib at a 10-foot brownie. Fortunately, the rewards of Alaska duck hunting go beyond the excitement of Bush landings and bear stories. By any conventional standard, the duck hunting can be as good as it gets. And coastal Alaska consistently offers waterfowlers one unique imponderable: variety. A typical day of duck hunting in the Interior or the Upper Cook Inlet, where our duck shack still stands, will offer a nice mix of the usual puddle ducks. But travel farther toward the open sea-the Lower Inlet, Kodiak or the Alaska Peninsula-and you better know your sea ducks or bring a bird book. A late-season bag on Kodiak often includes scoters, harlequins, old squaw (now officially long-tailed ducks) and eiders in addition to the usual fare, whereas a trip to the Peninsula might offer good shooting for emperor geese as well as a chance to spot a rare Asiatic stray such as a pochard, smew or Baikal teal. Remember that serious birders travel there just to look. The subject of sea ducks invariably raises the issue of their edibility. Granted, they're not grain-fed mallards, but with a bit of imagination, they can be tasty; and under the right circumstances-such as an unplanned overnight with no other source of calories-I've found them downright delicious. On our regular Kodiak waterfowl expeditions, we traditionally elevated the preparation of sea ducks to an Olympic event whenever we had access to a cabin with basic cooking facilities. The Great Alaska Duck-Off evolved its own elaborate set of rules. All ingredients in camp had to be available to all participants (to prevent someone from sandbagging by smuggling in a bottle of Grand Marnier for their exclusive use in a sauce). Every night of the Duck-Off each cook had to prepare a duck from his or her bag selected by the competition (and some of us were not above trying to talk companions into shooting mergansers by mistake). Ultimately, nothing but occasional exhaustion of the wine cellar kept every entry from earning Five Stars. (December nights are long and dark on Kodiak, and you have to find some way to occupy the long hours between legal shooting light.) Back at the little Cook Inlet pothole, our duck hunt had nearly turned into a nature walk by the time the dog pointed his muzzle upward in response to a sound I could not yet hear. But old Sky had too many seasons under his belt to cry wolf, and I knew it. I'd shifted into shooting position by the time the flock of teal came winging in low over the grass. Decoying as only teal will, they offered me everything in a sudden flurry of wings, and I accepted. With two downed birds kicking at the edge of the spread, it was time for the dog to go to work-about damn time in Sky's obvious opinion. Kid stuff on one level, the two easy retrieves still provided an opportunity to appreciate another element of the Alaska duck hunting experience: the bond between hunter and dog. The simple math of aircraft weight and balance tells part of the story. The back of a Super Cub can hold a 200-pound human hunting companion or a 100-pound Lab and another hundred pounds of something else-an excellent argument for canine companionship in itself. And as mentioned, I knew how cold that water felt and was happy to leave it to the dog. A personable old campaigner like Sky provided countless intangible benefits in the Bush, from adding an extra measure of warmth at the bottom of the sleeping bag at night to taking the edge off the loneliness without ever becoming intrusive. I've never loved my Labs more than I did in Alaska. Winter weather in the distant Interior finally stirred the pot that day, and late that morning ducks started to arrive in serious numbers. By noon we were done. Back at the cabin, I cleaned the birds and studied the sky. Freshening northerly winds had largely dissolved the fog bank, and I suspected that I could reach the dirt airstrip in the field beside my house if I really wanted to. But in the end the lure of home fires and hot showers had to wait until another day... several days, in fact. From canned beans and shotgun shells to dog food and an extensive library of trashy novels, the cabin contained everything we needed to survive. And there is an evanescent quality to the Alaska duck season that renders every day too precious to squander. The migrating Interior birds I'd just killed represented the season's memento mori as well as its bounty, promising that the interval until ice up would be measured in days rather than weeks. All the more reason to embrace those days and appreciate them to the fullest. Don Thomas and his wife, Lori, divide their time between homes in Montana and Alaska. Thomas's 15th outdoor book, a collection of essays on waterfowl titled The Language of Wings, is due out this year from Willow Creek Press.