Blue Sky in All Weather

    The big diesel pickup with ATVs on the back was stuck, wheels spinning in the slick black gumbo at the edge of a field, its 16-foot cargo trailer, loaded with goose decoys and blinds, jackknifed behind. This state of affairs didn’t particularly surprise me; the truck had been fishtailing around on the slippery “gravel” roads for the past half-hour. Through it all, our host at Blue Sky Outfitting, Kevin McNeil, had casually steered with one hand, peering through rivulets of rain between the high-speed wipers, occasionally talking on a cell phone, and drinking coffee from a huge insulated mug, as he fiddled with the goose calls, dog whistles, maps and other paraphernalia sliding around on the dash. All with no mishaps, until he had pulled off at the entrance to a stubblefield and the truck had bogged down. What did surprise me, however, was that Kevin didn’t express himself exclusively in four-letter words as I would have in the same situation. Instead he methodically rocked the truck out, straightened up the trailer and got the rig back on the road. Our waterfowl hunt in northern Alberta’s Peace River country was getting off to a slippery start.
    The Peace River country is justifiably famous as a mecca for waterfowl hunters. Geese and ducks from breeding grounds across a huge region of northwestern Canada funnel down the Mackenzie and Peace rivers to the staging waters of the Peace-Athabasca Delta. After a few days’ rest, they head farther south, stopping in the first fields they encounter to gorge on waste grain after their long migration. Blue Sky Outfitting sits by Kimiwan Lake, another staging area, near McLennan, in the heart of this frontier farming area. Arguably, the hunting here is the finest in North America.
Clearly we weren’t going to be able to drive into the field as planned, so we tumbled out into the rain and darkness and, in the surreal beams of headlights and flashlights, started to unload the decoys onto the four-wheelers. As the ATVs shuttled decoys and blinds into the darkness, several of us walked the half-mile to the setup site guided by the glowing red pinpoints of their taillights.
    While the guides began setting up several dozen full-body goose decoys in an X pattern, we unrolled the blinds at the crossing of the X and began re-camouflaging them. Evidently, the previous hunt had taken place in a pea field, as we were told to pull out all of the pea vines stuck in the elastic loops on the blinds and replace them with tufts of barley to match the field we now occupied. These guys are professionals and leave nothing to chance. We groped around in the feeble beams of our headlamps collecting soggy clumps of barley chaff.
    With the decoys set, Kevin and his assistant guide, Marco, climbed into their blinds about 15 yards behind us after stowing their retrievers beside them in igloo-like mini-blinds. My wife, Brodie, lay in a third blind beside the outfitters with her camera ready to photograph the action. As we waited for legal light, Kevin outlined the shoot’s simple rules for safety and efficiency:
    • No squirming around and rubbernecking while the birds are coming in.
    • No shooting until the guide calls the shots.
    • No shooting out to the side—just birds in front.
    • Guns are to be left down when the dogs are out retrieving.
    Now we all lay hunkered in our blinds—coffin blinds in the cheery nomenclature of the modern field hunter—our camo facemasks on, peering out the narrow slits between the flaps, waiting. A lone mallard flew in and landed beside my blind. He sat looking wet, lonesome and bewildered for a minute before fluttering off into the darkness. Finally Kevin let us know that shooting light had arrived. We were ready for action and now just waiting to see what the dawn would send our way.
    Most hunters come primarily for the Canada geese and mallards—the most-sought-after waterfowl and the commonest birds here. But I had been drawn to Blue Sky because of the good chance of finding white-fronted geese, or specklebellies as they are known to many western Canada waterfowlers. White-fronts are the least-common geese, have a relatively restricted range and are notably difficult to decoy. They also reputedly taste best of all, a claim that I was anxious to test. I also am partial to pintails, with their spectacular aerial maneuvers as they test the decoys. In recent years the Peace River region has seen an abundance of these graceful ducks. So when Brodie and I were planning to leave our home in the Yukon to hunt every species of gamebird in North America with my 10-year-old chocolate Lab, Heidi Brown, and my 130-year-old hammergun, Blue Sky seemed the perfect place to start—especially because my son, Chris, would be able to meet us there, too.
    Suddenly the first flock of Canada geese was headed for the decoys, and Marco and Kevin began to call. With the volume and quality of calling the guides threw out, it was not surprising that the geese dropped in on set wings. On Kevin’s shot call we threw open the blind doors, sat up and picked out birds hanging in the air about 25 yards out. Chris killed one while Garry and Greg, our two hunting companions from British Columbia, dropped three.
    And me? I shouldered my gun, swung, pulled the trigger and nothing happened. Damned selective safeties, I thought, it must be stuck halfway between settings. In deference to the weather, I had brought my heavy waterfowl gun instead of the antique game gun—feeling that anything that has made it to 130 years old deserves to be pampered a little. So I put the safety back on, carefully pushed it all the way to the left, nudged it forward again as I found another target, and pressed the trigger. Nothing. By now the somewhat-diminished and wiser flock was honking away in confusion. I broke open my gun to find its chambers empty. In my concern about safety in a group situation, I’d gone a bit too far. Oh well, best to get the opening-day jitters out of the way early, I rationalized.
    The second flock of Canadas proved to be the biggest of the morning, maybe 30 birds. This time Chris made his first-ever double with a double gun—in my opinion the most satisfying wingshooting experience there is. I was thrilled for him. And I doubled, too. Just goes to show what good things can happen when you actually put shells in your gun.
    Speaking of shells, some hunters might wonder about what shot size to use when ducks and geese of various sizes will be appearing randomly, but I have strong opinions on the matter. Steel No. 1s or 2s are fine (perhaps preferable) for smaller geese like snows and white-fronts, and some hunters swear by them for Canadas over decoys, too, but I have seen too many Canadas fly away even when hit solidly with steel No. 1s. So when there are big geese around, I use nothing but Kent Cartridge’s Fasteel BBs. I’d rather miss a few ducks because of sparser patterns than wound a big goose with smaller shot.
    And so it went for the rest of the morning. Flocks of Canada geese alternated with flights of mallards and pintails, and Kevin or Marco called the shots when the birds were committed and well within range. I confess that my shooting was slightly put off by having the shots called by someone else. I’m used to hunting alone or with one other person, and I do lots of pass-shooting. In that situation it is critical to decide exactly when to commit to shooting and to make the standing or sitting up part of the eye-hand rhythm of the gun mount and swing. So my timing was off. Knowing that several other people were going to shoot at the flock bothered me in another way, too. When I look at a flock of birds, there is usually something about one or two of the birds that makes them the obvious targets; maybe they are drakes or bigger geese or closer than the others—something. Animal predators operate on the same principle, picking out one from a group that looks somehow vulnerable or different from the rest. I assumed that when I saw an obvious bird it would be equally obvious to everyone, and that we’d all end up shooting at the same one. So I often waited to see which birds the others shot, and then picked birds flaring or going away. Maybe it was just as well with my choice of bigger shot and choke tubes that, with steel shot, produced Modified and Full patterns.
    Regardless of my personal shooting idiosyncrasies, our group was putting birds on the ground. After each round of shooting, the guides would send their retrievers to pick up the downed birds so that they could be tallied to ensure that we did not exceed our limits. Kevin’s beautiful little Golden, Sophia, and his black Lab, Raven, are professionally trained—steady, fast and responsive to whistles and hand signals, with thousands of retrieves to their credit. When it came time to pick up the decoys and head back to the lodge for lunch, we had accounted for 20 geese and 10 ducks.
    By 3 pm the rain had let up. Kevin took us to another barley field within three miles of the lodge. Even as we were setting out the decoys and blinds, the first geese came in to look over the field; and we’d no sooner crawled into the blinds than flocks began decoying. This time there were a lot of white-front flocks mixed in among the Canadas. To my delight, I got a double on white-fronts; unfortunately it was not with the hammergun. With that, I figured I’d killed enough geese for the day. Kevin called in a few more singles for Chris and Greg, and they made good, completing our limits of eight geese all around. Still, wave after wave of geese kept coming, maybe half of them white-fronts. We just sat back and enjoyed the show.
Between flights of geese, lots of mallards and pintails came buzzing around the setup, and Kevin started calling duck shots. Before sunset we had 22 more birds, mostly mallards, which, with the morning’s ducks, made a limit of 32 between the four shooters. On the first day, the Peace River country had exceeded our highest expectations.
    By the following morning the rain had passed, and Blue Sky was living up to its name. But although the weather had improved, the shooting opportunities declined. We almost got skunked. Only a few flocks came over, and they shied from the decoys. We managed to scratch down just two geese. This demonstrated the paramount importance of being where the birds want to be. Each season Kevin’s son and his crew put in thousands of miles scouting, starting from before dawn every morning and again in the late afternoon until last light, “putting the birds to bed.” Despite the most professional scouting, sometimes the birds change their minds, as they apparently did this morning. That uncertainty is part of what makes hunting so compelling. And of course waterfowl are harder to decoy on bright mornings, as even the best decoys shine in full sunlight.
    Rain squalls built up again after lunch. In the big Alberta skies we could see showers all around us, but the downpours missed us. We were hunting another pea field, and when the first geese came in for their afternoon feed, I opened with a nice double. Unfortunately one bird sailed off across the section road into an adjacent field. The next flock produced another long cripple. Steel shot seems to take a little longer to kill than denser shot such as Tungsten Matrix or bismuth, particularly on geese and larger ducks. Many hunters decry steel for this reason, but I have found it effective. When using steel, however, it is even more important to keep your eye on every bird you shoot at until it either falls or goes out of sight. With two birds now unaccounted for, Heidi and I set out to look for them. (I have a pathological inability to continue hunting unless all downed birds are retrieved.) I told the others that if I saw incoming geese, we’d quickly lie down in the field so as not to interfere with their hunt.
    Heidi loves searching for downed birds, and she found both geese—one hiding in the ditch and the other dead where I’d marked it in the middle of the adjacent field. On the way back we got lucky; a single goose flew right over us. Pass-shooting—at last I was in my element. But once again after I shot, the bird kept going, apparently unfazed, heading directly for the decoys—only to fall out of the sky within 30 yards of the spread. Heidi is pretty experienced at watching shot birds, too. She saw the goose fall and ran the entire 500 yards or so despite my efforts to stop her, dutifully bringing the heavy bird all the way back so I could experience the pleasure of lugging it an extra quarter-mile across the muddy stubble. By the time we returned, the others had shot a dozen more honkers.
    On the way home at dark, I realized that I was famished. Funny how getting up at 4 am, being out in the fresh air all day, chasing over the countryside with a peripatetic Labrador looking for downed birds, and lugging geese around will do that to a guy. Mark, the lodge cook, had just the remedy for that: duck breasts stroganoff and goose parmesan. It took me several trips to the buffet to conclude that each was more delicious than the other.
    I wouldn’t give you a nickel for a hunting lodge that doesn’t serve wild game regularly. Luckily Mark, a keen and knowledgeable hunter himself, loves to prepare waterfowl in any form and continually experiments with recipes. The next day he happily served up goose hearts and livers with bacon and onions at my request. I always keep the hearts and livers from the birds I take; it’s like getting an extra bird per limit along with exotic taste and high nutrition.

    Day three opened with a clear, cold sky. With no threat of rain, I had at last brought my beloved old Damascus-barreled hammergun. We were back in barley again, now lying in wait for the birds to come off an unseen roosting lake behind a screen of trees. Despite the cold, Heidi and I, who are not morning people, were dozing—this getting up at 4 am after long days of hunting was catching up with us old-timers.
    But we didn’t snooze long. As the sky brightened, hundreds of mallards and pintails began buzzing the decoys in a breathtaking aerial display. Wild cries and whistling wings filled the red skies. Then ducks were landing in the decoys and beside our blinds.
    Ducks and Canadas were everywhere, some decoying and many more flying by overhead to fields somewhere behind us. The shooting was pretty steady, but what I noticed most were the hundreds and hundreds of white-fronts in flocks setting in for the decoys, and then sensing something not quite right and rising to continue onward. But most of the birds took a look, and I knew that many of them were within my range but not being called.
    Finally I could stand it no longer; I simply had to shoot a white-front with that old hammergun. I committed the cardinal sin: I sat up on my own accord and shot an overhead bird, which dropped with a satisfying thump far behind me. Heidi raced off to retrieve it. In the deafening silence that followed, Marco’s voice was flat and cold as ice. “Who called that?” I apologized abjectly and profusely, but secretly I was pleased that the little red guy with the pointy horns and trident sitting on my shoulder had made me do it—thank God I hadn’t missed. Imagine my chagrin when I apologized again afterward and Kevin, who normally strives for the in-your-face shooting that his clients prefer, said that if I had told him I thought the white-fronts were in range, he would have said go ahead. Next time I’ll ask.
    That shoot completed our three days, the standard package at Blue Sky. We took group photos and thanked Kevin once again. My son had to leave that afternoon, but Brodie, Heidi and I would stay on a couple of days to hunt with my friend Tyler Sutton, who runs the Grassland Foundation in Nebraska. Although Tyler has plenty of good bird hunting there, the lure of the world-famous waterfowling of the Peace River country had drawn him to make the long trip to Blue Sky Lodge. Together we would take more Canada geese, pintails and mallards and add the variety and beauty of snow geese to the mix. I even lingered in the area after that to sample the fine ruffed grouse hunting in the aspen parklands interspersed with the fields and lakes. And I already had made a mental note to return again soon to try for the diving ducks—bluebills, redheads and canvasbacks—that Kevin had mentioned go virtually unnoticed in the area’s cornucopia of geese and mallards.

    We stood around by Chris’s car in that always slightly awkward and melancholy moment before saying goodbye, the car packed with coolers of frozen birds, his duffel of dirty hunting clothes and his cased Winchester 101. “You know what I’ll remember most?” Chris said. “Not all the shooting or the shots we made; I’ll remember all those hundreds of ducks flying all around us and above us in the half-light, landing all over in the decoys and right beside our blinds, and the noise, and the wind from their wings on my face.”
    And I thought, That’s my boy; that’s what we always should remember and treasure: the joy of being alive and out there at dawn (while the non-hunters are in bed) rejoicing that the skies are still full of birds, riding the wind while the morning stars sing together.

Author’s Note: For more information on waterfowling in Alberta, contact Blue Sky Outfitting, 780-324-2080; www.blueskyoutfitting.com.

George Calef is a wildlife biologist and photographer who lives in a log cabin in the mountains of Canada’s Yukon Territory. Each fall he, his wife and their brave little Labrador retriever, Heidi Brown, travel the Alaska Highway to Alberta to visit his son and three grandsons and to hunt birds. Calef’s book, Caribou and the Barren-lands, won Canada’s Governor General’s Award.