The Captains’ Geese

Led by Captains Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, the Corps of Discovery reached what is now Montana’s Fort Peck Indian Reservation in May 1805. I moved there 168 years later. Lewis first described the diminutive cackling Canada goose at the mouth of the Poplar River, right where I spent two memorable years as a reservation medical officer. Because of its remote location, no one else in the Public Health Service wanted an assignment there, but I looked at all of that prime bird cover (which Lewis described as “beautiful in the extreme” the same morning he saw his first cackler) and told HQ to throw me in that brier patch. Not all my decisions look smart in retrospect, but that one does.
    Even from our current home in central Montana, it’s a long haul north and east to Fort Peck. Shotguns usually provide the motivation I need to visit old friends there, as they did two Decembers ago. Although the area remains remarkably immune to the development sweeping much of the Mountain West, that was not always the case. The construction of Fort Peck Dam—the largest earthen dam in the world—made the place hum in the Depression-ravaged ’30s. The area around the dam is scarcely inhabited now, but there are plenty of fish in the reservoir above it, and late in the season migrating Canada geese flock by the thousands to the open water downstream from the spillway.
    We arrived on a brutally cold night, which was just fine with us. Warm weather allows the birds to disperse from the open water on the river. Hence the inevitable Catch-22 of December goose hunting there: If the weather permits creature comfort in the blind, you might as well stay home.
    Hunting geese over decoys in stubblefields may not guarantee wild goose on the Christmas dinner table, but it does guarantee a big show. An hour before shooting light we were busy hauling hundreds of shells out of our trucks and setting them up in the field we’d scouted the night before. We’d barely completed the task by the time we had to crawl into our coffin blinds like vampires as the eastern horizon began to glow. The goose talk from the river a mile to the south grew slowly toward a crescendo, but until the birds decided to take wing there was nothing to do but wait.
    After spending an hour supine on the frozen earth, not even the body heat from Rocky, my seasoned yellow Lab, could ward off the penetrating chill. I knew that if I was cold, my wife, Lori, was colder, and I finally pointed out that it probably wouldn’t hurt to stand up and stamp our feet until we saw birds in the air. Of course as soon as I talked our hunting partners into this heresy, a small flock of honkers flew in low at the far end of the field and sent us diving back toward our blinds. The birds held their line, and even though they never dropped their landing gear, they offered reasonable passing shots as they sailed by overhead. Shotguns spoke, geese began to fall, and suddenly the brutal chill felt tolerable again.

Despite the fact that 200 years have passed since Lewis & Clark traveled through, it’s impossible for any thoughtful Western outdoorsman to escape their legacy. Their powers of observation were so astute that they were the first to describe—in written English, at least—damn near everything out here. I spend a lot of time outdoors on the high plains, but no matter what the day’s objective, I almost always can discover some relevant wisdom in their Journals. So pick a card, any card. Pick . . . geese.
    Abundant along the Eastern seaboard then as now, the Canada goose had been familiar to the leaders of the Corps of Discovery before they’d left home. Not so the white-fronted goose—aka Anser albifrons to biologists and specklebelly, or speck, to waterfowlers. Lewis gets credit for the first written description of the speck, which he penned in March 1806 at Fort Clatsop, on the Pacific. Although I’ve shot my share of specks north of the border, I’ve killed only one in Montana, so this note is largely of academic interest when I’m goose hunting near home.
    In the case of Branta canadensis, our familiar honker, modern biologists recognize a number of subspecies that fluctuate at the whim of “lumpers” and “splitters.” To complicate matters further, the small cackling Canada was declared a separate species in 2004, and it dragged a number of the “lesser Canada” subspecies into its new pigeonhole. I’m not aware of any scientific effort to distinguish among these geese at the time the Corps set off for the Pacific, likely because most such sub-speciation occurs west of the Mississippi. But Meriwether Lewis was sharp enough to recognize that not all honkers are created equal, and first descriptions of both the lesser and cackling Canada appear in his notes. 

My friends Steve and Rhonda occupy a small homestead south of Great Falls that neatly demonstrates the superiority of quality over quantity in the choice of real estate. Their 10 acres represent little more than a backyard by Montana standards, but it’s remote, close to the Missouri River and surrounded by grainfields. The line of brush and cottonwoods running its length produces pheasant dinners on demand, and Steve kills a big whitetail there with his bow almost every year. When cold weather concentrates migrating geese on the river after Thanksgiving, the steep bluff behind their house offers a terrific opportunity for some of the most challenging wingshooting I know.
    On a clear day that bluff offers a splendid view of both the river and the Rockies’ Eastern Front in the distance. The Corps passed through in mid-July 1805, after spending nearly a month laboriously portaging equipment and supplies around the Great Falls of the Missouri some 20 miles downstream. They were plainly relieved to have that ordeal behind them, as Lewis notes in his journal on July 15: “At 10 am, we once more saw ourselves fairly underway, much to my joy and, I believe, that of every individual who compose the party.”
    The first time I accepted an invitation to shoot geese at Steve’s place, I was frankly skeptical. There was no place to set decoys, and the Missouri was too far away to pass-shoot birds trading up and down the river. But when the great, gabbling flocks finally lifted off of the water mid-morning to head for the stubblefields, enough of them passed straight over the bluff to provide a fast limit. Only a fraction of the birds came near shotgun range, but when thousands of geese are in the air, that’s all it takes.
    Last year Lori and I arrived one December afternoon to the best hunting conditions possible: brisk but tolerable temperatures and 30-knot southwest winds gusting to 40. I knew from prior experience that high winds would keep the birds close to the ground as they departed the river for the fields. I’ve never had any patience with sky-busting, but this was just the kind of weather that allows responsible pass-shooting in style.
    Atop the bluff, I’d just broken my shotgun to chamber two shells when Lori urgently whispered, “Birds!” Tacking back and forth against the gusting crosswind, the little flock was still several hundred yards out, but their course and altitude looked promising. Moments later they slid by 40 yards overhead and provided a perfect opportunity for me to miss. Twice.
    “What was that all about?” Lori asked as she fiddled with her camera. Rocky’s disappointed look seemed to pose the same question.
    “Dunno,” I replied, fumbling through my disorganized pockets for more shells. Because I’d been hunting ducks hard all month, I couldn’t invoke rustiness as an excuse. As I finished reloading, I began to experience a queasy feeling in the pit of my stomach. Suddenly, this felt like the beginning of One of Those Days.
    I started shooting shotguns at flying targets around age 6 under my father’s expert eye. Do a lot of anything for 50-plus years and you ought to be fairly good at it. But once or twice per season I still experience a wingshooting meltdown, almost always in the same situation: shooting waterfowl in high winds. Paradoxically, ducks and geese screaming by with a stiff breeze behind them aren’t much of a problem. I’m naturally a swing-through snap-shooter, and as long as I can keep my barrels moving fast I’m fine. But birds hanging up in a stiff headwind or sliding across a breeze from either side disrupt my rhythm, with results ranging from comical to mortifying.
    Midafternoon is hardly prime time to shoot the bluff at Steve’s, but that day someone forgot to tell the geese. In no time flat I’d whiffed on more birds than I’d missed the whole month prior. The geese were offering reasonable shots; the problem was the crab angle that they were tracking in the nearly perpendicular crosswind. Swinging intuitively along a vector drawn from the tail through the extended neck left the shot column well upwind of the bird by the time it arrived.
    Shortly thereafter, another pair of geese invited theory to meet fact. When the birds were still a hundred yards out, I made my eyes reduce them from geese to pinpoint spots, to counter the optical illusion of birds flying sideways. Tracking the vector rather than the bird, I rose, forced myself to pull a few extra feet ahead for good measure, and fired. The lead honker crumpled, allowing me a chance to complete the double.
    Finally, Rocky had a chance to go to work. The setting was personally significant for him, for he’d retrieved his first goose there five seasons earlier. Like most young dogs facing greater Canadas, he’d been a bit intimidated that first time, but he’d enjoyed plenty of experience with geese since then. Some argue that retrievers are little more than a distraction when shooting geese over land, but watching Rocky chase the second bird, an energetic cripple with a broken wing, across the stubblefield behind us, I felt vindicated for insisting we bring him.
    “Thank God you finally hit something,” Lori said as Rocky finished running down the honker. I’m years beyond pouting if I miss, but we both recognized that I’d been getting close. And when the dog returned with the second goose, we finally had an opportunity to direct our attention where it had belonged all the time: to the birds.
    “Look at this,” I said as I examined the pair side by side and made myself ignore more birds flaring overhead. “One greater and one lesser from the same flock.” That’s not a particularly unusual event, but I always find myself thinking about the Corps of Discovery when I sit on that bluff and scan their route. The smaller bird made me imagine Lewis at Fort Clatsop, where he’d recorded not only that first written description of the specklebelly but also one of the lesser Canada. In the middle of all that rain and misery, he’d taken the time to notice something different about the geese there. What has happened to such powers of observation today, when gadgets so insistently try to substitute for woodsmanship? Give that man a medal.
Although the limit of geese on the game strap that night was too heavy to ignore, I realized that the birds weren’t the most important product of the afternoon’s efforts. I’d given myself lessons in shooting and history alike, and I wasn’t sure which mattered more.
    In town that night we met our old friend Jeff Lander—coincidentally a waterfowl guide—who’d come down from Alberta to visit family over the holidays. Great Falls nightlife is hardly spectacular, but there’s one mandatory stop after a long day in the field: the Sip-n-Dip at the O’Haire Motor Inn, recently recognized by GQ Magazine as one of the 10 best bars in the world. If you live in New York or New Orleans, it’s no surprise to learn of a world-class watering hole around the corner. That’s hardly the case in Montana, where the after-hours crowd tends toward visiting investment bankers trying to act like cowboys and cowboys trying to get drunk. But after a late dinner Lori insisted, so off we three went to shut down the place.
    Several features distinguish the Sip-n-Dip. First is Piano Pat, a Grandma Moses lookalike whose keyboard and gravelly voice both display limitless endurance. Pat’s tastes run heavily toward Neil Diamond and Elvis in his later pills-and-rhinestones phase, but that’s not nearly as unfortunate as it sounds. Then there is the mermaid.
    The Sip-n-Dip employs several mermaids of varying talent and appeal, and we arrived to one of the best. Tastefully clad in a bikini top and a mermaid bottom (the mermaids never venture beyond a light PG rating), she dived and blew bubbles and turned graceful underwater arabesques behind the Plexiglas while Pat sang and we talked over old times. Finally we walked back to our motel and poured ourselves into bed.
    All this should have been good news for the geese the following morning, but in the end it hardly mattered. I felt eager to re-test my new theory of crosswind goose shooting, but there wasn’t any crosswind. In fact, there wasn’t any wind at all, which meant the birds were all a hundred yards up when they passed overhead. We quit early without firing a shot and headed home to prepare for kids due back at Christmas. As a diehard advocate of the pluck-don’t-skin school of waterfowl cookery, I had as many geese as I wanted to process anyway.
    Largely content to eat buffalo loins and beaver tails, Lewis & Clark didn’t do much goose hunting on their journey. Nonetheless, I’m sure they would have made great companions on a goose hunt today. No doubt I could learn a thing or two from them even after all the years I’ve spent in the field. Those lessons likely would focus on what really counts: the ability to stay alert and observe, and to recognize that none of us ever has nature figured out completely.

Don and Lori Thomas divide their time between homes in rural Montana and coastal Alaska. With kids grown, the rest of the family now consists of two Labs and a cougar hound. Don recently finished a book analyzing sportsmen’s contributions to the conservation movement.