Four Shots

“When angry, count four”  —Mark Twain

If you are a waterfowler, you know that the only thing that can ruin a duck hunt is another duck hunter.
     Weather can weigh in. Sometimes it’s too good; other times it isn’t bad enough. Outboard motors can fail, dogs can screw up, decoys can get tangled, and some mornings there are no ducks. Potholes can freeze, boots can leak, your gun can break, but it doesn’t matter as long as you are able to get yourself out of bed, get dressed, make coffee, find the truck keys, and get out the door.
    This isn’t fishing. You aren’t going to meet any water skiers out there. No, sir, the thing that is going to ruin your hunt is the duck hunter already sitting in your blind. No, not you or your hunting partner. I’m talking about that fellow you beat out yesterday, or the one who watched you shoot a limit or who heard about it.
    I can almost live with someone getting out ahead of me. Almost. But for reasons that are a mystery, the places I seek to hunt seem to have no other locations to set up. There’s one good place, and now someone else is in it. And he is seldom alone. Oh, the fantasies of what I want to do! A duel, a fistfight, automatic weapons, torpedoes, air strikes. Then there is that slumping over the oars. The sun is coming up, and there is nothing left to do but row back down the channel, between the bog clumps, over the beaver dam and up to the landing. I had seen the truck there when I’d arrived, but I’d thought, No problem. How can he know the sweet spot?
    A few years ago I found a creek in my grouse ramblings that was so remote that I thought of prehistoric swamps as I looked across its dead standing timber. Even better, every quarter-mile or so a beaver dam stretched across the channel and backed up a series of ponds. Of this chain of pearls only one had all the right assets: a shore of wild rice, oaks on the edge and loose feathers floating all over it. Opening day was going to find me in that water. Even better was the fact that I could paddle from an old log landing. The road led to the water, and the culvert was filled and flooded over. Opening day was just a week away.
    Apparently beaver-trapping season also was open. When I arrived, filled with anticipation of a glorious opener, two other trucks were there. Traps and pack baskets were in the back of them. There was still reason to be optimistic. These guys were beaver trappers. I paddled my homemade pirogue, decoys and black Lab down the channel, portaged over the first dam and continued downstream. At the second dam I met my predecessors. They were young men, four standing in a group. Two canoes, a couple of ball caps (one a bright white), some scraggly hair and a medium stiff attitude. No matter. Hello and goodbye.
    I was right about the last pond being the best. I took nothing but drakes, and two of them were black ducks. No one was around when I came back through.
    But the trucks were there in the black of the next morning, and the second beaver dam was empty. My duck blind was full. I slumped over the oars. A quiet space floated between us. There were four in my old blind and four more across the pond.
     “Public land, mother-f---ker!” came across the water. And laughter, and more curses. Oh, the things I thought of doing, floating out there between them. There was nothing else to do but turn around and row back, hoping that somehow the ducks would be scared off by the previous day’s work but knowing full well that someone else would have the day I’d planned on.
    I never went back . . . by boat. I came over the dams on foot every now and again using the dams as bridges into the clearcut aspen grouse coverts. I simply did not want to go through all that up at dawn, haul the boat, row and fuss to meet the same greeting again. The dams gave way in time, but I knew the places that held water and the ducks that were there. All I can remember is my public land good morning.
    I suppose there are lots of ways to deal with a mess like that. I decided to pick places that were quicker to get in and out of. A bigger piece of water can have two places to hunt. Even if one is the best and the other a poor substitute, the passage of the morning gives a hunter something to watch and the rituals of duck hunting are at least as important as killing two or three ducks. One of my choices was a small lake north and east of town bordered on two sides by farm fields with an access road to the water. The opposite side of the lake had a long, wide strip of shallow water and reeds that washed up against the town road after a half-mile.
    The lake had been there a long time. In my teenage years my brother and I would drive Dad’s old jeep down the trail to the water and then walk the shore. It was a huge paddy, solid with tossing and bending wild rice. An unhuntable prairie of flooded food filled with happy, well-fed ducks. There was one point, tree-lined except for the last hundred yards. Near the end someone had dug two pits, the first I had ever seen. My brother and I would sit on the rims of those two pits dangling our legs in the holes and watch the ducks circle and swarm. We never shot a cartridge, but we sure thought about how it could be done.
    Sometime after that, long after my brother went to college and I went to war, the rice was picked with a commercial combine of some sort. After that it became just another lake. No more rice, or ducks. Time must have done some good, though, and eventually black-and-white divers began using the lake and in numbers worth hunting. The point became the place to shoot them. By then the surrounding land was closing up. A fence was built blocking off the farmland. In order to get to the point, a hunter had to drive down to the water and launch a boat, and then row out of the bay and down the shore a half-mile. Two or three dozen diver blocks off the tip of the land would do it. Best of all, the shooting was from dry land. The lake wasn’t good until the flight came in, but when you could see the raft of ducks with binoculars it was time.
    I suppose I should have saved myself the time and trouble that gray sleety morning, but the momentum of up at dawn, coffee, driving and arrival just pulled me out on the water. I saw the parked truck and the smoking campfire and beer cans. But all those facts were pushed aside with the confidence that only I knew about the point.
    Rowing and rowing, glancing over my shoulder for a light, I became more and more certain that the other hunters had gone to the other side. The place that was not so perfect. The backup to the best.
    Then the light came on, 50 feet away. They had let me come all the way, oar locks squeaking, across the tossing water.
    “Public land, mother-f----er!”
    Slumped over the oars, jeered, cursed and laughed at, I turned about and rowed back to the truck. It was too late and too far to cross the lake to Plan B. It wasn’t the same group as at the beaver ponds, at least not the same people, but definitely the same personalities.
    I was on fire in those years. I had a good dog, a pretty good boat, and I loved the rituals of the sport. It was kind of like fly-casting. Sometimes just doing it well was reward enough even if the fish would not cooperate. The next week I launched my boat from the town road and poled my way across the reed flats to the opposite shore. I never cared for shooting out of a small boat, but my retriever was good and I knew no one else was willing to do that.
    The morning was quiet. I found enough cover to hide myself and put out all my decoys, including a hundred feet of rope pinned with 10 fish-stringer loops, a bluebill decoy clipped on each one. I dropped this line at the far end of my decoy set, a good 50 to 60 yards off the main. It played out like a toggle line of kindergarten kids.
    Across the lake I could make out the same truck as before, smoke rising from a smoldering fire. I turned the binoculars to the point. Four heads, same as the last time. Loud voices and laughter and finally a shout.
    “Good luck with that, a--hole!”
    Lovely. But they were over there, and I was here.
    It was still dark when the flock came over. On a clear morning the sky is a light color—not exactly gray but not blue either, more like a flat yellow. The horizon is a black bar right across the middle. Below the bar is the same strip of color, the water reflecting the sky. It was a big flock—bunched, then open, then bunched again. The ducks were trying to decide where to go. Then they were gone. The whole flock was out there in the black strip of trees. Were they coming or going? I had no idea.
    Then I knew. There was a rush of wings on water. The whole flock had settled at the far end of my string. Lots of them, heads bobbing, swimming and out of range. They stayed only a minute. Then they left again, feet spattering across the water as they picked up and flew out.
    Oh, the yelling and swearing from the point! One of them even fired—a streak of flame followed by spent shot pattering the water in my direction. “Wake up, you stupid (blankety-blank)”—and worse. But I was smiling and happy, and I poured some coffee. Life was good and about to become better.
    I saw headlights coming down the trail to the landing. They went out, a door closed and some noises of a boat being unloaded drifted across the lake. This guy had squeaky oarlocks like mine. One guy in a small boat heading for the point, his back bent to the task of trying to beat the sunrise.
    They let him come, and he worked hard to get there. Then, as before, when he was right upon them, they flipped on their light. “Public land, mother-(as before)!” they hollered in unison. Then the abuse broke up into individual curses and insults.
    The hunter slumped over his oars, as I had—and as I was doing in sympathy for him. He sat in his boat floating off the shore and stared at his abusers. He did this for a long time. They fell silent, then renewed their cat calls and swearing. Slowly, ever so slowly, he turned about and began rowing back, not so strong this time. He had all morning to return. Then, as if inspired, he picked up his pace, back into the early morning light to his truck. I watched with my binoculars.
    His boat crunched the shore, and he stepped out. First the decoys went into the back of the truck, and then the boat, which he tied securely, stowing the oars. He picked up his gun case and paused, looking back across the water to the point, back at the others. They, in turn, were watching him.
    Then the gun came out of the case. He loaded it and walked over to the camp and to the truck of his tormenters.
    Bang! . . . Bang! . . . Bang! Reload. Bang!
    Four shots. He shredded their tires! He shot them right off their truck!
    Then he calmly walked back to his gun case, picked it up, slid the repeater into it and got behind the wheel of his truck. He drove off, slowly and deliberately, lights on, two red eyes moving up the trail.
   You’re da man! I stood up in my tippy boat lifting both arms over my head. Touchdown!
    In the wake of the moment, as the echo of the shots came back from the treeline, there was no sound. No curses, no laughter, nothing. Wait a bit. Now came a scrambling and banging of two boats hitting the water, frantic talking, oars splashing and four bodies bent to the task.
    “Time to pick up, dog,” I said to my retriever. “This day has been seized.”

Ted Nelson Lundrigan makes a living practicing law in northern Minnesota from the end of one grouse season to the beginning of the next. He writes for no one in particular and when he feels like it, and he has authored three books: Hunting the Sun, Grouse and Lesser Gods and A Bird in the Hand (www .shootingsportsmanbooks.com).