Duck Duck Goose

I’m not sure I ever played the kid’s game, Duck Duck Goose.  But as a child, I was often involved in my father’s fascination with duck and goose hunting.  I can remember going duck hunting with my dad at a very early age when we lived in Raymond, Nebraska, in 1958.  I would have been four-turning-five during that season.  So, I wasn’t carrying a gun myself.  My father was a stickler for gun safety and obeying the laws.  I do remember standing on the front seat of our car, looking out the window as we drove down country roads in search of ducks.  This demonstrates the relative development of motor safety to hunter safety at that time.  I’m not suggesting that as a recent post-toddler, I should have been allowed to brandish a firearm, but I might have been just as safe doing that as I was riding in the family car.

These memories of hunting with my father are my youngest images of life and have a pretty significant impact on my life.  Every fall, I get a bit of a neck ache from swiveling my head around, checking every passing pond for waterfowl residents.  My dad’s preferred hunting style was to drive about checking out small ponds, what he called “potholes,” for feeding ducks.  Once spotted, the duck hunt transitioned into thousands of yards of sneaking, often crawling through weeds, until he’d pop up in range and pick off a duck or two as they frantically attempted to escape into the air.  My dad called this “jump shooting.”  I never did figure out whether it was the ducks or the hunter doing the jumping; probably both.

My shooting at ducks and geese had to wait until that splendid fall day when I turned twelve years old.  By then, my family was living in rural North Idaho.  For most of my school buddies, hunting regulations were a passing fancy ginned up by bureaucrats in Boise.  Some had started hunting grouse with 410 shotguns in the first or second grade.  But as I mentioned, Dad insisted on following the laws no matter what my compatriots were allowed to do. So it was on a bright clear day in early November, nearly halfway through 1965 duck season, that the Ithaca 20 gauge designated as mine brought down a mallard drake I jumped on Spring Creek.

As triumphant as I felt then, it was probably the only duck I got in the first season.  The tight quarters and easy sneak on the creek brought the fleeing ducks within close range of my 20 gauge.  Dad insisted he had purchased that gun because he was disgusted with how easy it was to bring down waterfowl with his favorite Remington 12 gauge, and he needed the challenge.  That challenge did little for my hunting success, but it didn’t lessen the sheer delight of tramping through the marshes of North Idaho in search of willing game.  

One might ask why I didn’t just stick to hunting ducks on Spring Creek.  Dad forbade us from hunting there two or three days after the fall salmon run began.  It was the spawning Kokanee that drew the ducks to the creek, and he insisted that ducks tasted fishy soon after the run began, making them inedible. This explains much about what hunting meant to our family.  Hunting was never a sport for us.  It was always about food.  We ate everything we took, and we were strictly schooled never to shoot anything we did not intend to eat.  

Along with football and basketball, duck hunting occupied my non-academic time while in high school.  Girls were a distant fourth until a certain young lady from Sandpoint caught my attention senior year. Fortunately, that was well after duck season because this discovery was to have a significant long-term unfavorable impact on my duck hunting.  Marriage and family change lots of things.  But that is another story.

Back in my sophomore year, I decided to scale up the sophistication of my duck hunting.  Why chase ducks all over creation when they could be induced to come to me?  Soon I began constructing a semi-portable blind out of wooden stakes, chicken wire, and cattail parts pulled from the creek.  It was SEMI-portable because only a duck-crazy high school kid would try to haul that monstrosity around.  By an equally semi-miracle, the thing ended up in its permanent location beside a pond on the Clark Fork River delta.  It was a thing of beauty to me, and it continuously demonstrated the serious gullibility of waterfowl that they failed to identify it as dangerous from about a mile away.  

My next step was to purchase a cheap set of chest waders and a half dozen mallard decoys. It took me a while to get them rigged up, but soon they were bobbing up and down in front of my Cattail Mansion. I had been swayed by the literature that “magnum” decoys were easier for ducks to see from a greater distance.  Still, I was nervous about the fact that each of my decoys looked like they had just finished devouring half a field of corn.  But their designers had factored in the incredible naivete of your average duck. Even my tiny flotilla succeeded in attracting the attention of particularly stupid ducks.

The final step in my transition to becoming a sophisticated duck hunter was purchasing a duck call.  I got it, and a cassette tape of example calls designed to attract ducks of all species to dinner.  A dinner I planned to eat.  Several hours were spent in my room listening to the tape and practicing my ability to imitate hungry feeding ducks calling to their friends to come to join them.  It probably drove my family nuts.  I do remember at one point that my mother mentioned I might benefit by practicing my band instrument rather than my duck call.

Well, I proved to my complete satisfaction that the combination of a blind, decoys, and a duck call was indeed the time-honored best way to hunt ducks.  My little setup produced several ducks for our dining table throughout my high school years.  I like eating ducks, which I have since learned is a rarity among humans.  The tired mantra about how to properly prepare a duck by cooking it on a plank, then throwing it away, and eating the plank never seemed that humorous to me.  

I never knew what happened to my duck-hunting stuff after I went to college.  My parents ended up selling the building where I stored it, so I hope that someone else got as much joy out of it as I did.  After graduating from high school, my hunting was kind of spotty.  I did some pheasant hunting in college.  I was able to get back to duck hunting during my Internship year in Glendive, Montana.  One of the kids from my youth group showed me around to the potholes in the area.  But I never did get back to a sophisticated type of duck hunting.

My first parish provided a church council member who was an excellent duck hunter, but he was a wait-in-the-weeds kind of hunter and didn’t like the hassle of decoys.  So my time in the Cattail Mansion faded into a distant memory.  But now, my retirement has afforded me a new opportunity to haunt the marshes for ducks and geese.  To my amazement, I found out that the region where I now live during hunting season, Sioux Falls, SD, is one of the hottest places for ducks and geese in the nation.  It is called the Pothole Region because numerous natural depressions left by the last ice age fill with water to form ponds that support a significant local duck population.  If I’d only known for ten years, I lived here without hunting.  Yeah right!  Work and duck hunting don’t actually coexist well.

Now I have spent several very pleasant afternoons driving around, ferreting out access points to the public lands designed for duck hunters in this wonderful area of the country.  Hunting for access is almost as fun as the actual duck hunting itself.  I’ve found some very interesting places to go, and there are actually ducks and geese there.  It’s been truly exciting.  I’ve dug up my old duck call and given it a quack or two.  And I’ve been trolling Amazon looking at prices for decoys.  I might even get one of those crazy ones with the spinning wings.  Who knows?  I’m going to skip the Cattail Mansion thing because I’ve left behind my 18-year-old body.  Hiding in the weeds should work just as well.  But things are looking up for this season.  There is only one thing that I won’t be able to bring back from my youth.  My wife did not grow up in a hunting family, so instead of meeting me at the door to praise my trophies, she greets me with, “Did you murder any ducks?”  Sigh . . .