Random “Diaries” Entry From 1980
First honkers and an old man’s memories
October 12, 1980 — I dozed heavily in my recliner, snoring loudly according to the family, snarled in fragmentary dreams, some of them unwillingly about my summer dalliance. The subconscious has been goaded beyond toleration and begun to masticate the experience; a final flare-up at the office put an emotional damper on my sacred time: on opening day.
I was babysitter again. Beau and Heather rolled out easily as last year; their eyes wide and lustrous with the mystery of it. Beau chattered incessantly about last year’s hunting trips, last year’s vacation trip in a rented truck camper, and named each kind of 4WD as we saw it, thinking he saw Joe Mismas’ Bronco, then guessing where Joe and Sonja were hunting. Heather says “dee-uh” this year instead of “deh” and “bee-uh” instead of “beh.” It was dry in the high country, but summer ORVs were mercifully gone.
We went up the West Fork all the way to Lonesome Lake and then dead-ended on a landing where the timber companies are pushing into a virgin canyon of Doug fir. We saw no game, not even grouse. We didn’t even see camp-robbers. The kids got bored and restless. We ate all the lunch and drank all the Cokes and took a couple of short hikes, one on steep terrain above a logging road that gave them a kick. The rough roads banged the handle off that last fancy coffee cup from Victoria in the gimbaled cup holder on the dash. I told Wanda we’ll just have to buy some more.
I had the 7mm Magnum for clear-cut work after being forced to buy commercial ammunition, $12 a box, to get a decent group when my hand-loads fell at two minutes at a hundred yards. I had the Ruger.45 for sudden work; at Vern’s I linked three touching holes offhand at thirty yards the other day; at fifty yards I stayed in the black. Sunday I slept luxuriously late, preferring the warm nude comfort of my wife to the rain that started in the night. I finally got into the woods behind the school after noon. I hiked, got rained on, drank coffee, ate some doughnuts and a couple of sandwiches. Not much sign in timber I have hunted since my first year here. I’m not much of a deer hunter and this was a typical opener for me.
October 18, 19 — Afternoon hunts, one up the 6050 Road and one up the West Fork; both washouts. I liked today best; sneaked an old cat trail too beat-up for 4WD to its end against a steep old cutting laced with game trails. I found bear scat, buck rubs, nubbed-off alder, plenty of small wild purple berries, and one strange thing: upchucked stomach contents — enough to have come from a large stomach — with plenty of undigested purple berries in the mix. What sort of large critter gorges itself sick on berries like a human?
My legs are tight and sore, a good feeling. That slow-motion climbing stretches muscles as hard as steady plodding. Not a lot of work for the heart and lungs, but I found my leg muscles quivering. There’s another fork up there I didn’t give myself time to explore. Both days I scavenged chunks of firewood spilled from ambitious woodcutters’ vehicles in the resurgence of wood stoves for home heating. At the age of 37, weight of my big Remington 700 with its four-power scope on a narrow sling numbs and wearies my shoulder. The metal of the receiver still has small spots from surface rust Earl permitted while I was in the Army, the wood has its share of scratches and worn spots; the Weaver has a small spot of moisture trapped in the lens about ten o’clock. Considering the rain and snow and sweat it has weathered, it deserves a little internal moisture. Either I can no longer hold the gun steady, or its half-inch factory accuracy has deteriorated. It gradually widened to one, now almost two inches. I began to use the Model 88 .308 because it threw one-inch groups at a hundred and was so much lighter to pack. But the .308 threw my handloads all over the target this year, so I fell back on the Magnum; nothing to use it on today.
November 9, 1980 — Home after two days of waterfowling at Potholes Reservoir. Gary Gilbert, assistant chief of Liquor Board enforcement, asked me to speak at the central-region enforcement meeting in Moses Lake, which enabled me to claim mileage for the pickup. I pulled the boat; a Chevron station manager let me park it and said he’d keep an eye on it.
After my little lunch speech and socializing, I checked into the Travelodge, parked the boat, got into hunting clothes and out to Gloyd Seep in time to miss a couple of mallards with my ten-gauge. The evergreens in the windbreak that comes down to the Seep are higher than my head now. I remember the pang I got there seeing the clump of filter-tip cigarettes snubbed out beneath the trees the year after (Marge shared) the first good mallard shoot I ever had. Back in town I had prime rib for dinner, some drinks, and slept restlessly, awakening before the alarm. Getting ready settled and steadied me, a balm for nerves jangled by internal Liquor Board politics: re-hitch the boat, check lights, check coupling, warm up the truck, bring the guns from the room. I recited my hunting-morning mantra not to hurry because predawn haste can result in a wasted trip or trouble.
Launch was easy on a nice double-wide ramp at the State Park. Soon I was bundled in my bright blue flotation coat, running on plane toward a low blur that grew slowly into the red-brown sand dunes; the Mercury just loves that fresh water. I reminded myself again not to hurry, to wait for ducks to show me where they were using. I noticed a flight pattern and picked an island, scattering decoys widely. The boat’s new camouflage paint and camo tape on the motor, combined with the military netting, blended it in. I was hardly set when the wind turned on-shore and ducks began to flare. I was just standing up to explore for a better site when a pair of mallards fluttered into calm water behind me. My first shot of the season dumped the right-hand duck. Harry raced forward, checked, entered the water, got the duck and came back with it pecking at him; turned it loose, circled, grabbed it from behind and brought it in. Took a half hour to move the decoys around to that calm water; I was hiding the boat again when, unbelievably, I heard close-by geese.
A seven-goose wedge was right over my lone goose outrider, talking to it. I froze in plain sight. They seemed to take a long time to get into sure range. I grabbed the ten-gauge, swinging the muzzle across my belly in a breach of gun safety unavoidable in the circumstances, reversed it as they stood on their wings in alarm. The big gun swept up covering the squadron leader and at the boom it folded and came down in a compact package, blasting into the water. Harry was dwarfed as he nosed the vast gray-brown bulk shoreward. My first honker; I couldn’t believe it.
Canada geese seldom make mistakes. Hunting ducks for nearly twenty years, occasionally near geese, occasionally hunting geese — and finally lightning strikes. A single ten-gauge shell, the flight leader cleanly killed. The day was made on that instant. Before noon I dropped one of a pair of decoying widgeon. Then a flock of mallards landed outside the decoys. I began soft entreaties on my Dye Call and they swam in. I talked them closer and closer, finally drew down on the lead drake with the Browning and blew him over. When they jumped I shot another. I shot again at a third — and it folded. I looked back for the first drake, but it apparently dove while I was shooting. The others were floating away on the wind; Harry couldn’t see them from his lower vantage. I went and got them with the boat. One honker, a widgeon and four mallards, including a triple, only one lost.
The run in was choppy, spray flying, exhilarating. Boat, motor, trailer, truck — everything worked trouble-free. The weather was clear to cloudy with gusts to twenty miles an hour. Local, call-wise birds; a good bag considering. I have been vowing to take my rig to Potholes since Vence led the F&H News crew there; finally fulfilled. I love that combination of big water, places to hide, and no God-damned tide. Harry likes the islands where he can romp not confined in the boat. I got back to the motel, showered, ate food from home, and shopped for an alarm clock — my second such purchase in Moses Lake — and other things like tooth brush and toothpaste. I watched “The Hulk” on TV and crashed, to waken to the subtle buzz of the new alarm. I was tired; my energy drains away after an all-day outing involving physical labor and excitement. It’s nineteen miles from the motel to the launch, but hunters camping in their RVs on the launch roused my envy; they just beach their boats below camp and are ready to go again immediately.
Day two was calmer, fewer ducks and more hunters; almost all sky-busters. A MarDon blind near me sky-shot a flock of geese and one of them gradually slipped lower, banked toward my decoys. He couldn’t make it all the way with one wing busted about six inches from the tip; parachuted onto the next island. Nobody came after him. I took the boat with the ten gauge. I jumped out of the boat prematurely; only the habit of keeping one leg in the boat saved a bad situation. I landed astride the gunn’l painfully and filled my hip boot. When Harry pushed the hiding goose, he flushed like a pheasant but fell back, then ran through the sage. I scythed the brush with a load of twos and he went over. Harry didn’t want to lift that bulk, but did. Later a single gadwall coasted over and I dropped him right on our island. Harry was looking in the decoys, then the scent hit him and he came back with the duck before I could turn around. The Potholes pattern of the second day being slow continued. It was dark when I idled down at the launch after a full-throttle run. Harry is something to see, flinching as the boat bounces in the waves. He doesn’t like the roller-coaster ride at all.
I stopped at the MarDon restaurant to eat. Rod Meseberg told me he lost his copy of a F&H News story I wrote about his resort, and I told him I’d send him another. He asked if I’d like to go out on the Duck Taxi in the morning but I declined, saying I had to get home. Turned out he had an old-timer in one of his motel units planning to hunt alone and was worried about him, would trade me a hunt for guiding him without seeming to; just another random hunter assigned to his blind, to save his pride. Wish he’d told me that before I declined. I admired his sensitivity to the old guy’s feelings, but felt like I couldn’t change my mind after I said I didn’t have time. A decision I will always regret; as I was eating my chili burger with cheese and onions, a gray-haired hunter sat at the counter for coffee and we fell to talking. He grew up in Iowa and his father was a market gunner. Their many-windowed home kitchen looked out on a natural flyway for redheads and canvasbacks between two lakes. The old hunter had a high, etched forehead and grin wrinkles, white hair not much sparser than mine and told about taking a limit of mallards and teal by himself from a small rubber raft in a bass lake.
“I usually hunt alone,” he said, both proudly and a little sadly, it seemed. He resembled Bob Hernbrode, the old Arizona game ranger who worked in hunter education: same far-seeing eyes under a shelf of dramatic eyebrows, same quiet competence touched with a sensed vulnerability. He told of his dad killing five scattering ducks with his Model 97 Winchester, “saving the teal till last, and that teal was climbing and corkscrewing when he shot.” His old man was showing off that day for a friend he was trying to interest in duck hunting. When his veined hands shook a little steadying his coffee to his lips it seemed strange, because his soft voice was young with memories. He remembered 1932 as the year L.C. Smith introduced the three-inch magnum twelve and his dad got one “to see what it would do” and dropped ducks “I wouldn’t even raise a gun to.”
“He was a wonderful shot,” he said, eyes lost in the past, “who taught me everything, even about getting a gun to fit you.” He said his shooting has gone downhill because he only fires about 200 shells a year now, where his dad went through 7,000 a year. Then he told about driving to a north Minnesota lake through a foot of snow, chasing the mallards off his spot, getting ready — and then being driven out of his blind by mosquitoes. Mosquitoes in a snow-storm. So I traded him my grandmother Burkett’s Arkansas tale about how it got so cold in Stuttgart frozen mallards fell out of the sky, one of them narrowly missing braining a hunter, who then was almost arrested for taking more than the limit. He chuckled. No, no, he said, my story is true — it snowed before a hard freeze that year; it takes a hard freeze to kill Minnesota mosquitoes.
He seemed sorry to see me go. I was sorry to leave. I wished him luck. On the long drive home, I had a word with whoever or whatever it is that I believe in that is powerful enough to stir up the weather to bring down Northern mallards, and interested enough in the mortality of old hunters to do it tomorrow for that old man. His eyes were bright and his memories as clear as a young man’s in the telling. Somehow he vindicated to me all the old simple beliefs in waterfowling I built my life on, but sometimes forget because of distractions. May duck-hunting always be as fresh for me, is a kind of prayer.
