A weekend off
I get next weekend off. Duck season is over so I don’t have to leave the house if I don’t want to.
I really enjoy duck hunting. Believe it or not I enjoy getting up at 5:30 am and putting on about forty pounds of clothes. Layer after layer after layer.... Drive down the road in the dark and unload the ATV from the back of the truck. Put on your waders. For you ladies that haven’t had this experience, imagine a thirty-pound pair of stiff, loose fitting panty hose that go up to your armpit. Load your shotgun and five pounds of shells (shotgun bullets) on to the ATV. Maybe load three dozen decoys on the ATV, another 25 pounds of stuff. Do you have your license and your duck call? You don heavy gloves, an insulating facemask and goggles. Now you try to “swing” your leg over the seat of the ATV to begin your ride. Your leg has all the coordination, flexibility and dexterity of a piano leg. At 25 degrees, with 80% humidity, and a 25 mph ATV ride, the wind chill is sub-arctic. Don’t forget, I enjoy duck hunting.
You unload all of this stuff at your “hole”. Then you get to place your decoys. Imagine the forty pounds of clothes, the thirty pounds of waders, so much headgear you can’t turn your head from one side to the other and the 25 pounds of decoys. Get the image? Now wade through knee peep water in the dark across a flooded field with 18-inch deep wheel ruts zigzagging across it in an unfathomable pattern. Are we having fun yet?
After flailing through the water and placing your decoys, the forty pounds of clothes and headgear have increased your body temperature to about 110 degrees. Dry clothes keep you warm. Sweaty clothes don’t. You remove a couple of layers and unzip a few others.
Put shells in your gun, get behind cover and watch the sky. The sky begins to lighten in front of you as the earth rotates toward the sun. You hear some shooting from other “holes”. It’s amazing to hear: boom-ba-boom-ba-ba-boom-boom------boom. You can almost feel it. Somebody is seeing ducks. But, you haven’t seen one yet. The sky turns to streaky bands of yellow, orange and red on the horizon while still black and starlit above. This is the morning. The ducks will be here, you just know it! You can feel it.
You can hear ducks long before you see them. Some make a chuckling sound as they fly. Ducks doing this are too far off to shoot and typically won’t come any closer. Pintails have a short whistle sound that travels for what seems like miles. Teal have a shrill peep-peep call. Mallards, the duck all duck hunters want, make all the quacking you’ve heard. But only the females; they’re the most vocal of the mallards (sound familiar?). The males make only a low raspy dweek sound. Wood ducks give out a shrill, almost scream-like sound as they zoom through the trees. Believe it or not, you can hear their wing feathers from a great distance. On a quiet morning it can sound like a rush of wind. This gets pronounced as they get closer and maneuver through the air. A group of 15 or 20 teal can sound like a jet plane flying overhead. Many times, you hear these sounds and never see a duck, but you know they’re there. Somewhere.
The sky’s pretty light now and the stars are no longer visible. The wind picks up and begins stinging your face. Your eyes water and the tears roll down your cheeks, making the stinging worse. You’ve seen a couple of ducks but nothing to shoot at. They’re high and on a mission to someplace else. You cool off from your earlier exertion and zip up everything and replace all available layers. There’s more shooting off in the distance. It’s frustrating to hear the shooting when you haven’t seen a single duck within range. Nothing but singles, doubles, and small groups high in the air.
With so few ducks you tend to concentrate on other things. The little songbirds flitting around. If you’re real still some of them will come right up to you. Small and huge groups of noisy geese. Crows, hawks, flocks of blackbirds, woodpeckers, the occasional eagle, and a heron occupy your eye. You notice your feet are cold. Your fingers are cold too.
When a duck does appear, especially one only treetop high, all these other things disappear. You track it as it circles. You follow every wing-beat of a pair as they glide around, hoping they’ll cup their wings and fall into your decoys. You tell yourself, “I’ll shoot on the next pass.” You get ready. Safety off. Line of sight across the top of your gun. They turn.......... away from you. No shot. The adrenaline wears off quickly. You notice your feet are cold. Your fingers are cold too.
After a couple of hours of this you load up everything and head for the house. Your hands get painfully cold as you pick up the decoys and wrap the weights around the keels. The scooter ride back to the truck is mind-numbing cold. The talk is all, “there are no ducks” and “I can’t believe with all the shooting we heard...” You get to the house and warm up, get something to eat and take a nap. After the nap you do it all over again except the color in the sky is behind you. You go to bed at night knowing you’ll do it all over again the next morning. They’ll be here tomorrow, I KNOW it.
I really enjoy duck hunting. But I’ll enjoy my weekend off.
I really enjoy duck hunting. Believe it or not I enjoy getting up at 5:30 am and putting on about forty pounds of clothes. Layer after layer after layer.... Drive down the road in the dark and unload the ATV from the back of the truck. Put on your waders. For you ladies that haven’t had this experience, imagine a thirty-pound pair of stiff, loose fitting panty hose that go up to your armpit. Load your shotgun and five pounds of shells (shotgun bullets) on to the ATV. Maybe load three dozen decoys on the ATV, another 25 pounds of stuff. Do you have your license and your duck call? You don heavy gloves, an insulating facemask and goggles. Now you try to “swing” your leg over the seat of the ATV to begin your ride. Your leg has all the coordination, flexibility and dexterity of a piano leg. At 25 degrees, with 80% humidity, and a 25 mph ATV ride, the wind chill is sub-arctic. Don’t forget, I enjoy duck hunting.
You unload all of this stuff at your “hole”. Then you get to place your decoys. Imagine the forty pounds of clothes, the thirty pounds of waders, so much headgear you can’t turn your head from one side to the other and the 25 pounds of decoys. Get the image? Now wade through knee peep water in the dark across a flooded field with 18-inch deep wheel ruts zigzagging across it in an unfathomable pattern. Are we having fun yet?
After flailing through the water and placing your decoys, the forty pounds of clothes and headgear have increased your body temperature to about 110 degrees. Dry clothes keep you warm. Sweaty clothes don’t. You remove a couple of layers and unzip a few others.
Put shells in your gun, get behind cover and watch the sky. The sky begins to lighten in front of you as the earth rotates toward the sun. You hear some shooting from other “holes”. It’s amazing to hear: boom-ba-boom-ba-ba-boom-boom------boom. You can almost feel it. Somebody is seeing ducks. But, you haven’t seen one yet. The sky turns to streaky bands of yellow, orange and red on the horizon while still black and starlit above. This is the morning. The ducks will be here, you just know it! You can feel it.
You can hear ducks long before you see them. Some make a chuckling sound as they fly. Ducks doing this are too far off to shoot and typically won’t come any closer. Pintails have a short whistle sound that travels for what seems like miles. Teal have a shrill peep-peep call. Mallards, the duck all duck hunters want, make all the quacking you’ve heard. But only the females; they’re the most vocal of the mallards (sound familiar?). The males make only a low raspy dweek sound. Wood ducks give out a shrill, almost scream-like sound as they zoom through the trees. Believe it or not, you can hear their wing feathers from a great distance. On a quiet morning it can sound like a rush of wind. This gets pronounced as they get closer and maneuver through the air. A group of 15 or 20 teal can sound like a jet plane flying overhead. Many times, you hear these sounds and never see a duck, but you know they’re there. Somewhere.
The sky’s pretty light now and the stars are no longer visible. The wind picks up and begins stinging your face. Your eyes water and the tears roll down your cheeks, making the stinging worse. You’ve seen a couple of ducks but nothing to shoot at. They’re high and on a mission to someplace else. You cool off from your earlier exertion and zip up everything and replace all available layers. There’s more shooting off in the distance. It’s frustrating to hear the shooting when you haven’t seen a single duck within range. Nothing but singles, doubles, and small groups high in the air.
With so few ducks you tend to concentrate on other things. The little songbirds flitting around. If you’re real still some of them will come right up to you. Small and huge groups of noisy geese. Crows, hawks, flocks of blackbirds, woodpeckers, the occasional eagle, and a heron occupy your eye. You notice your feet are cold. Your fingers are cold too.
When a duck does appear, especially one only treetop high, all these other things disappear. You track it as it circles. You follow every wing-beat of a pair as they glide around, hoping they’ll cup their wings and fall into your decoys. You tell yourself, “I’ll shoot on the next pass.” You get ready. Safety off. Line of sight across the top of your gun. They turn.......... away from you. No shot. The adrenaline wears off quickly. You notice your feet are cold. Your fingers are cold too.
After a couple of hours of this you load up everything and head for the house. Your hands get painfully cold as you pick up the decoys and wrap the weights around the keels. The scooter ride back to the truck is mind-numbing cold. The talk is all, “there are no ducks” and “I can’t believe with all the shooting we heard...” You get to the house and warm up, get something to eat and take a nap. After the nap you do it all over again except the color in the sky is behind you. You go to bed at night knowing you’ll do it all over again the next morning. They’ll be here tomorrow, I KNOW it.
I really enjoy duck hunting. But I’ll enjoy my weekend off.
posted by steve | 1:09 PM
1 Comments:
Long ago I made a cross stitch for my father in law of a duck hunter, it said:
This duck hunter in his blind
cold in front and wet behind
It only took 500 bucks
To hide himself from the silly ducks.
Bet it cost you more than that - silly ducks?
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