Spirits of the Hunt

 

By Gordy Gordon, Editor

Convection fog shrouded the duck pond in an otherworldly pall.  A quarter moon hovered - red as blood - on the western horizon. Pre-dawn, opening day in Missouri’s North Zone.

In smartweeds frosted by stillness, I huddled with my aging Lab, Jack.  It was quiet as a chapel. Nine decoys mirrored dimly on dark water out front.

Waiting for shooting time, I tried to tally how many duck openers I’d hunted.  This would be No. 46.  Lord – can that be right?  

It was. No need to cipher how many seasons I’d hunted without Dad.  He had passed away at the tag-end of last season.

“Chilly this morning,” I finally say to the dog, the words sounding like a foghorn in the smothering silence. 

Jack's otter tail thumped in reply, but otherwise he stared at the sky and said nothing more.

I tugged a big brass zipper on the heavy canvas coat I wore. The coat was snug because it wasn’t mine. It was Dad’s WWII-pattern canvas hunting coat. He mail-ordered it from Herter’s in Waseca, MN., a way-before-Cabela’s purveyor of ‘World’s Finest Outdoor Gear.’

For years I memorized that coat --from the back -- as I walked in Dad’s footsteps to pinoak oxbows and goose-infested cornfields.  I knew its rips and corduroy collar. On its shoulders were bloodstains of big Eastern Prairie geese and greenheads slung there during sundown walks back from our goose pit on Hog Ridge, and duck blind on Coates Lake. 

These were the places where I grew up.

I recalled the day he first pulled the coat onto his big square shoulders.  He shouldered an imaginary shotgun a few times, then declared, “Last hunting coat I’ll ever buy, Skip.”  

As a 7-year-old, his teasing comment hurt and angered me.  The Old Man – who in my eyes was John Wayne and thus indestructible – could surely never die!  We would always hunt together!

But he was right. The old canvas coat was a central icon at his funeral, along with his pair of Olt Perfect goose calls and other trappings of a  good, long life as a waterfowler.

Inside the coat’s huge pockets lay slim yellow shells for the stick of faded blue steel and American walnut that rested across my lap.  A first-year-of-production Remington 1100 20 gauge magnum, its oil-soaked stock deeply checkered with experience.

It wasn't Dad's shotgun.  It was my Granddad’s.

Before he shot Germans in northern France in World War I, Granddad had shot mallards by the barrel-ful for wild game markets of Chicago and St. Louie -- and therefore was my hero.  He was truly larger than life.

The same year Dad got the Herter parka, Granddad presented me the shotgun under a scarlet sky laced with feeding flights of  hungry Canadas and mallards.  We were in a ripgut blind east of the tiny farmhouse where he lived out his widower years alone.  The Farm Crisis and D-7 Caterpillars have since leveled the place. Yet I could take you this minute to that spot we passed so many golden hours.

Like the one when Granddad slid a pair of 3-inch Browning 2s into the battle-scarred autoloader and set it in front of me. “Now Johnny,” – he always called me Johnny – “when the first bunch comes in to my shaddas, I want to see you kill your limit. A shell a bird. Like a man.”

Presently, geese slanted in, backpedaling over his “shaddas” – cardboard Johnson Folding Decoys he had used since the 1920s. 

“Shoot, Johnny!” he grunted.

As it has a thousand times since,  the 1100 found the first outstretched black neck – boom! – a swarm of No. 2 lead pellets spun the bird and it arc’ed into the stubble faster than you just read this sentence.

Spooked survivors honked excitedly and clawed for altitude, and as often occurs for some reason one honker peeled away to cross back over the blind. I blotted it out and it sagged to bounce off the woven wire fence – by gosh, a double -- not bad for a kid!   Granddad beamed but nothing more was said.

This day, 44 years later, with the legacy gun and coat,  I would try to kill a duck in my forefathers’ honor.

Shooting time arrived. Out of the north came triangles of mallards and gadwalls, so high they were spot-lit by the rising sun. They folded themselves into M-shapes and spiraled down to our little knot of decoys, hissing and quacking.

Sudden the Spectre of Death awaited, clad in a too-small coat and clutching a battered shotgun.  No need to rush, or to even shoot more than once. I lowered a single bird from each of the first four bunches; big gray duck drakes and a young greenhead, its markings patchy and brownish-drab.

As Jack happily splashed his retrieves, I couldn’t help sensing the two old men out there in the low fogbanks... unseen spirits. 

Timeless spirits of the hunt.

And even though neither man was given to flowery words of praise nor displays of affection,  I knew they approved.

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Icons of this hunt still go with me every season.  I had a talented seamstress convert the camo canvas of Dad's coat into a fine shell bag.  The old scarred 20 gauge magnum 1100 is first in a beloved rotation of fowling shotguns I own.  Guns that tell their own stories.  And thus to me are priceless.