The First ... Prelude to the Last

Essay by GORDY GORDON, Editor/Publisher

Sumner, Missouri, October 1963.

You think this is a photo of a beginning. It's not.

Men at left and right, respectively, were my adopted uncles, Ray and Randy. That's a somewhat excited young Gordy at center. And yes that is my first goose. Moments beforehand, it fell to my shot. I had fired from a concrete pit in the ground so deep that I had to stand on a wooden box to see out and shoot.

Now, my Dad was a Waterfowler, through and through. He chose the location where I grew up based heavily on the fact it was smack-dab in the center of duck and goose hunting grounds. And perhaps it was Dad's adult lifetime of wishing and hoping and working toward this moment that essentially willed my shot and the goose to collide in a burst of fate some 24 yards east of where three men and a boy huddled within the goose pit.

A generation or two earlier, famed outdoorsman and conservation pioneer Aldo Leopold had -- and wrote about -- the experience of his first waterfowl kill. In his essay, "Red Legs Kicking," Leopold confessed remembering nothing of the shot itself. No recoil, no sound of gunpowder. Such was my experience too. Just the gun to shoulder, a puff of feathers and Glory Be! -- MY GOOSE pinwheeling into Wayne Foster's picked cornfield! Black legs kicking!

Before I could turn to give him the 20 gauge, my Dad was beaming at me while taking charge of the little shotgun. He and his hunting buddies, Randy and Ray, were slapping me on the back, hollering GOOD SHOT SCOTTY and laughing as they shook hands all around.

Dad produced his treasured AGFA 35mm and snapped Kodachromes of the frenzied aftermath of a Very Big Moment in a provincial country boy's life. He shot thousands of slides of our lives growing up. So I didn't think much about it. Since then, surviving slides have become priceless treasures of course. And thankfully I developed the maturity to thank him for giving Sister and me a gift of a photographic history beyond most other Sixties kids.

Unfortunately, not a totally complete history.

Through incidents and accidents, only a couple of that roll of 20 color slides survived to today. Among the lost was the requisite shot I had practiced for while holding ducks, geese and other critters bagged by Dad over the years -- the Hero Shot. Me, grinning. Goose, looking surprised in cold Death. One slide (the best one) was lost during mailing to a print house for enlargements; the others, who knows? Lost amid suspicions and skullduggery normally reserved for the likes of Jimmy Hoffa.

A different "first" image has fared better; it survives to this day. It shows me six years later, age 9, with the first goose I killed while solo calling over decoys I arranged.

But I digress.

You can tell -- even from this old Kodachrome above -- that I was chattering at 200 words a minute ... with gusts to 600! From that season to the present one, I've taken game large and small in ways and locales both ordinary and steeped in legend. But nothing has surpassed the thrill of goading Canada geese to "decoy" on bowed wings, their big triangular feet reaching for the stubble.

Now, some scoff and slam Canadas as trash, golf course spoilers, welfare birds fit for nothing but "shoot & release." Blame for such is laid at the wrong doorstep. People, not the birds, are solely to blame for bad traits. The same fools who deride resident geese as lazy freeloaders go to all lengths and expense to put up feed stations to attract cardinals, bluebirds and other wildlife. Oh, but that's "different." Uh, huh.

This photo depicts my first official hunt. One day soon, unwanted but dictated by the turn of an unfriendly card, I'll take my last hunt. Icons of my life, Canada geese, will be the quarry.

My plan and my hope on that final trip does not involve killing a limit. Nor is it hinged on shooting even a single goose. That ancient hunting ritual, an urge buried deep in our psyche, has been met and assuaged many thousands of times over. Yet Granddad's shotgun and all the other traps of the pastime will be loaded and ready, lest otherwise we will be engaged in "armed birdwatching." That is how points are missed.

On that last day my plan is to lean hard against conventions lofted on the winds of time in favor of unfiltered excitement like I felt that afternoon some six decades ago.

My hope is that haunting cries of big migratory V;s, cleaving the murk of a springtime thaw, will always inspire people to stop, look above and marvel at these winged voyagers... masters of land, sea and the sky.

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