by Jim Harrison
1976
Okeechobee
An hour before dawn it was unseasonably warm, with the wind out of the southeast pushing a bank of thunderheads in the moonlight. It was indolent weather, the sort one associates with the morning hatch on a trout stream in July. It was mid-December but there were mosquitoes in the air at the marina. I swatted at them while my friend finished loading the skiff with decoys and shotguns and attempted to coax his yellow Labrador, Rain, into the boat.
Rain is a wonderful dog. When you are around people and call out to her, everyone looks up in the air. If you shout “Rain” angrily, the people are likely to look askance at both you and the sky, and feel sorry for the dog. On this morning Rain was acting put upon and, when called, lay on the dock with her feet in the air. She didn't want to go for a boat ride in the dark for as yet unrevealed reasons. I lifted the dog gently into the boat as the motor started.
Lake Okeechobee proved to be the strangest body of water I've ever been on. Leaving the marina we traveled down a long canal, still in total darkness. The canal abuts a huge dike built during the Depression to control Okeechobee's floodwaters. The lake level is thus higher than the canal, so your boat must go through a small lock that opens at 5:30 A.M. for duck hunters, bass fishermen, commercial catfish long-liners and other odd citizens who might want to be out on the lake as the world wisely sleeps. The lock was strangely thrilling to an outsider. As the skiff rose a foot under the arc lights, the attendant yelled down for our boat's identification number and the operator's name. I learned later that our goings and comings were recorded, in part to keep us from staying lost if we got lost. Okeechobee is an immense lake, and the swamps of palmetto, saw grass and cane are a navigational nightmare that takes years to solve. To the inexperienced Northerner, Okeechobee looks like the “green hell” of stories and motion pictures; a sense of insecurity mixes with breakfast in the pit of the stomach.
It was a half-hour run to our spot, and our speed in the dark was appalling, nearly forty knots, with bugs stinging against the face so powerfully that I tried to keep my head down. The speed seemed senseless, but we wanted to set out our decoys before dawn broke. One consolation was that Okeechobee lacks the logs and deadheads that plague northern lakes. I signaled happily to my friend as our boat kicked up large rafts of ducks. He shook his head and yelled, “Coots!” over the roar of the big outboard motor. A coot is a daffy, unwary member of the rail family. In sporting terms shooting a coot is akin to shooting a parked car.
Phobias are clearly understood only by those who share them. My wife's vertigo I find quietly amusing, though she hid in the backseat in terror on a day when we drove over the Bighorn Mountains. Mice and spiders can crawl over me if they choose. And on airliners I often sleep during takeoffs and landings. However, snakes drive me up—and over—the wall with a visceral kick of adrenaline. Thus, when we reached our spot and I stepped off the bow of the boat into a large truck inner tube with a sling in the middle, my heart pounded at the thought of water moccasins. The inner tube is unquestionably a wonderful device for warm-water duck shooting, but within moments, sitting in one, you feel a terrible sort of vulnerability. Your wadered legs hang down treading water—an obvious alligator meal—and though the top of the tube is six inches above the water, you are sure this is no barrier for the feisty moccasins that slither around in search of Michigan hunters dumb enough to challenge Okeechobee.
I pulled myself through the reeds to where my friend stood on a ladder in the chest-deep water. Rain sat on her platform looking utterly bored, her eyes peeking out from the camouflage covering. She was glad to see me and wriggled precariously on her narrow seat. I explained my fears. My friend shooed me away.
“Nonsense! We can't hunt this close together. We'll make an outline, and the ducks won't come into the decoys.”
“I'm not sure I like you anymore,” I said, pushing back towards my spot. “I don't see any ducks around anyhow.”
“Ssshhhh!” he hissed, pointing out into the lake, now gray with dawn. I could see a large raft of ducks about 200 yards away that he seemed to know weren't coot. My fears were not really allayed, though. I had heard a probably apocryphal story about a water skier who had fallen into an Alabama lake and been attacked by hordes of moccasins. But then a giddy resignation began to come over me. How noble to die a truly “natural” death. It was the same feeling I have had in grizzly territory in Montana or at sea when the motor fails. Or in Africa once when we lost our transmission near a pride of lions.
This utter irrationality is peculiar to phobias. I have never had an accurate intuition in my life, but a few days before, while snipe hunting near Palm Beach, I had envisioned one of the particular, very individual giant eastern diamondbacks striking the back of my knee as I stepped over a log. As I fell mortally wounded, after blasting the snake, I knew what I would say to my friend: “Looks like you'll have to clean the birds.” This mood had ruined my shooting for the first hour; it is difficult to lead a bird properly when you are staring at the ground in front of your feet. But, avoiding the nonexistent logs, I had begun hitting birds, and we soon had our limit. On the way back to the car my friend said, “Think about it this way. You're never going to see the one that gets you.” Wonderful.
By midmorning on Okeechobee, nothing duckwise, as they might say on Madison Avenue, had occurred. My interest had long since turned from the inanely bobbing decoys to the overwhelming life in the reeds behind me. In a lifetime as an amateur bird watcher, I had never eyeballed warblers so closely, and there was a profligate amount of other bird life. The birds would bathe, then stand on lily pads to dry, all within a startling few feet of my camouflaged mound in the water. The warblers saved the lives of the three ring bills that did fly over. Before I recognized the sound—the staccato huff and sigh of low-flying ducks—they were well past range.
By noon we decided to make the run back to the lodge for lunch. My skepticism about Okeechobee duck life was noted, so we made a short detour out into the lake. We flushed great rafts of ring bills. Hordes of ducks. Thousands of them, in fact. I had never seen so many ducks, and the whole purpose of the trip returned in main strength. The trouble was it was so hot and clear and calm that there was nothing to urge the birds in toward the sheltered water of the reed beds. The fact that I had leaned forward too far to study warblers and had filled my waders didn't matter. The warmth of the water was tropical. There were plenty of bass there in the weeds; a rod would have served me better than a shotgun. At one point a bass fisherman had passed quietly in a boat with an electric motor and cast a plug near me. I had considered shooting the jitterbug as a practical joke but instead had raised my camouflage net and grinned. The fisherman had widened his eyes, then pretended indifference. I should have shot the plug.
At lunch we ate a big basket of catfish freshly caught from the lake and drank a copious amount of beer to counter the heat. The bass mounted on the lodge wall were immense; any of the hundred would have been a trophy in Michigan. My thoughts went back to all the warblers I had seen just after dawn; they had enough sense to leave Michigan for the winter while I turned my home into a hibernating cave. If you wanted to hunt our late blue bill season in December you would likely tear your waders on the ice. And as a night person who can't really sleep before 3 A.M., I found the classical shooting of Okeechobee most improbable. Dawn in a duck blind back home would require a tailored polar-bear skin for comfort. People do it by the thousands, but I don't have to admire them for it. A leisurely breakfast at midmorning perfectly suits the grouse hunter.
After a nap we returned to the lake with revived interest. We covered a crazy-quilt forty miles on a scouting trip and again saw thousands of ducks, but few within less than mortar range of shore. I explained the highly dangerous cut-shell method to my friend. With a jackknife you make number six bird shot shoot like a slug. You fire over distant rafts of ducks and, you hope, flush them toward your blind. I leave out the technical explanation here to avoid poisoning youn
g minds.
On our scouting expedition I shot a particularly low-flying duck—a cripple, in fact—that we had seen swimming in circles before its wobbly takeoff. Crippled game is the most unsavory aspect of hunting. It makes any aware hunter queasy, but most know that it can be largely avoided by not taking the long shot known as “sky busting.” It is a disgusting practice. While grouse can fall with a single pellet, a duck is a sturdier creature and any grace the sport possesses demands the etiquette of a surer shot.
We finally found a likely spot near a point. While putting out the decoys, I saw a large animal swimming in the water some fifty yards away. It was plainly an alligator. We motored over to get some idea of its size. Measured against the skiff the alligator was around thirteen feet long, and girthy. It submerged and came up another thirty yards or so away, but not really very far from where my legs were going to be hanging down through the inner tube. My friend was nonchalant and I tried to ape his attitude of indifference. Now I had something new to fret about, compared to which a moccasin would look as puny as a tadpole.
Oddly, I was soon able to push the alligator from my mind. It has taken me too many years to learn that when you are hunting you can think of nothing else. There is nothing more painful than wandering through a clearing thinking about lunch and flushing half-a-dozen grouse. This had happened to me one October, and I had blown the only truly easy shots of the season.
But within an hour my attentiveness began to dissipate. Again the ducks were out there on the horizon, sitting still and comfortable like tiny floating Buddhas. A bald eagle passed high above us. Hundreds of swallows flew in from the lake; they were barely higher than our heads.
“Ducks! A single coming in from your right,” my friend hissed.
By the time I shot, the duck had spread its wings to settle with the decoys. Rain burst from her platform and retrieved the bird. I gave a few whoops to honor our change in luck.
“It's a redhead,” my friend yelled. “A female.”
I slumped in my inner tube low enough to fill my waders. Redheads are protected in Florida. Each redhead shot represents seventy points of an allowable 100 points for a day's shooting. I now had a cripple and a seventy-point duck to my spurious credit.
Another hour passed. Rain sneezed and I whirled and screamed, thinking the sneeze was the attack cry of the bull alligator. There was nothing behind me but darkening swamp.
We loaded our gear and picked up the decoys. The long-suffering Rain huddled in the boat demanding a tummy rub. The motor wouldn't start; the battery was dead. I held the light in the gathering dark while my friend dismantled the cowl and tried to start the motor by hand with a piece of rope. It was some fifteen miles back to the lodge. Short of lassoing and riding the alligator, how could we make it? Then part of the cowl fell into the black water. My friend, who works out daily in a karate dojo, stamped and yelled. I feared he might kick the boat to pieces. Finally the motor started, and we made our way haltingly back in the dark.
At the lodge our hunting friends, a young couple from Palm Beach who shared our two-room cabin, listened sympathetically. They slyly admitted that they had shot their limit. After several drinks we cooked a meal of venison chops and went over to the main lodge to play Bingo. I hadn't played Bingo in twenty years and looked forward to it, but when we entered the hall, a local wise guy asked, “How many ducks?”
“Forty-seven redheads,” I yelled to the assembled Bingo players. It was a showstopper.
Dawn again—a butter-thick, damp dark full of bugs. During our sleepy wait at the lock, the keeper called down to say that the week before a crew of vacationing Miami homicide detectives had shot their limit every day. Then he said that it was too warm and still for duck hunting and that we should have stayed in bed. Or gone bass fishing. As a trout fisherman, I look at bass as a variety of hyperexcitable carp.
After the usual long run, we chose a spot with no real confidence. As the sky lightened, some high-flying ducks passed over but did not pause at our decoys. Then we heard shooting from well behind us, perhaps a mile into the swamp. More shooting came from down the lakeshore a few hundred yards, but also well into the swamp. Our irritation grew as we watched high flights pass over, followed by more shooting. As the shots became intermittent my friend left me to do a little spying down the lake. After fifteen minutes he returned looking happy. He had hidden in the rushes and had seen a small skiff emerge from a channel so narrow that it was invisible from the lake proper. We loaded up and went for a look with a conspiratorial air.
We passed through a long reedy cut into a small pond but could find no blind. Then we found yet another small channel, and now we had to get out in our waders and push the skiff. The going was obnoxious and oozy, the surroundings resembling an aquatic viper farm. Rain watched us from the stern of the boat with modest curiosity. Eureka! We emerged into another pond that held, smack in the middle, a lovely little duck blind built of palmetto fronds.
We sped back for lunch and a quick nap. At the lock we joined another boat, in which my friend recognized the builder of the blind. He asked us about our luck, and we said zilch. He said, “Got a few myself.” Which meant his limit, if the number of shots we had heard was any indication. Back at the marina, it was apparent that he was packing for the trip home.
There was no nap this day. We had another catfish lunch. The radio promised a northern front, and back out on the lake we could see the clouds coming on the far horizon with the wind picking up and the lake developing a stiff chop. The temperature began to drop, and the lake was clearing of the ubiquitous bass fishermen.
We eased rather strenuously back into our discovered spot and hastily set out the decoys. The blind was small and the shooting would be close. My friend returned the boat to the channel for hiding and to discourage anyone else's entry. We were barely situated when the ring bills began to come in. I was pleased when the ducks wouldn't decoy but instead would come over for a look at full speed—perhaps twenty yards in the air, right or left. This made for the most demanding sort of pass shooting. Rain was so pleased that she was hard to restrain on her perch during the frequent misses. She only resumed her true character when, upon retrieving a bird, she delivered, then quickly turned to Silly Putty in the water. I had to lift her back on the platform with the water running down under my sleeves. Then I arranged her limbs, turned my face while she shook off the water, and rear-ranged the camouflage.
We limited out well before dusk, feeling inordinately proud of our shooting and sleuth work. The next day we had equally good luck and became even more careful about taking reasonable shots. Still, we lost several cripples, and it was disturbing to watch the dog swim in narrowing circles around the scent of duck. Ring bills, blue bills and other diving ducks that are wounded will go under, grab a strand of weed and stay there until they drown. This singular fact keeps me from ever becoming an ardent duck hunter, no matter how delightful the sport can be.
I finally got a moderately difficult double. Despite more than a decade of hard-core shooting, I am still a C-plus shot. During our lazy moments we discussed the menu we intended to cook for twenty people when we got back to Palm Beach. My friend mentioned that in the seven years we have fished and hunted together we have talked about our weight and diets on an hourly basis to no visible effect. We ended up serving a feast that reflected our figures: courses of crab fingers, moules marinière, snipe broiled and flamed in calvados, then chilled, sautéed duck breasts in a vermouth cream sauce, venison stew and a country ham. It is fun to cook something you can't find in even the best restaurants on earth.
On our way into the lodge that last afternoon we were lucky enough to be granted the kind of grace note given only to those who spend a great deal of time outdoors. First the sun went blood red from the smoke caused by farmers burning off cane. Then that red sun was caught in the froth at the wave tips as the promised rough weather started to chop up the lake. Rafts of coots skittered out of the way, and above, the first southward fl
ock of teal wheeled in a swift-moving cloud.
1976
A Day in May
Without having flown over this particular stretch of water southwest of Key West, I can still envision it topographically: the infinite shadings of blue over the tidal flats—azure, indigo and the predominant light turquoise of the shallows with the paler striations of white sand. Then the brown turtle grass, the dark outlines of coral outcroppings or tidal cuts that game fish use to reach the feeding grounds, and the darker green random splotches of mangrove keys. Farther to the south is a sometimes garish penumbra of purple, that imaginary point where the Gulf and the Atlantic meet in a great ocean river, the Gulf Stream.
This vision is open to errant civilian pilots, gulls, frigate or man-o'-war birds at the edge of their northern cycle, and Navy pilots on practice bombing runs off the Marquesas. I saw it most poignantly last May, reflected off a motel wall in Hollywood after a month of butting my head into the movie industry with the kind of nondirectional energy that characterizes boobs from the Midwest.
One evening I drove back to the room in a borrowed car, going eighty miles per hour, in wet underpants from the sort of poolside party I will refuse to remember on my deathbed. In no time at all I was on the red-eye flight from L.A. to Miami, where a friend picked me up at dawn. Before noon we reached Key West and launched the boat. Just a clean, bare skiff with no equipment save a saltwater fly rod and a box of tarpon flies. Already the baggage of the clumsy Hollywood hustle was fading; we pulled out of Garrison Bight, ran at thirty knots past Christmas Island, then slowed for the heavy riptide of the ship channel. It was hot, but I was somehow shivering. Off Mule Key, not an hour into it, the first tarpon was hooked, a single stray lying along a dark bank of turtle grass in cloudy light. It was a sloppy cast, but the hookup was good, with perhaps eighty pounds of fish thrashing upward in three shattering jumps before breaking off. The break off was fine because it was the beauty of the jumps I was looking for, and we let all the tarpon free anyway.
