The Best Hunting Stories Ever Told

by Jay Cassell

  “NOW!”

  Mel and Paul leaped up and did an audition for a movie called Abbott and Costello Go Hunting. Paul stepped on Mel’s foot, and Mel recovered his balance by knocking Paul back into the corner. Then, swinging on the nearest bird, which look as large as a bomber, Mel squeezed the trigger of his empty gun. He had forgotten to reload after the gadwall farce.

  Meanwhile I had somehow contrived to insert the thumb tang on the bolt of my semi-automatic shotgun through a hole in my right glove and couldn’t get my hand free. My frantic gyrations and furious oaths brought the dog around to the entrance of the blind where he peered in to see what was going on.

  A dozen geese flew by unscathed, but our imprecations quickly turned into such uproarious laughter it took still another missed opportunity to sober us up. No, we hadn’t been drinking.

  And we did quite well when we finally got organized. Funny though: I don’t remember those details half as well as the foolish way we began.

  How do you explain waterfowling to anyone who does not share your faith? How can you even describe events to those who care but were not there?

  With my final shot last season, I killed a black duck. That is a simple statement of fact. But those few words mask a range of sensations which could not be duplicated with a sound-and-light replica of the outing.

  This is because you’d have to know my dog is old and that day lame, and I wanted to get his mind off his hurt by doing something he loves and does well: jump shooting. You’d also have to know that I had watched half a hundred black ducks angle down in the afternoon mist toward a series of meanders in two drains of the high marsh, and despite a following wind which blew every crunch of spartina grass underfoot ahead of us to spook the wary birds, I was confident that eventually Rocky and I would find an elbow of water to which we could turn upwind and find an unsuspecting duck.

  You’d have to hear the whispering wings of birds in the air, and see how I’d periodically squat, less with the hope of having a shot, than to pause and watch the panorama of waterfowl returning to the evening marsh. You’d have to see the pair of mallards pitch to a pond several hundred yards away, and know that because I’d rather kill one of these interlopers of the salt lands than a native black duck, I made a special effort to reach the alert drake and his oblivious hen. You’d see the mallards sitting close by the opposite shore and then noisily flushing out of range. You’d watch Rocky and me turn back to our original course, and when we were 75 yards away, you’d glance back in time to see a solitary black duck take to the air a few feet from where we’d stood while contemplating the fleeing mallards. You’d hear me chuckle and tell my dog that I hoped the crafty bird lived another decade, and you’d see Rocky look up as if he understood every word.

  Other ducks were getting up in the mist, but only a few were at extreme range, and you’d know that once the gun was fired, every bird in the marsh would be up and gone. So you wait with me for the shot that can’t be missed.

  You’d watch me come to a deep, unwadable creek, and while I look for a possible ford, two black ducks leap up from the other side. Despite the fact you are hunting them, the sudden rise of a pair of ducks is always a strangely unexpected event.

  You are behind my eyes as I fire at the farthest bird in an attempt to score a double, miss, swing on the nearest, and kill it with a charge of steel 2s. While Rocky swims the channel to retrieve the fallen bird, you let the sight and sound of dozens of ducks rising from all parts of the darkening marsh and the cold mist on your cheek saturate your senses.

  My watch tells me there are still seven minutes left in the season. But my day, my year, is done. I turn back toward the distant blind and calculate that in a narrow, ten-square-mile band of salt marsh, I am the only human being, and the proud, head-high sashaying dog striding before me with a black duck in his mouth is all the human companionship a waterfowler needs.

  An oar, an otter, a tangled glove, and a last-chance duck. These are the memories of waterfowling. These are the words and experiences we seek to recover or revise each time we return to the marsh. If we weren’t dedicated, we would not suffer the small tribulations surrounding our recreation. And it is this dedication—call it “obsession” if you like—that provides hope for the future.

  Thousands of years ago, men crouched at the edge of ponds to fling their stones and arrows at ducks and geese lured by crude facsimiles of themselves. So long as waterfowl and men exist, we will hunt the wings of dawn.

  Hunting from an Unusual Blind

  NELSON BRYANT

  Although the excuses offered by waterfowlers who fail to shoot their limit of birds are as plentiful as pinfeathers on a young duck, I have one that is, I believe, without precedent.

  Whit Manter of this town and I bagged only four Canada geese instead of the ten allowed us because our blind was an outhouse.

  Those who have never hunted out of an outhouse cannot appreciate what a handicap such a hiding place presents, but before I expand on this I should explain why we were using it.

  The structure is smack-dab in the middle of a farmer’s field adjoining a salt pond. There is a conventional blind on the pond’s shore, but we were not in it because the geese have of late been settling down in the middle of the field no matter how many decoys were spread about the shorefront location. That the pond has been frozen solid for the past couple of weeks probably has something to do with this.

  The alert reader might also wonder why an outhouse is situated on a windswept plain. It was put there, held upright against northeast gales by two iron fence posts driven into the earth, to accommodate those who attend the annual picnic of the town’s volunteer fire department.

  Arriving there forty-five minutes before daylight, Whit and I set out two dozen oversized shell decoys. Bogus birds of this genre weigh very little and their heads and necks are detachable, making it possible to stack as many as a dozen bodies together for transportation and storage.

  We missed our first chance of the day when a lone goose came in low over the pond, remaining silent and unseen until it was too late, just as we finished arranging our rig. Our guns were leaning against the outhouse six feet away, so all we could do was stand motionless while the bird set its wings and landed about 35 yards away. The instant I made a move toward my gun, it departed.

  We regarded that as a good omen, even though the day was far from ideal for goose hunting, with bright sunshine and only a whisper of wind from the west.

  Half an hour later, we got a taste of what lay ahead when a flock of fourteen geese appeared in the distance. We entered the outhouse from whose interior Whit began calling them. I have neglected to mention that although the structure was a good-sized two-holer, it was divided in half by a wooden partition, making it impossible for us to see each other unless we stuck our heads out of our respective open doorways. The geese were coming from the blind, or back side, of the building, so all we could do was to listen for their approach.

  Their clamoring grew louder and a moment later we saw their shadows as they passed directly overhead, well within range. From the twilight of our cubicles, we watched them circle until they were once again out of sight behind us. A muffled consultation through the partition wall resulted in an agreement to go for them if they came that close the second time around.

  When their shadows appeared once more, we jumped out of our hiding places and shot one bird each, and at the sound of our guns, five that had already landed out of sight on the other side of the outhouse took wing and were out of range before we could fire.

  Before we could pick up the downed birds, we saw another flock of about twenty birds approaching and darted back into our lairs.

  Thinking of what had happened only two minutes before, I tapped on the partition to get Whit’s attention and told him that this time around I would await his signal to leap forth.

  Being more than three decades younger than I, his hearing is acute, and I thought that he might be able to better estimate the moment of
truth.

  Once again, the honking of the geese drew near. Whit cried, “Now!” He stepped outside and fired twice, dropping one. I lurched forth too late to do anything, my gunning coat having caught on the edge of the door.

  The lack of wind was also adding to our problems. Had there been a stiff breeze, the geese that did respond to our decoys and our calling would not have been so indecisive.

  Whit remarked that if we had a brace and bit, we could drill peep holes in the back of the outhouse. We could also have shot peep holes in it, but declined that gambit because the structure wasn’t ours. We decided that our best bet was to remain inside until the birds landed. Even though we wouldn’t know their exact location, that would we reasoned, give us an extra second or so to spot, flush and shoot them.

  Three or four times after that decision, small flocks of geese, always gabbling incessantly, came in to look at our rig, then became indecisive and left. On each occasion, had there not been a roof over us, we would have been able to fill our limits. The five-bird daily limit applies during Massachusetts’s experimental coastal region season for Canada geese, which began January 21 and ended at sunset February 5. Canada geese have proliferated in the Northeast during the past decade and in some areas have become a nuisance, raising havoc with crops and golf courses.

  Sticking to our game plan, Whit and I lurked within the outhouse as long as birds were visible. Between eight-thirty and nine the flights stopped and we were about to call it quits when a huge flock of about three hundred geese appeared more than a mile away in the west. The flock began to break up into smaller groups, and one of about thirty headed our way. They came to us, talking with great animation, then flew away. As I peered out the doorway, I had the feeling that the departing flock was a little smaller than it should have been.

  “I think,” I whispered to Whit, whose head emerged from his half of the building, “that a few of them are on the ground behind us.”

  I eased my head around the corner of the building and four geese were on the ground about 40 yards away. I eased back, reported my finding to my companion, who said, “Go ahead. I’ll come around behind you.”

  The birds were nervous and jumped the instant I stepped around the corner. I shot one and could have shot another if I had remembered to pump a fresh shell into the chamber of my new gun, a slide-action repeater with which I am unfamiliar. Whit had no chance to fire.

  As we were picking up the decoys, five Canada geese accompanied by one snow goose came in, and even though we were standing in the open, our guns 30 yards away against the building, they circled us several times, often within range.

  The outhouse caper seemed a poor way to end the season, so the next day I went forth with my brother Dan to a field where we quickly put up a blind of camouflage netting against a wire fence, set out twenty decoys, and in two hours had our ten birds.

  PART VII

  Turkey Hunting

  That Twenty-Five-Pound Gobbler

  ARCHIBALD RUTLEDGE

  I suppose that there are other things which make a hunter uneasy, but of one thing I am very sure: that is to locate and to begin to stalk a deer or a turkey, only to find that another hunter is doing precisely the same thing at the same time. The feeling I had was worse than uneasy. It is, in fact, as inaccurate as if a man should say, after listening to a comrade swearing roundly, “Bill is expressing himself uneasily.”

  To be frank, I was jealous; and all the more so because I knew that Dade Saunders was just as good a turkey-hunter as I am—and maybe a good deal better. At any rate, both of us got after the same whopping gobbler. We knew this turkey and we knew each other; and I am positive that the wise old bird knew both of us far better than we knew him.

  But we hunters have ways of improving our acquaintance with creatures that are over-wild and shy. Both Dade and I saw him, I suppose, a dozen times, and twice Dade shot at him. I had never fired at him, for I did not want to cripple, but to kill; and he never came within a hundred yards of me. Yet I felt that the gobbler ought to be mine; and for the simple reason that Dade Saunders was a shameless poacher and a hunterout-of-season.

  I have in mind the day when I came upon him in the pine-lands in mid-July, when he had in his wagon five bucks in the velvet, all killed that morning. Now, this isn’t a fiction story; this is fact. And after I have told you of those bucks, I think you’ll want me to beat Dade to the great American bird.

  This wild turkey had the oddest range that you could imagine. You hear of turkeys ranging “original forests,” “timbered wilds,” and the like. Make up your mind that if wild turkeys have a chance they are going to come near civilization. The closer they are to man, the farther they are away from their other enemies. Near civilization they at least have (but for the likes of Dade Saunders) the protection of the law. But in the wilds what protection do they have from wildcats, from eagles, from weasels (I am thinking of young turkeys as well as old), and from all their other predatory persecutors?

  Well, as I say, time and again I have known wild turkeys to come, and to seem to enjoy coming, close to houses. I have stood on the porch of my plantation home and have watched a wild flock feeding under the great live-oaks there. I have repeatedly flushed wild turkeys in an autumn cornfield. I have shot them in rice stubble.

  Of course they do not come for sentiment. They are after grain. And if there is any better wild game than a rice-field wild turkey, stuffed with peanuts, circled with browned sweet potatoes, and fragrant with a rich gravy that plantation cooks know how to make, I’ll follow you to it.

  The gobbler I was after was a haunter of the edges of civilization. He didn’t seem to like the wild woods. I think he got hungry there. But on the margins of fields that had been planted he could get all he wanted to eat of the things he most enjoyed. He particularly liked the edges of cultivated fields that bordered either on the pinewoods or else on the marshy rice-lands.

  One day I spent three hours in the gaunt chimney of a burned rice-mill, watching this gobbler feeding on such edges. Although I was sure that sooner or later he would pass the mouth of the chimney, giving me a chance for a shot, he kept just that distance between us that makes a gun a vain thing in a man’s hands. But though he did not give me my chance, he let me watch him all I pleased. This I did through certain dusty crevices between the bricks of the old chimney.

  If I had been taking a post-graduate course in caution, this wise old bird would have been my teacher. Whatever he happened to be doing, his eyes and his ears were wide with vigilance. I saw him first standing beside a fallen pine log on the brow of a little hill where peanuts had been planted. I made the shelter of the chimney before he recognized me. But he must have seen the move I made.

  I have hunted turkeys long enough to be thoroughly rid of the idea that a human being can make a motion that a wild turkey cannot see. One of my woodsman friends said to me, “Why, a gobbler can see anything. He can see a jaybird turn a somersault on the verge of the horizon.” He was right.

  Watching from my cover I saw this gobbler scratching for peanuts. He was very deliberate about this. Often he would draw back one huge handful (or footful) of viney soil, only to leave it there while he looked and listened. I have seen a turkey do the same thing while scratching in leaves. Now, a buck while feeding will alternately keep his head up and down; but a turkey gobbler keeps his down very little. That bright black eye of his, set in that sharp bluish head, is keeping its vision on every object on the landscape.

  My gobbler (I called him mine from the first time I saw him) found many peanuts, and he relished them. From that feast he walked over into a patch of autumn-dried crabgrass. The long pendulous heads of this grass, full of seeds, he stripped skillfully. When satisfied with this food, he dusted himself beside an old stump. It was interesting to watch this; and while he was doing it I wondered if it was not my chance to leave the chimney, make a detour, and come up behind the stump. But of course just as I decided to do this, he got up, shook a small cloud of
dust from his feathers, stepped off into the open, and there began to preen himself.

  A short while thereafter he went down to a marshy edge, there finding a warm sandy hole on the sunny side of a briar patch, where he continued his dusting and loafing. I believe that he knew the stump, which shut off his view of what was behind it, was no place to choose for a midday rest.

  All this time I waited patiently; interested, to be sure, but I would have been vastly more so if the lordly old fellow had turned my way. This I expected him to do when he got tired of loafing. Instead, he deliberately walked into the tall ranks of the marsh, which extended riverward for half a mile. At that I hurried forward, hoping to flush him on the margin; but he had vanished for that day. But though he had escaped me, the sight of him had made me keen to follow him until he expressed a willingness to accompany me home.

  Just as I was turning away from the marsh I heard a turkey call from the shelter of a big live-oak beside the old chimney. I knew that it was Dade Saunders, and that he was after my gobbler. I walked over to where he was making his box-call plead. He expressed no surprise on seeing me. We greeted each other as two hunters, who are not over-friendly, greet when they find themselves after the same game.

  “I seen his tracks,” said Dade. “I believe he limps in the one foot since I shot him last Sunday will be a week.”

  “He must be a big bird,” I said; “you were lucky to have a shot.”

  Dade’s eyes grew hungrily bright.

  “He’s the biggest in these woods, and I’ll git him yet. You jest watch me.”

  “I suppose you will, Dade. You are the best turkey-hunter of these parts.”

  I hoped to make him overconfident; and praise is a great corrupter of mankind. It is not unlikely to make a hunter miss a shot. I remember that a friend of mine once said laughingly: “If a man tells me I am a good shot, I will miss my next chance, as sure as guns; but if he cusses me and tells me I’m not worth a darn, then watch me shoot!”