Shivering
so hard his teeth chattered, the sub-teen boy kept his face down,
his cold hands on the barrel of the shotgun that was almost as tall
as he was and hoped his father's persistent calling would bring
the small group of mallards down in front of the willow-covered
blind. He and his father never had top-quality hunting clothes in
those days.
In
fact, the state of the art in hunting clothes wasn't especially
high at the time. So being cold was an accepted part of duck hunting.
His father always kept a small charcoal fire going in a big metal
bucket inside the blind, but it was good only when one of the hunters
took a break from watching for ducks to appear above the ring of
cypress trees that hid the horizon on the northwest Louisiana lake.
Inside,
the blind was cozy. Made of wood with a tar-paper roof and a canvas
curtain between the sitting area and the shooting porch on the front,
the blind was built high above the water, allowing part of the boat
the hunters used to reach the blind to slide underneath. A brush-covered
tin roof sloped back from the blind to hide the boat and limit the
amount of rain that entered it while the hunters were in the blind.
The
boat, the blind, the clothing, the 100 or so decoys anchored in
4 feet of water in front of the blind, the guns and the shells ‹
all of theequipment was the best the man could provide, given the
fact that his wife wasn't interested in hunting, didn't like to
cook or eat ducks and questioned every expenditure the man made
for outdoor sports.
All
of it was good. All of it would be acceptable to most duck hunters
today, except the paper-bodied shells. Ammunition for shotguns had
to be protected from moisture or shells would swell and hang up
the guns after the first shot. That happened often enough that smart
hunters kept their shells in metal containers that were easy to
seal. Later, they used coffee cans with handy plastic replacement
tops or sealed their extra shells in plastic freezer bags and put
them in their coat pockets. But, in the 1940s, such cheap, convenient
items weren't available. Shells got wet. Serious hunters also kept
a stick trimmed off to the right size to ram down the barrel of
a gun and force a lodged shell out of a gun's chamber. Usually,
of course, the malfunction occurred when ducks were still in range.
That's
why learning to make the first shot count was extremely important.
There seldom were as many ducks on the lake as there were duck hunters.
In fact, there were more blinds than ducks most days. Blinds were
required by law to be 500 feet apart. A person who figured out a
good spot to locate a blind and had success there quickly was surrounded.
Others would build blinds 500 feet away, roughly in a circle around
the prime spot.
This
was the pattern all over the big lake, created a couple of decades
earlier as a water supply for Shreveport. Less attractive blind
sites might not be crowded by other blinds, but the only truly isolated
blinds were the few placed far out in the open lake, where deep
water had long before drowned all the timber. Such locations seldom
attracted mallards, regardless of the number of decoys around them,
the thoroughness of the brushing done on them or the quality of
the calling from inside. They
were "blackjack" blinds, where diving ducks such as ringnecks and
scaup were the main targets.
When
the hundred or more blinds in the shallow, cypress-studded parts
of the lake were full of hunters on weekends, the open-water blinds
could be the most productive places on the lake. Ducks that quickly
became cautious when a barrage of calling sounded through the woods
were likely to decoy readily to a big spread in open water, especially
on nearly windless days, when decoys in the woods floated like the
wooden chunks they were and open-water decoys seemed lively in even
the lightest of breezes. Wind, however, was the factor that kept
most hunters from bothering to build open-water blinds, even though
sites on the lake could be claimed for a $10, one-time fee. The
small, flat-bottom boats used in those days had low sides. Most
were 12 feet long with a pointed bow and no decking to keep out
heavy seas.
The
boy and his father used such a boat until 1953, when they got a
14-foot Skeeter boat. No, not the popular bass boats bearing that
name today. The original Skeeter was so named because it was a lean,
low, light plywood boat with sides in the kayak style, capable of
skimming over still water at high speeds with a 5-, 10- or 16-horsepower
engine. Few outboard engines were larger in those days. Such boats
could handle fairly large waves safely. But those at-the-time prestigious
fishing boats weren't made to handle the storms that could arise
on such a lake in winter. And life jackets were rare. Most hunters
had a Kapok-filled cushion or two and could have survived the capsizing
of their boats only if rescued quickly. The boy shook more when
ducks were near. He shook the same way when ducks approached even
when he was 20 and 30 years old. Somewhere along the line, after
he had mastered the sport and taken enough limits to know he was
an accomplished duck hunter, the shaking stopped. His clothes were
better. He learned to wear insulated leather boots even when hunting
ducks from a boat. Finally, he learned to wear wool sweaters under
his cotton or nylon coats. In the 1970s, he got his first pair of
neoprene waders and camouflaged stocking caps with openings for
his face. He could take the cold without shaking and he could watch
ducks approaching without fear that he might fail to call them close
enough for a shot. His shells were plastic-bodied and less susceptible
to water damage and almost never swelled in a gun, although they
could hang up!
He
didn't shake any more, but he still loved to hunt ducks. He knew
many ways to hunt successfully, had hunted ducks in so many different
types of habitat that he not only had a plan in mind as soon as
he saw a field or stream or lake or flooded forest but also could
tell a credible story of past success in some similar spot. He knew
the lack of shivering meant he had lost something he had enjoyed
about those early hunts with his father. But he couldn't say he
missed the shivering itself. Besides, as he grew older, he was likely
to shiver in his living room, unless he turned up the heat or put
on some of his hunting clothes. The main thing he missed were the
days in the blind with his father, and the smell of dried willow
leaves, charcoal burning in a bucket and strong dark-roast coffee
from a thermos.
|
|