Teal duck with all the goodies on the back of the car.

DUCK HUNT

By John Graham

INTO THE UNKNOWN, I follow Daniel’s pickup. It is dark, 5:50 a.m., the temperature just shy of freezing. We head over the Sacramento River via a short bridge, into fields where the road turns to dirt and gravel and puddles of milky water.
A waning full moon offers detail and the silhouettes of other distant hunters greeting one another in short clips.
  Daniel and I meet up with Frank, who will be our caller for the shoot. Together we pull together our gear against the cold, pull up waders and button snaps, we grab the guns and bags and move out along the trail towards the ponds, headlamps leading the way.
  As we wade into the knee-deep rice paddies, the water and soft mud threaten to topple each of us if we don’t mind our steps. All around we can hear the sounds of tens of thousands of birds, lying down, amongst themselves.
  We wade and wade until we reach the blinds, cold steel boxes sunken into narrow levies called “checks.” The decoy ducks have been set out from the day before, on either side of the blinds, in paddies glistening with slivers of the moon.
  As the sun ever so slowly begins to come up, we drape our steel boxes with sheets of perforated camouflage, gathering reeds and branches around them. We lower the guns into the boxes, then ourselves, where we sit up on small, round chairs that swivel. We put our hands in our pockets, take them out adjusting our straps and collars against the wind and cold and fear of screwing up. Then we put them back in.
  Quiet time begins.
  We’re hush. The light of the sun increases. Shooting time is minutes away. The birds are more and more active, louder and vocalizing. Frank tells us to load. Formations can be seen materializing in they sky. Then, the first shot comes from a few paddies away—BAM, BAM.
  The day’s begun.
  We begin to work the whistles, looking about. Some birds come in. They get close. I’m looking the wrong way, huddled down and unprepared. Daniel and Frank tell me to look up. Before I can, I’m surprised by the profound bam and clack of their guns as they begin hammering away at the birds. The adrenalin starts. The paddies all around hold the sounds of birds and the banging of shotguns.
  Frank is calling out directionals, “Twelve o’clock. John, work your whistle.” He works his duck call. “Two o’clock, John. Call them in.”
  I work the whistle. The birds turn and come in to my sound. They cup their wings to land. Between the decoys and our calling, the ducks think that we’re them.
“Okay, John,” Frank says to me quietly. “Get ready . . . Now stand!”
  I stand and release the safety and give the birds the two solid bang-bangs of my over-under twenty gauge. I twist one of them, which turns to fly on. Frank drops another bird on the spot and it falls into the water in front of us. Daniel gets three shots off with his twelve gauge, going after the bird I’ve wounded. It seems to be hit again and does an arc that sends it into the next paddy. It splashes.
  “Alright, John,” Frank says. “Go get your bird. Hurry! Don’t let it get away . . . And bring your gun. Be ready to shoot it if it tries to fly off.”
  I hoist myself out of the blind, lift the gun, methodically reload and begin sloshing across the paddy as fast as possible, heading in the direction of the downed bird.
“Hurry!” they call after me as I slog away.
  The sun has come up by this time and one can see the birds every so often dropping with the sound of bangs in the paddies all around.
  I reach the check on the other side of the paddy where I last saw my bird and see a feathered creature face down in the next paddy. He is dead and beautiful, a pintail, my first-ever and the last I will be allowed in the day as the limit on pintails is one a day. All of us will get one today as we huddle, whistle, hide, shoot and try to stay warm in our camouflaged metal boxes.
  Above, higher than all the birds, fly geese and swans in huge V formations, chattering away at one another to let themselves know they are where they should be.

— John Graham
from Colusa, CA
December 15, 2008