A Cold Day for Ducks

                                            

                                             Dennis Whiteside with a limit of river ducks...

                                          Floating behind a blind on the river, duck hunting.
One Sunday night in mid-December, the temperature had dropped to about 6 degrees Fahrenheit. I called my friend Whiteside and the conversation went like this… “I guess that trip down the river tomorrow is off,” says I. “I hear it’s gonna be about 10 above for a high.”

“Why?” he replies. “You too old and soft to take the cold?”

By a few months or so, Whiteside is older than I am. I was figuring he couldn’t possibly make it and I’d have to do all the paddling and thaw him out at the end of the trip so he could get his hip boots off. And then he wonders if I am worried about the cold! Was John Wayne afraid of the Indians?

We met at 9:00 the next morning, and it was 8 degrees above zero. Dennis Whiteside and I did this very thing when we were 18 years old and in college at the University of Missouri. My dad would go with us on weekends and the three of us would float the Piney in one of our old wooden johnboats, jump-shooting ducks.

The colder and wickeder it gets, the more ducks you will find, because all the marshes and ponds freeze up and the river gives them open water, and quite a bit of food as well.

At 18, we perhaps had greater physical abilities, but I figure we weren’t as smart then. That morning as we headed down the river with me paddling and Dennis clutching his shotgun in the bow, I wondered if we were any smarter than we ever were. If you dump a boat on a rough shoal in that kind of cold, you are in real trouble. Your life can depend on getting a fire built in a hurry. We had a stable 18-foot johnboat, and we both know how to paddle it. If you can paddle on one side, and make that boat go where you want it to go with a minimum of effort and no noise, you can sneak up on ducks or anything else, without taking the paddle from the water.

Duck-hunting a river behind a floating blind is next to impossible if you can’t paddle from one side without making a sound. And you have to have enough water. When you drag over a shoal, you make so much noise everything knows you are there for a half mile down the river. This year, many of the rivers we normally float in the winter are just too low. The lower end of the Big Piney had plenty of water, and plenty of ducks.

Thirty minutes after we started, we spied a group of 12 or 15 mallards about 200 yards downriver, and we began a slow silent drift, hidden by the blind attached to the front of our boat. It took awhile, but in time, we were right in the middle of them, and the whole flock took to flight about 20 yards before my partner’s gun. Sometimes miracles happen. Dennis fired 3 times and 3 drake mallards folded up and plummeted into the river. He never did that when he was 18, if I remember right.

We stopped and drank hot coffee, and tromped around a little to get the feeling back in our feet. It isn’t hard to stay warm when you paddle a boat, even when it is that cold. We have good gear to keep us warm, having acquired coats and gloves that Eskimos would envy. But hip waders or chest waders, no matter how many socks you have on, do not keep your feet warm enough if you sit in a boat without moving them for hours at a time.

Back in the boat, Dennis takes up the paddle, and I am in the bow with my old dependable pump gun. The pressure is awful! I know I have to equal his shooting prowess and I am so cold I don’t know if I can find the doggone trigger on my shotgun. Down the river a quarter mile, there is a huge flock of mallards… too many. The shoal is a little rough, and the water breaking against the boat as we scoot through it makes a metallic slapping sound and some old hen mallard gets nervous. She remembers her grandmother saying something about this kind of situation. She starts squawking and we watch them take to flight at 60 yards.

You never have a day when all goes perfect. If you didn’t have that challenge, it would be too easy for us grizzled old veteran outdoorsmen. But the next flock was in a perfect spot, and Whiteside got me to within good shotgun range. I clobbered a greenhead drake with my first shot, and he just flew off. So I picked out another one and my dependable old pump gun wouldn’t pump right. I think the WD-40 oil in it had froze up, and suddenly it became an UN-dependable old pump gun. I got off a second shot by finally breaking it loose, and I hurried too much and missed.

Nothing hurts worse than to shoot twice and have nothing to show for it just after your hunting partner has scored a triple. But I am an outdoor writer, and I cannot redesign a hunting trip, I have to tell the truth and write about it the way it happened. Especially when there is a witness! And that’s the way it happened, dad-blame it! Even though it was mostly the shotgun’s fault, I shot twice and had nothing. But there is always a silver lining inside the rainbow, a pot of gold inside a dark cloud, or something of that sort, and just through the shoal, in another eddy, there was that mallard drake I had shot at, stone dead in the middle of the river.

Just after that, two gadwalls jumped from a little pocket, and I shot one time and dropped them both. We stopped and built a big fire and had more coffee whilst I bragged about that last shot. Before that crackling fire, I got to where I could feel my feet again, and I let Dennis get back in the front of the boat. Maybe 100 yards downriver, three mallards swam out from behind a log and took to flight. Whiteside fired once and folded another drake mallard. That made his limit, and it wasn’t even noon yet.

By three p.m. we were so darn froze, we were wishing the take-out point was a bit closer. The temperature had soared to almost 20 degrees but not quite. By taking one shot at a time with my newly undependable old pump gun which would hardly pump, I had my limit of mallards and a pair of gadwalls. We had fired a total of 11 shells to kill 10 ducks, but I had missed twice. Dennis hadn’t missed at all. I might point out that he has missed plenty since then.

That night we cleaned ducks in my basement, and remembered those long ago days when we were 18 years old. It was nice to float the river again like we did when we were kids, just as tough as we were then, better shots than we were then and with hunting coats today that came from Cabela’s instead of the army salvage store. There are more eagles today, less water in the rivers and fewer ducks. And back then, it never got nearly as cold!

Write to me at Box 22, Bolivar, Mo. 65613, or e-mail lightninridge@windstream.net The website is www.larrydablemontoutdoors.blogspot.com