Duck hunting story

The perils of duck hunting are great - especially for the duck. Walter Cronkite

Maybe it was because the first Earth Day was while I was in college or maybe some degree of increased environmental awareness because of the works of the great environmentalists of our day such as Rachel Carson.  Or maybe,  it was just an easier major and kept them in school and out of the draft and Vietnam.  For whatever reason though, there seemed to be a lot of my peers going into some type of wildlife biology.  Most these guys liked to hunt and fish anyway and maybe some field of wildlife biology was the closest thing to making living doing something related to what they loved.  There were not an incredible number of jobs for college graduates in this field.  You could be Park Ranger/Manager of some sort or maybe you could be a Game Warden. 

 Dwight was a friend from back then.  He was a good ole boy from a small town somewhere.  He and his friend Sam always had some kind of scheme attempting  to win a hunting or fishing contest.  They would be force feeding a bass in a fish tank or modifying the antlers of a captured deer with a steel brush to make more points.  And there was always some great story about their success or how someone cheated even better than they did.

Dwight ended up as a Game Warden.  Perfect.  He knew so many of the tricks of the trade.  He ended up as a Game Warden somewhere in SE Texas.  I ran in to him a few years later and though he was now a law abiding citizen, he still had some great stories.  The following he told a couple of us over a beer.

I will retell as Dwight.

I was out one morning during the early part of duck hunting season.   It was a nice morning with a little lingering fog and not a trace of a breeze.  I was just enjoying the beautiful morning cruising down a 2 lane road with mostly grain fields on either side.  I had the windows down on my official Game Warden truck, the morning air felt really good.

I slowed to watch a flock of ducks flying overhead.   One of the ducks fell from the sky as if shot.  I hadn’t heard anything.   I pulled off the road and killed the engine on the truck, got out and stood beside the truck.  I hadn’t seen exactly where the duck had fallen and now saw no sign of it on the ground.  There were a few duck stands around but all seemed quiet.

After about 15 minutes, another group of ducks flew overhead and the same thing as before happened.  This time I was sure that I had heard no shot.  I watched the bird fall to the ground and a Golden Retriever

immediately ran from one of the blinds and then disappeared back into the blind with the duck.

Sticking my ticket pad in my pants pocket, I strolled out to the duck blind in question.   Just as I made it to the duck blind, an old geezer, probably in his seventies, stepped out.

“Sir I need to see your hunting license”

“Sure son, what have I done?  I’ve only got 2 ducks.”

Now looking at his license, I said “Mr Hopper, I saw those two ducks fall from the sky but I never heard a shot.  I have never even heard of a silencer on a shotgun but any kind of silencer is strictly forbidden when hunting in this State.   I need you to turn over your gun to me.”

“I don’t have no gun”

I didn’t even bother to answer.  I just started searching the blind.  Other than a stool, 2 dead ducks, a dog, and a thermos of coffee, I could find nothing.  No sign of a gun.

“Wherever you have hidden the gun, you might as well get it and turn it in.  I’m not leaving and neither are you until I have the gun.”

“Son, I already told you I don’t have no gun.  Don’t use one.   My eyes got too bad to hit anything anyway.”

I picked up one of the ducks and examined it as I said “Then how in the hell do you kill ducks 50 or 100 feet in the air.”  There didn’t appear to be any sign of a wound on the duck.

“Me and my sister ugly them to death”

“Huh?”  He wasn’t exactly easy to look at but…….

“Yep, when the ducks fly over, I jump out of the blind and make a face and if one of them ducks happens to see me the shock knocks him out of the sky and the fall kills him”

I had a real nut case here.  I wasn’t sure whether to arrest him or call EMS for the psych hospital.

As I was thinking, this is going to be a really long day, he whispered “ Get back in the blind here come some more ducks.”

Against my better judgement and thinking I must be as crazy as this old man, I crawled quietly into the blind with him, the dog etc.

Just as ducks flew almost directly overhead, the old geezer jumped from the blind and made the ugliest face I had ever seen.   It was so bad that I shuddered.  I looked up.  One of the ducks flying near the front of the flock looked down saw the old cuss, flapped wildly for a couple of seconds and then fell from the sky, as if it had forgotten how to fly.

“That is the damnedest thing I have ever seen.  I guess I owe you an apology.  I don’t think there is a statute anywhere against what you just did.  That was amazing.”   I started glancing around to the other duck blinds,  “You said your sister can do this too.  Where is she, which blind?”

“Well yep, she can, but I started having to leave her at home”

“Yeah? And why is that?”

“She got to where she was bruising the meat.”