Bill Burkett
Active member
Been a while since I posted from my Duck Hunter Diaries. Volume One is enjoying respectable sales on Amazon and I am editing Volumes Two and Three. At 70, in my second year unable to get out after them, I ran across this entry from my mid-thirties about a guy I feel more akin to now than the younger me. Hopefully this won't seem too melancholy for the holidays.
The old-timer
I stopped at the MarDon restaurant to eat. Rod Meseberg told me he lost his copy of a F&H News story I wrote about his resort, and I told him I’d send him another. He asked if I’d like to go out on the Duck Taxi in the morning but I declined, sayi ng I had to get home. Turned out he had an old-timer in one of his motel units planning to hunt alone and was worried about him, would trade me a hunt for guiding him without seeming to; just another random hunter assigned to his blind, to save his pride. Wish he’d told me that before I declined;. I admired his sensitivity to the old guy’s feelings, but felt like I couldn’t change my mind after I said I didn’t have time. A decision I will always regret; as I was eating my chili burger with cheese and onions, a gray-haired hunter sat at the counter for coffee and we fell to talking. He grew up in Iowa and his father was a market gunner. Their many-windowed home kitchen looked out on a natural flyway for redheads and canvasbacks between two lakes. The old hunter had a high, etched forehead and grin wrinkles, white hair not much sparser than mine and told about taking a limit of mallards and teal by himself from a small rubber raft in a bass lake.
“I usually hunt alone,” he said, both proudly and a little sadly, it seemed. He resembled Bob Hernbrode, the old Arizona game ranger who worked in hunter education: same far-seeing eyes under a shelf of dramatic eyebrows, same quiet competence touched with a sensed vulnerability. He told of his dad killing five scattering ducks with his Model 97 Winchester, “saving the teal till last, and that teal was climbing and corkscrewing when he shot.” His old man was showing off that day for a friend he was trying to interest in duck hunting. When his veined hands shook a little steadying his coffee to his lips it seemed strange, because his soft voice was young with memories. He remembered 1932 as the year L.C. Smith introduced the three-inch magnum twelve and his dad got one “to see what it would do” and dropped ducks “I wouldn’t even raise a gun to.”
“He was a wonderful shot,” he said, eyes lost in the past, “who taught me everything, even about getting a gun to fit you.” He said his shooting has gone downhill because he only fires about 200 shells a year now, where his dad went through 7,000 a year. Then he told about driving to a north Minnesota lake through a foot of snow, chasing the mallards off his spot, getting ready—and then being driven out of his blind by mosquitoes. Mosquitoes in a snow-storm. So I traded him my grandmother Burkett’s Arkansas tale about how it got so cold in Stuttgart frozen mallards fell out of the sky, one of them narrowly missing braining a hunter, who then was almost arrested for taking more than the limit. He chuckled. No, no, he said, my story is true—it snowed before a hard freeze that year; it takes a hard freeze to kill Minnesota mosquitoes.
He seemed sorry to see me go. I was sorry to leave. I wished him luck. On the long drive home, I had a word with whoever or whatever it is that I believe in that is powerful enough to stir up the weather to bring down Northern mallards, and interested enough in the mortality of old hunters to do it tomorrow for that old man. His eyes were bright and his memories as clear as a young man’s in the telling. Somehow he vindicated to me all the old simple beliefs in waterfowling I built my life on, but sometimes forget because of distractions. May duck-hunting always be as fresh for me, is a kind of prayer.
The old-timer
I stopped at the MarDon restaurant to eat. Rod Meseberg told me he lost his copy of a F&H News story I wrote about his resort, and I told him I’d send him another. He asked if I’d like to go out on the Duck Taxi in the morning but I declined, sayi ng I had to get home. Turned out he had an old-timer in one of his motel units planning to hunt alone and was worried about him, would trade me a hunt for guiding him without seeming to; just another random hunter assigned to his blind, to save his pride. Wish he’d told me that before I declined;. I admired his sensitivity to the old guy’s feelings, but felt like I couldn’t change my mind after I said I didn’t have time. A decision I will always regret; as I was eating my chili burger with cheese and onions, a gray-haired hunter sat at the counter for coffee and we fell to talking. He grew up in Iowa and his father was a market gunner. Their many-windowed home kitchen looked out on a natural flyway for redheads and canvasbacks between two lakes. The old hunter had a high, etched forehead and grin wrinkles, white hair not much sparser than mine and told about taking a limit of mallards and teal by himself from a small rubber raft in a bass lake.
“I usually hunt alone,” he said, both proudly and a little sadly, it seemed. He resembled Bob Hernbrode, the old Arizona game ranger who worked in hunter education: same far-seeing eyes under a shelf of dramatic eyebrows, same quiet competence touched with a sensed vulnerability. He told of his dad killing five scattering ducks with his Model 97 Winchester, “saving the teal till last, and that teal was climbing and corkscrewing when he shot.” His old man was showing off that day for a friend he was trying to interest in duck hunting. When his veined hands shook a little steadying his coffee to his lips it seemed strange, because his soft voice was young with memories. He remembered 1932 as the year L.C. Smith introduced the three-inch magnum twelve and his dad got one “to see what it would do” and dropped ducks “I wouldn’t even raise a gun to.”
“He was a wonderful shot,” he said, eyes lost in the past, “who taught me everything, even about getting a gun to fit you.” He said his shooting has gone downhill because he only fires about 200 shells a year now, where his dad went through 7,000 a year. Then he told about driving to a north Minnesota lake through a foot of snow, chasing the mallards off his spot, getting ready—and then being driven out of his blind by mosquitoes. Mosquitoes in a snow-storm. So I traded him my grandmother Burkett’s Arkansas tale about how it got so cold in Stuttgart frozen mallards fell out of the sky, one of them narrowly missing braining a hunter, who then was almost arrested for taking more than the limit. He chuckled. No, no, he said, my story is true—it snowed before a hard freeze that year; it takes a hard freeze to kill Minnesota mosquitoes.
He seemed sorry to see me go. I was sorry to leave. I wished him luck. On the long drive home, I had a word with whoever or whatever it is that I believe in that is powerful enough to stir up the weather to bring down Northern mallards, and interested enough in the mortality of old hunters to do it tomorrow for that old man. His eyes were bright and his memories as clear as a young man’s in the telling. Somehow he vindicated to me all the old simple beliefs in waterfowling I built my life on, but sometimes forget because of distractions. May duck-hunting always be as fresh for me, is a kind of prayer.
