Friends Old, New, and Soon to Be,
Even with an almost-sure-thing South Carolina hunt coming a week later, it felt like something of a Hail Mary as Jed and I cranked the truck at the last possible minute on the last day of North Carolina’s duck season. The notion that it would be nine months until we could do it again, and the painful reality that I’ve got more duck seasons left in me than Jed does, was enough to get me moving toward a cypress pond that rarely offers more than solitude and unmet expectations. I’ve always been a bit of a bitter ender, though, relying on pain tolerance more than skill, so a hard-luck spot felt right for us.
As my father once said to me, “You ain’t got much quit in you.”
There was a lot of traffic on the road, given the hour and the day’s prediction of a coming Snowmageddon, and we were three minutes past shooting light when we reached the turn off the main road, with a gate yet to unlock.
I don’t know what it is about Labrador physiology that they express excitement by sneezing, but with Jed’s head poking between my headrest and the door of my truck, he misted the left side of my face with a combination of things I preferred not to ponder. Wiping a sleeve across my cheek, I pressed the accelerator a little deeper. Jed sneezed again, Labrador for, “Dude, seriously, hurry up!” as I drove beyond our normal drop-off point, jumping five deer who flashed white tails at us as they broke for the Cape Fear River. I briefly wondered where they meant to hide as I parked and guzzled coffee that burned throughout my chest as it went down.
Freed from the backseat, Jed readily stepped into his neoprene vest. It was a minimalist’s hunt. Our best-case scenario was a three-shot volley at a flight of passing woodies, so we didn’t need decoys. I still pocketed a fistful of number six 12-gauge as a nod to optimism, dropping them in the chest pocket of the insulated waders I bought at a clearance sale three years ago. The waders’ warmth, combined with that offered by my Fowler jacket, meant I’d likely be sweating by the time we reached the blind. Some cold front.
Coffee cup in one hand, shotgun in the other, we stepped off. Despite two trazodone tablets to compensate for the fact that we were hunting the duck hole where I created his intermittent gun anxiety two years ago, Jed got squirrelier the closer we got to the blind. It’s an issue my buddy Grayson Guyer calls “locational anxiety.” One hundred yards out, Jed sat down and refused to take a step further. I called him, cussed him a little bit, and tried to sweet-talk him when that failed. Finally, I gave up and walked on to the blind, figuring he’d either head back to the truck, stay right there, or join me. I hoped it would be the latter, but hell if I knew the right answer. I guessed one of us does have some quit in him.
Though the wintry mix the weather folks called for wasn’t falling, the wind was edging on up towards the 30-mile-an-hour mark they’d predicted when Jed ambled up a few minutes later and curled up next to me. “Nice of you to join me,” I whispered. “Now, watch. He looked to the sky. It was game on after all.
On the expertly managed property to the north, it sounded like a war, but at our bit of black water, I just hoped the pair of wood ducks I’d watched all season would arrive. I wanted Jed to get feathers in his mouth at the pond that has been his nemesis, sometimes a cure-all for gundog problems. But after a couple of hours, I knew it wasn’t to be, and we headed home, the temperature having dropped fifteen degrees while we’d waited. We had not quit so much as accepted reality. Sometimes that’s a necessity. And sometimes things work out in other, even better, ways, even if not as you might have envisioned.
It was a week later in South Carolina Jed had what I reckon was the single greatest day of his life, courtesy of the Andy Quattlebaum and Blackwell Family Foundation. Running under the constant fire of twelve pegs worth of guns, he retrieved forty-one pheasants at a tower shoot without showing a moment of concern. And the next day, in a rice field duck blind, he worked through his anxiety around close-in gunfire to retrieve nine ducks on an exquisite morning in which teal swarmed like moths to a 40-watt bulb. It was far fewer than he'd have had with someone other than me handling the shotgun and far from textbook dog work, but in a season that had seen him retrieve only a single mallard hen, he tallied fifty retrieves in two days.
Loving a gundog, like hunting itself, is a never-ending puzzle. You solve one problem and create another. You unlock one door, another closes. Along the way, you open more and more of your heart to these magnificent creatures. It’s the world’s most delightful endurance event. Fortunately, I ain’t got much quit in me. I don’t reckon Jed does either.
I’d be interested to hear how your gundogs did this waterfowl season, how they’re doing this quail season, and how you’re approaching the coming turkey season. You can reach me at EAL@tombeckbe.com.
Yours,
Russell Worth Parker
Editor-in-Chief, Tom Beckbe Field Journal
