Friends Old, New, and Soon to Be,
For those of us blessed enough to have Maslow’s hierarchical bases covered, success is a mutable word, largely defined by the capaciousness of our spirit. That’s a bold statement to make in the sporting world, given that two of the five stages of a hunter’s life are based upon “more” and “bigger”. But a life afield teaches us so many things that have nothing to do with bag limits or beard length, things indeed of the spirit, and for me, the appreciation of sufficiency is chief among them. I am open to assertions that I am rationalizing, given how much time I spend hunting and how little I spend finding. But I don’t worry about it much unless I am trying to feed others. The joys I find in the woods are often small, but meaningful, and therein, enough.
Just this past weekend, two mornings in a row, I slipped to the edge of a black water cypress pond with a friend and a cousin in hopes of seeing a few wood ducks. On the first morning, a mated pair landed from the left, out of range, to loaf for an hour. Watching them, and thinking about other mornings there, it occurred to me that we were sitting at the pond’s six o’clock position but needed to be at nine.
The next day, we watched as the woodies made their appearance at the same time as the day before, the squealing hen announcing her arrival like your loud Aunt bursting into the family party a few G&Ts into her own, she and her drake skidding across the water like they were stealing third. Now sitting where we needed to be, I whispered, “I’m pretty sure I can hit them from here.” But my cousin suggested we watch them a bit, see if they’d decoy in some more. I thought that a fine idea until I shifted on my seat, and they burst from the water and were gone.
I didn’t care about missing the birds. I cared that they came when I said they would come and did what I said they would do. That was enough to know I am a better woodsman this year than I was last year. A small joy, but a real and lasting one that will carry me over the next year as I go back and watch those ducks. It’s more than enough, in fact.
My Labrador Jed stayed curled up under the dog stand I sat on throughout. He’s pretty passive until called upon by word or gunfire, preferring to find some overhead cover during a hunt. Sometimes I wish he were a fire-breather, his eyes fixed on the sky, beads of water dripping artfully from his muzzle, but he’s not. Neither am I, for that matter. We are matched well, both of us quirky, curious about the world around us, not overly concerned with results. He likes to put his back against my leg and doze. I like to drink coffee and solve the world’s problems. It’s enough.
At four years old, he’s a joy in the house, quiet in the blind, and rocket-powered in the training field (though he does enter the water as if he’s easing into a warm bath). But as I’ve written you before, for most of the last two years, we’ve been working through, if not gunshyness, a gun anxiety. We spent last year’s season, and most of this one, offset from other hunters, just working to associate the sound of a shotgun with the splash of a bird in the water and a chance to do the thing that he loves more than anything – go get something and bring it back. And on a recent hunt in South Carolina, it all came together with a single mallard hen. It’s amazing what feathers in a dog’s mouth will do to rekindle the fire.
A week later, as I prepared for the next morning’s hunt with a friend, Jed walked into my office and lay down atop my stack of gear, something he had not done since he was a first-year hunter. Putting himself atop my gun case was once his way of saying, “You’re not going unless I am.” To see it again after two years, during which he would leave the room when I picked up my shotgun, left me a bit emotional. The next morning, when I looked down from shooting through tree branches at a vee of geese passing low overhead, to find him at my side, ears cocked forward, head up, looking for work, it was all I could do not to dance. I knelt and hugged him, whispering in his ear, “You’re back!” as he strained forward in my embrace, making sure there was nothing in the water that needed getting.
I didn’t kill any birds that day. Or the next. Or the days since. Some of that was bad shooting. Some of that was just the state of duck hunting in Southeast North Carolina. As my buddy Chris said as we shook hands after this season’s last hunt together, “We’ll have to get them next year, man.” Yeah, we will. Or not. Hot coffee and wet dogs and good conversation in the dawnlight are sufficient for me.
And to see Jed emerge from a two-year funk, his eyes on the skies? Well, I don’t need anything else.
I’ve already got a gracious plenty.
But there is one more thing I must note, and that’s the kindness of the many sportsfolk I hear from each month, like Vaughn from Arkansas, who kindly invites me to hunt every year. Arkansas is a fair piece from coastal Carolina, but I do love that flooded timber, so I’ll keep my fingers crossed. Then there’s Bill in Alabama, who offers compliments that mean the world to me and all of the Field Journal writers to whom I pass them. And of course, I must thank the writers themselves, many of whom regularly publish in national magazines, but love what we are doing here enough to be a part of it.
I hope it’s enough for you, too, but I’d love to hear your thoughts. Email me at EAL@tombeckbe.com.
Yours,
Russell Worth Parker
Editor-in-Chief, Tom Beckbe Field Journal
