By Wade Bourne

The drone of heavy rain on the roof had awakened me several times. All through the night, the downpour had never let up. I guessed three or four inches of rain had already fallen, and I expected the river to be pushing out of its banks by daybreak.
 
When my alarm went off, I dressed quickly and headed out the door. The boat trailer was already hooked up to my truck, and my hunting partner would be waiting at the Waffle House.

I was right about the river. When we got to the ramp, the water was high and the current running. “Well, look what we have here,” my friend said enthusiastically. We’d encountered this situation before.

We climbed into the boat, cinched our hoods tightly around our faces, and started running upriver. The raindrops were like tiny mirrors reflecting off the beam of my spotlight. My Lab stood between us with his head low and ears back as water blew off his oily coat.

Daybreak was just oozing in as we turned off the river into a large feeder creek. We idled upstream a couple of hundred yards and then veered into a tree-lined ditch where water was spreading out into a bordering cornfield. The rain had slowed to a drizzle.