Cupped Wings: Buried Treasure

This could be the funniest true duck-hunting story ever told. It involves a high-speed truck chase, a landfill, a grown man crying his eyes out, and a very understanding wife. And there’s hardly any hunting in it. Which is pure genius.

It took place many years ago during a two-week stretch of bitterly cold central-Arkansas weather. Snow covered the rice fields, ice cloaked the trees, and when the power went out, folks knew it might be days—or weeks—before it came back on. A rice farmer named Shane and his wife, Lisa, were packing up the house to leave when Lisa’s cousin called Shane to tell him that he’d found an open creek, and the mallards were pouring in. “Come on,” he told Shane. “Right now.” Shane had no business going hunting at the time, but he left within minutes, driving his wife’s new Yukon.

And the ducks poured through the timber, just as Lisa’s cousin had described. Now, Shane is a big fellow with a ZZ Top beard, and he might spook you a bit if you ran into him in a dark swamp. But he’s a kind and gentle soul, and he didn’t want to mess up Lisa’s new rig. After the hunt, he stuffed his muddy waders into a garbage bag for the ride home and, once there, set the bag down in the breezeway. Then he and Lisa left for two weeks, waiting on the power crews.

When they returned home, home was a mess. All of the food in the refrigerator had spoiled, so they loaded it into garbage bags and set the bags in the breezeway. It took several days for Arkansas to thaw out, and when it did, Shane hauled the garbage to a local dump. Later that day, Shane and his pals were itching to get back after the ducks, so he started looking for his waders. That’s when it hit him.

“It was just BANG!” he says, the remorse still in his voice. “I knew right away I’d thrown those waders out with the trash.” Shane sat down in a chair in the breezeway and bawled like a two-year-old girl who’d just had her baby doll snatched away—his words, not mine. When Lisa walked up and asked what in the world was wrong, he sobbed: “I threw my waders away. I hauled ’em to the dump.”

“So what?” Lisa said. She had seen a world of chest waders in her day and wasn’t sure why this was a big deal.

Shane sniffed. “My duck call was in the wader pocket.” And here we go with the crying again.

Here’s the thing: It wasn’t just any ol’ duck call. It was the first call he ever owned, and he’d had it since he was seven years old. Lisa knew how much her husband loved that call, and she is a wonderful wife. “You better get gone,” she said.

Shane didn’t hesitate. He jumped in his truck and tore off for the dump. When he arrived, the attendant said that a truck with Shane’s garbage in it had left for the landfill only a few minutes before.

“Which way?” begged Shane.

“Towards Carlisle,” the fellow said.

Shane’s truck spat gravel when he peeled out onto the highway. “I was going 99 miles an hour when I caught that truck,” he says proudly. “I got in front of him to slow him down. And I got him stopped right there on the highway.”

The truck driver stormed out of the cab, hopping mad, but recognized Shane.

“Boy, what are you doing?” the driver asked.

Shane told him the sad story. “I said, ‘Fella, my heart is broken. Can I crawl up there in the garbage and look?’”

The fella said, “Have at it.”

Shane clambered into the back of the garbage truck and burrowed through a couple weeks’ worth of half-rotten central Arkansas garbage. Throwing bags around like a bear hunting grubs.

“Lord, it was nasty,” he says. “I looked and looked and looked, and that fellow started looking at his watch.” Shane was sopping wet with trash goo and exhausted. It was time to take things up a notch.

“How much would it take,” he asked, “for you to dump all this garbage in my yard?”

“Dump it where?”

“In my yard. I’ll pay you.”

“I can’t do that,” the man said. But then he hesitated for a moment, and Shane’s heart leaped.

“If I did,” the fellow figured, “I reckon I would get home early tonight.”

I’ve met Lisa, and she is a sweet and understanding woman. But a full truckload of trash in the yard is a full truckload of trash in the yard. “It will blow your mind how much trash a garbage truck will hold,” Shane grins. “He dumped it in the yard, and it was taller than our ceilings. Huge. I picked up four bags to look through and figured that when I was done with them, I’d pick up four more. I thought it might take me a week, but I was committed.”

He found the duck call in garbage bag number three.

There was whooping and hollering. There might have been more tears. Shane doesn’t know about that. But he knew he was one lucky son-of-a-gun, with a prodigal heirloom come home again and a mountain of garbage not far from the front porch.

And today, Shane has a collection containing dozens of historic duck calls, but he only uses one. That very first one, which he has not put into a pocket since.