Cupped Wings: Halftime

You don’t want to look in my basement. It’s Scary Town down there. Piles of clothes are heaped up like poker chips. I’ve long since forgotten which are clean and which are dirty. It’s down to the sniff test by now. A slimy mud slick extends from the basement door to the back corner where the decoys are stored, as if a giant slug had crawled across the floor. Camo netting is draped and drying everywhere. Tangled decoys mound over the workout bench. And something smells. Could be me.

My truck is not much better. You could grow corn in the floor mats, if you could even get to the dirt under all the biscuit wrappers. Tumbleweeds of Labrador retriever hair tumble across the back seat. And the truck bed—honestly, I don’t even want to touch it without a bottle of hydrogen peroxide at the ready.

And the last place I personally want to look is in the mirror. Crikey! Is that me? Eyes sunken like potholes. Chapped face. A couple hundred yards of lines and wrinkles that weren’t there on opening day.

Dadgum, I think. I look like something the cat would cross the street to avoid, much less drag into the house.

And here’s the crazy part, the thrilling part, the part that makes my wife, Julie, think she may have to call in the family for a midwinter intervention: Half of duck season is yet to come. Score!

We’re all a little creaky-jointed and crusty by now. Here in the Atlantic Flyway, I’m a little over halfway through the allotted 60 days that I am gifted to chase ducks each year. I’ve hunted near and far. Crammed in a few deer hunts and a bit of speckled-trout fishing between the duck hunts and pulled off my son’s wedding to boot. Thankfully, it was scheduled for the December split, or I might have had some explaining to do.

You probably feel the same way. You might need a halftime locker-room pep talk about now. If you hunt in the Pacific Flyway, then bless your heart. With its 107 days of open season—47 more than in my neck of the swamp—I’m not sure I would survive. I know my marriage would be on the rocks.

But here’s the thing: Three days ago, I found a pod of mallards that had taken a liking to a back corner of a cypress swamp. I’ve kept the discovery all to myself, which is selfish and not very nice but also entirely within my late-season character.

You can’t get away with much in the second half of the season. Ducks that make it this far south have had it up to their nictitating membranes with shiny upturned faces, blocky blinds, and dark blobs in the marsh. When it comes to camouflage, I go all in, like Arnold Schwarzenegger in the mud scene from Predator. And it’s much easier to hide one body than two. Some ducks require a solo act.

It will take the perfect shade of camouflage netting to help me and my kayak melt into the swamp, and that requires another trip to the basement. I go past the metal shelves full of plastic tubs marked with their contents: socks, thermal underwear, anchors, and decoy line. I push beyond the layout blinds and the piles of fetid clothing from last week’s up-to-the-shoulders face-plant in a beaver pond. (There’s my puffy vest! Been looking for that.) Behind the row of still-stacked dog stands is a rack where I store miscellaneous rolls, wads, and buckets of camouflage material, like bolts of fine cloth at a bespoke tailor. Raffia grass in four shades, camo netting in six patterns, marsh mats, camo blankets, canoe covers, even a snow blanket for those every-third-year days when snow falls in the southern part of heaven.

I’m in full Goldilocks mode. This one is too brown. This one is too green. This one . . . is a special weave of dead-grass tan. I think of the winter-brown reeds along a certain island under the tall cypress.

“Just right,” said Papa Bear.

It’s like saying “yes to the dress.” I let out a whoop. I may have shed a tear. It’s the mud-brown shade I’ve dreamed of all of my life.

That’s the kind of crazy you have to be in the last half of duck season.You can’t slow down. You can’t ease up. The details matter more than ever. Thankfully, we have the season splits. I know they are in place for biological reasons and to up hunters’ chances at fresh birds, but what a relief—time for blisters to crust over, dogs to heal up, and marriages to rebound.

I climb the basement stairs holding 20 feet of the most perfectly hued camo netting I’ve ever seen. Walking through the kitchen, I croon to Julie, “Have you ever seen anything so beautiful?” She rolls her eyes, as if to say, How much longer?

Tomorrow is a new day. In fact, tomorrow is a big day, because tomorrow is the first day of the rest of duck season.

So I’d better load up on flashlight batteries. I’d better check the shotshell stash. Thirty days in, and it’s probably about time to wash my coffee bottle. I’d better get going. Plenty of time to sleep in February.

Except that’s quail season. Uh-oh.