I am not a great duck caller. Barely passable, in fact. I do have the mallard drake’s buzzy, grunty whistle dialed in, but that’s not saying much. And you don’t want to be in the same county if I’m trying to call a goose. That is simply hilarious.
On the plus side, I’m a solid shot and a pretty good decoy putter-outer. I can hump a load of decoys through the muck with the best of them, and I don’t mind doing it. I can paddle a canoe like nobody’s business. So it’s not like I don’t bring anything to the duck-hunting table.
But when it comes to pulling off a sneak, you’d better back on up. This one’s in my wheelhouse. I could belly crawl to the edge of a farm pond full of black ducks. I am a freakin’ ninja on a stalk. I move like smoke through the trees.
Just ask my buddy Tim Gestwicki.
We were posted up on the dam end of a wood duck swamp, which I had scouted the day before, so I knew exactly where the ducks wanted to be. When I heard the first woodies whistling toward us through the dark creek woods, I grinned at Tim. “We are on the X,” I whispered. Which meant, of course, that all the ducks went down on the other side of the swamp.
“Nice work, Sherlock,” Tim sniped, because we are hunting pals and that is how we treat each other. We stood in the timber, backs to gray gum-tree trunks, and listened to woodies squeal, whistle, and otherwise cavort 80 yards away. They didn’t have a care in the world.
I narrowed my eyes. “I’m going after ’em,” I said. “You?”
“That’s nuts,” Tim replied. “There is no way you can cross this swamp and get close enough to those birds to shoot. I’ll watch from here, thanks.”
Ye of little faith.
I looked across the swamp to plan a rough route of attack. The trees thinned out pretty quickly, but there were clumps of shrubs and blown-down trees I could use to break up my silhouette. I could see only one stretch where I’d have to cross through a bright patch of sunlight, which is always a stalk-killer.
More whistling. More cavorting. Those ducks thought they had it made.
I took a first, slow step and then another. I found a lane of dark shade and went to work.
I know where my obsession with stalking is rooted. As a kid, I had no hunting mentors, nor friends nor family who could school me in the ways of the hook and bullet. But I had a 40-acre block of woods behind my childhood home and free rein to wander there. I was also a pretty serious reader and went through biographies of Kit Carson, Jim Bridger, and other frontiersmen like water. I devoured Tom Brown Jr.’s wilderness survival books, which is where I learned to avoid looking at the sky in order to conserve the visual purple in my eyes. It’s also where I was introduced to the concept of “splatter vision,” which involves letting your vision go soft-focus to expand peripheral vision and better detect movement. There wasn’t a duck or deer within miles of those city woods, but I would stalk squirrels and rabbits with astonishing success. I was also fascinated with the Native American war tactic of counting coup. One version of counting coup involved sneaking into an enemy’s camp at night and, instead of slaying the adversary, simply touching them before sneaking away. I was big into this, let me tell you, and I freaked out my mom and the family dogs with the practice on a regular basis.
Yes, I was a bit of a strange child. But I can ooze through a swamp like a snail through a flowerpot. Those wood ducks never had a chance.
When I bumped a branch, I whistled a quick, single kwee-oop to cover my tracks. Before I crossed that sunny patch, I snipped off a branch of holly and used it to break up my silhouette. I moved slow-slow-slowly to minimize the disturbance of the water, for it’s the silvery glint of rippled water that most often gives you up.
I didn’t look for ducks, but for pieces and parts of ducks. I did not see a duck, nor did I want to. If I could see the duck, the duck could see me, and I wasn’t quite ready for that. I wanted to force the flush on my end, rather than bumping the birds accidentally and rushing the shot.
It took me the better part of 45 minutes to cross 60 yards of swamp. I only dipped the top of my waders into the water twice. Not bad.
And then there was a glint of shimmering blue just beyond a tangled bush. A slash of white. A sunlit glint of rippled water.
There was no counting coup this time. I was counting on a duck dinner. And maybe a bit of payback for those birds making me look like a stooge in front of my pal. A single woodie flushed, then a second. At the first shot, one duck fell and another half-dozen vaulted from the brush. My second shot went who knows where, but I pulled it together for the third.
When I laid the pair of drakes on a log beside Tim, he whistled.
“I watched you as long as I could see you,” he said. “You are a freakin’ predator.”
I hope my mom is reading this, because I’ve never been more proud.
