There’s a lot to remember about a trip to Crow Hill Hunt Club in eastern North Carolina. Driving to the club, through the venerable Down East region of the state, inside the southern Outer Banks, you get a sense of the area’s history and heritage. You cross the North River and Ward Creek. Crab-pot floats speckle the water. Fishing nets dry in side yards. Duck boats are tethered to private docks. Marsh and sky mingle to the west. The entrance road to the club winds through quail woods, along impoundments of open water and scattered marsh, and beyond the remains of a tabby foundation—a mix of lime, sand, and oyster shell—that dates back to the 1700s. Folks have been drawn to Crow Hill for a long time.
The clubhouse and lodge are tucked into a grove of gnarly, ancient live oaks that overlook sprawling vistas of salt marsh and open water. I’ve seen neither sunlight nor moonlight more beautiful than what I’ve seen at Crow Hill.
In every direction, at all hours of the day, there is another duck camp icon: The ducks pitch into freshwater impoundments that aren’t 10 feet from the briny estuary. The oysters are local and plentiful. The cooks are local and very talented.
I remember all of that, but what I most clearly remember about the Crow Hill Hunt Club might be surprising. I remember Alex Willis, its oldest founding member. At 88 years old, he was wiry and fit, with a shock of white hair. “Let me show you something,” he said, and he pulled out a canvas-and-wire duck strap that looked like it had been there and back a time or two. Willis bought the duck strap from a local hardware store when he was 16 years old, and he had been carrying it for 72 duck seasons. It looked like it had quite a few more seasons in it. He caressed it as if it were a rosary.
We didn’t say much. We were standing on the front porch of the Crow Hill clubhouse, and he seemed lost in thought, remembering all the ducks he had toted with that strap. And I was lost in awe, thinking of all the memories he’d stored up in more than seven decades of waterfowling.
It’s funny what sticks with you. Given how rare an invitation to hunt at Crow Hill Hunt Club can be, you’d think my most vivid memories would be mallards careening into the impoundments or oysters by the fire. Instead, I think of an old man and his duck strap.
I’ve come to understand that duck camps might be brick-and-mortar buildings—or sometimes little more than a pole barn—but what they’re made of mostly is blank canvas. The best duck camps are painted with your own memories, with experiences that accrete like the rings in an old stump. Laughter and hot biscuits and boot sheds that smell like a high school locker room. Dogs snoring by the fire, paws twitching with their dreams of one more retrieve. Friends and friends-to-be. And ducks on the board, if you’re lucky.
I’m no general contractor, but this much I know: That’s what duck camps are made of.
In November 1870, a group of Harvard-educated sportsmen departed from Long Island, New York, on a sailing sloop called the Anonyana. They were headed for a winter of waterfowling in Florida, but they hit rough weather and storms off the North Carolina coast and retreated into Currituck Sound for safe harbor while the storm passed. They anchored just off a high patch of ground locals called Crow Island. What they didn’t know was that the water in Currituck Sound is affected as much by wind as by tide. One can only imagine the Yankee gunners’ surprise when the storm dissipated and they found themselves hard aground.
But the best waterfowlers are nothing if not adaptable. The sand-stuck hunters hired a local guide and proceeded to shoot so many ducks, geese, and swans that they left the Anonyana mired in the muck and returned for the next seven years to base camp out of the beached ship, Shackleton style.
When the boat burned in 1877, the hunters bought Crow Island and converted a farmhouse into a duck camp. That building burned, and a second one was built. Then that building burned, a third was built, and it was renamed the Swan Island Club. Today it remains a cedar-shaked cube capped with a rooftop deck from which sharpshooters once used a rifle mounted on a pivot to send warning shots toward duck poachers in the thousands of acres of Swan Island Club marshes nearby. Over its more than a century of existence, the Swan Island Club attracted a heady crew: A United States ambassador to Japan was a member. The Endicotts of the Rhode Island shoe-manufacturing empire gunned there, as did a chancellor from Johns Hopkins University. The artist Bob Timberlake, who was my host, was the only native North Carolinian in the club when I visited.
The Swan Island Club was most likely the oldest continually operated duck camp in North Carolina when I hunted there, a few years before a private family purchased it. We ran johnboats powered with Go-Devils to marsh blinds where mallards, pintails, and green-winged teal seemed to fly in patterns they had followed for centuries. I could hear the breaking waves of the Atlantic surf while guides mouth-called to ducks over the marsh.
After the hunt, I gorged on teal-and-dumpling stew and thumbed through the club’s ancient gunning records, which go back to the very first hunt, with a take of three teal, three wigeon, and four black ducks. Things got better. Between 1872 and 1891, the club tallied 36,600 birds. Reading the old stories, I heard a creak and watched as a canvasback decoy suspended below the ceiling in the great room swiveled an eighth of a revolution. A weather vane mounted on the roof was attached to an iron shaft that passed through three floors and terminated in the decoy. Swan Island hunters always knew which way the wind was blowing.
I swirled a glass of Scotch and looked around. The Swan Island motto was inscribed above the fireplace. It is a phrase from Horace’s Odes: Ille terrarum mihi praeter omnes angulus ridet. “That corner of the world smiles for me more than all others.” It could be the unofficial motto of duck camps everywhere.
It’s a fact that many duck camps are fairly swanky affairs. Many are centered around famed hunting regions, places that attracted the well-heeled from a century ago, like Currituck Sound. At Utah’s Great Salt Lake, the curiously named Chesapeake Duck Club, founded in 1903, once catered to market hunters. Today, members have their own apartments, and the Utah State Historical Society archives the club’s historic records. In the Santee Delta of South Carolina, Rochelle Plantation is a private estate of live oak trees and waterfowl impoundments with roots in the rice-growing culture of the 1700s. I once hunted at Raccoon Ranch, a sprawling 1,500-acre property on the confluence of the Mississippi, Missouri, and Illinois Rivers. The spread is owned by a family that hit it big forging hinges for the wooden shipping cases of a new company called Budweiser. The soaring family lodge, with roots all the way back to 1898, lords over expansive lawns and gardens. A baronial great room holds mounted wild turkeys and owls in the exposed timbers as well as a complete collection of all species of North American waterfowl. There’s a massive 19th-century bar that was shipped over from Europe, crystal stemware, and a formal dining table that seats 22 people.
The lodge was the setting for a memorable Budweiser beer commercial, but the coolest thing about Raccoon Ranch wasn’t the fancy digs or the manicured grounds. It was the fact that the club’s patriarch had a solid preference for how he likes to hunt ducks: while sitting on a wooden seat by the side of a slough. No blind. No blind heaters. No midmorning blind breakfasts whipped up on a camp stove. Just a man and some duck water and a place to lay his head. Put all those together, and what you have is a duck camp.
They’re also made of long boat rides and places you hope will never change. Ducks have a way of living in places that no one but a duck hunter would think to visit. Duck camps have a way of making those environments more inviting than any five-star hotel.
When I think of the remote camp on the Athabasca River I visited a few years back, I recall the arduous journey to get there. It required a day and a half of air travel from the East Coast to Fort Chipewyan, Alberta, where I boarded a 20-foot aluminum skiff piloted by Harry “Junior” Adams, a triple-XL-sized Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation native with a gold earring and an Elmer Fudd hunting cap. It was a 32-mile run down the Athabasca River to his camp, and I’ll never forget the soundtrack of that journey. For the entire trip, Taylor Swift warbled from the boat’s satellite radio, and a duct-taped 1903 Enfield rifle rattled against the windshield in case a moose made the mistake of crossing Adams’s path.
His camp wasn’t just a duck camp, but also a moose camp, berry-picking camp, and whitefish-smoking camp. Two dozen buildings—small cabins, single-wides, wall tents—were perched on a bluff over the river, scattered about a freshly mown stretch of lawn. I hunted for four days out of the camp, and I could tell you stories about mallards and wigeon strafing the tops of the tule marsh and the endless mudflats that fingered into the endless Lake Athabasca. But my most salient memory took place around a massive communal fire pit made of a giant chunk of corrugated pipe, where a half-dozen other hunters gathered and ate whole ducks threaded on willow sticks and cooked over the fire.
I sidled up to a big fellow in a checked flannel shirt and struck up a conversation. He was Mikisew Cree, and he carried a medicine bag that his parents had passed down to him. The bag had once belonged to his uncle, who was a medicine man. In that bag he had some fungus scraped from the north side of a poplar tree, as well as something he called rat root. “It makes a tea that you drink pretty strong,” he said, waving a cigarette in the air. “That will clean you out.” He also had some skunk urine. “When the old people would leave with the dog teams for four or five days,” he explained, “every day they put one drop of skunk urine on the tongue. Never get sick. Build your immune system up to the top level.”
Nearby, duck fat sizzled in the fire, and there was the occasional call of a loon in the distance. I marveled at just how wide and wild the duck-hunting universe is. And I learned something new about skunk urine.
All because of duck camp.
Like a lot of great duck camps, Stillwater Hunt Club has a bit of a split personality: It’s a deer camp until it’s a duck camp. The switch is instant: Deer season goes out on January 1, so there’s a solid month of late-season duck hunting left, which is typically some of the best duck hunting in the South. A few Stillwater members are serious about ducks—I am one of them—but it’s nothing like the seven-day-a-week busyness of deer season.
I’ve been a member at Stillwater for a dozen years, and its beaver swamps and flooded creek bottoms can hold solid numbers of birds. Emphasis on can. It’s got to be cold up north to bring in the mallards and black ducks. I don’t even go until it’s cold enough to freeze the shallows. Cold enough to make you rethink your decision to go in the first place.
I’ve spent a world of cold days and nights at Stillwater, either in the main house bunks or in the annex, where you can sneak in a dog overnight. And sometimes, on opening-day nights, I’ve slept in my truck, because I can’t stand listening to other people snore almost as much as I can’t stand making them endure my own snoring. I should get a loyalty card from Hotel Silverado.
You have to put in the time at Stillwater, because the ducking doesn’t come easy. I don’t go as much as I’d like to. Or as much as I need to. But even when I’m not there, on a cold January day, a part of me remains. I can imagine walking into the small farmhouse that’s been revamped into a hunt camp—worn sofas, out-of-date magazines, a hodgepodge of cast-iron skillets hanging on hooks—and the smell of wood smoke hits me like an old memory. There’s no smell on earth like the smell of a woodstove that’s been hard at work. It’s the most welcoming aroma I know. When it’s tinged with the smell of fried bacon, it’s better still.
I can close my eyes and think about that squeaky back porch door, and the way I have to stand on my tiptoes to find the hidden door key, and how the first thing I do is open the refrigerator with the hopes of scoring a leftover biscuit. From the main living room wall, a dozen mounted deer heads give me a dozen glassy side-eyes. I flip through the sign-in book to see who’s hunted where and what they’ve seen. No one has hunted the swamp where a double beaver dam crosses the creek. It has a name, but I never utter it.
No matter where I am or what I’m doing, I can let my mind wander down to Stillwater, and I know that it’s there for me. Whenever I can slink away from home or the office, there will be Maxwell House coffee on the counter and Little Debbie snack cakes in a cupboard.
That’s the feeling of the best duck camps. All you have to do is think about yours for a moment, and it’s like you’re walking up the porch steps in your mind. You can smell the wood smoke. You can taste the sausage. In a cupboard below the coffeemaker, the Oatmeal Creme Pies await.
