Duck Hunting

More than half the US population lived on farms when I was growing up. Less than 2% live there now. Farming itself was an outdoors life, but it subsumed the native way of living. A few special places out there on the prairie still offered a remnant of the hunting and fishing riches of the prairie when my dad was growing up. He knew where most of the nearby ones were.

There is an element of diversion in hunting and fishing, but that isn’t why my dad had a lasting interest in the world outdoors. Hunting and fishing held a more primal motivation for him. It was a way to experience self-reliance, not just a field-and-stream “sport”.

There are many stories about dad’s years on the prairie. I’ll relate a few aspects below. I picked up his outlook to some degree and dabbled in outdoor pursuits myself. But as a boy, I was more intrigued by the mountain men that I read about. I didn’t know then about David Thompson, perhaps the greatest mountain man of them all.

The nearby Sand Hills had several nice ponds that the wind formed centuries ago. The Arkansas river carried fine sand from the mountains of Colorado to central Kansas. Perennial Kansas winds blew this sand north and formed sand dunes, which are now covered with grass and brush. The blowing sand also scoured out depressions in the original clay soil. Clay is impervious to water, so ponds formed among the sand dunes.

Those ponds were part of a flyway that ducks followed to migrate to Mexico from Canada in the fall of the year. Grandpa Spohn — who died years before I was born — gave my dad a single shot 12-gauge shotgun for duck hunting when he was about 14 years old. If you’re only going to get one shot at a duck, you don’t want to miss. He also reloaded his shells to keep expense down. Two good motivations for learning to be a good shot.

He did not go to high school, so he was free to go duck hunting almost any day in the fall when he was young. He became a crack shot. He started hunting ducks again when we moved back to the farm.  When I was about 12 years old he began to take me hunting on weekends. I didn’t have a shotgun then. I carried our 22 caliber rifle. Some ducks that you shoot can no longer fly, but they can still paddle. My job was to shoot the cripples in the head so that we could retrieve them.

Grandpa Miller gave me one of his shotguns when I was about 16. But I never became a good shot with it. I was going to high school, so I didn’t have much time for hunting.  I never got good at hitting ducks. Dad was a dead shot. Sometimes he would see two ducks converging, and wait just a second before shooting. He’d often get two ducks with one shot that way.

My shotgun: Model 12 Winchester. Designed in 1912, manufactured until 1967. My dad started using it when he was 70. His double-barreled “goose gun” was too heavy for him by then.

Dad’s hunting rules: 1.) Never let the muzzle your gun wander so that it points at someone. 2.) If you fall down, hang on to your gun and keep it under control. 3.) Find all the ducks you shoot. 4.) Pluck and dress the ducks as soon as you get home. 5.) Eat all the ducks you shoot. We used the feathers to stuff pillows. Waste not, want not.

The reason for Rule 2 is simple. It’s not unusual for somebody, often the one who falls, to get shot if he lets go of his gun. You want to keep control of where it’s pointed, even at the expense of injury.

One year there were plenty of ducks flying south, and the daily limit was 15. We had been eating duck two or three times a week for several weeks. One day mom said, “Paul, Marilyn and I not going to eat any more duck this year. If you and Phil Jr. (that’s what she called me) want to eat duck I’ll fix it for you, but we are going to eat something else.” Lucky for them that we weren’t eating duck to survive.

Years later I came home on leave from the Army, but not in duck hunting season. One day my dad said, “Let’s go to town.” “OK, why not?” I said. Off we went, and we were soon in the Sand Hills. Then he said, “Let’s go left here.” “OK, why not?” I said again. I knew he didn’t want to chat about it. He liked for things to be surprising.

We went a mile and came to an open area with a bunch of parked pickups. I could see that some of the men had shotguns. Dad told me it was a “turkey shoot.” After we pulled in and stopped, one of the men came over. I’d never seen him before. He said, in a half-displeased way, “Why did you have to show up? We were going to have some fun here today.”

I didn’t know quite what the guy meant, and I didn’t know what a turkey shoot was either. There were no turkeys in Kansas then. A turkey shoot is a shooting contest, and if you want to shoot you have to put money in the pot. All I knew was that dad was good at trap shooting. He used to shoot with my Uncle Cecil and others, and almost never missed his clay pidgeons.

The same was true that day. He won the first rounds handily, advanced to the final, and won the pot. Then I understood what the guy who greeted us was saying. I also realized this wasn’t dad’s first turkey shoot. While Paul and I were off at school, he had time to hone his skills.

Addendum: This may have been part of Dad’s secret (from The New Yorker).

“There was a guy who was a great wingshot on a quail hunt in Georgia. He killed everything he saw, he dropped ’em all morning. One of the other guys said, ‘You’re the best wingshot I’ve ever seen.’ At lunch the guy asked him, ‘Do you shoot with one eye open or both?’ He paused and thought about it. Finally, he said, ‘I don’t know.’ ”