The end of duck season always comes like a hard slap in the face. You can see it coming, almost in slow motion, but you’re still taken aback by its abrupt, stinging finality.
So when you get an unexpected shot at a post-season hunt – not just any post-season hunt, but one of epic potential – it feels like a dream.
March 1, 2012 is the beginning of the final month of the upland bird hunting season at Joshua Creek Ranch (JCR). In my mind, I picture the calendar as twelve monthly segments arranged in a circle. October through March segments appear smaller than the other months, and if my circular calendar were placed over the face of a clock, those six months of October through March would be all jammed up between 10 o’clock and 2 o’clock. That’s how fast the hunting season seems to go compared to the rest of the year.
The other day I received a call at my Joshua Creek Ranch office from the wife of a wingshooting client. She asked if I remembered a newsletter we’d sent out several years ago that had a piece in it comparing the benefits of men having dogs rather than wives. She was in hopes of getting a copy of it to share with friends. I did vaguely remember it, but to tell the truth, searching for that particular newsletter rated about minus two on my scale of things I needed to do at this particularly busy time of the hunting season.
I remember so vividly the day I went to buy my first shotgun.
My boyfriend Hank and I drove a couple miles down the main drag of our dilapidated 1960s-era suburb to our local hook-n-bullet store, an utterly charmless building with windows boarded over and painted, and not so much as a sprig of greenery anywhere in the parking lot. It was ugly even compared with already-low neighborhood standards.
My husband Joe and I just finished a delightful late lunch at the top of Aspen Mountain in Colorado with our good friends Toby and Liz from Cincinnati, Ohio. We had met them in Scotland several years ago when we went on a driven pheasant shooting trip in the beautiful Port Patrick area.
It felt like we were the stars in a Quentin Tarantino movie: Well-dressed tourists moved out of our way as we strode down the sidewalk of Sutter Creek, the glittering mid-afternoon December sunshine in our face.
I see the solution for breaking a clay target as a puzzle. For every target I must assemble a set of pieces. When pieces fit together, targets break.
Yesterday was Thanksgiving Day and we had the traditional gathering of family and friends to celebrate and give thanks for our many blessings, starting with this great country and ending with the vivacious young grandchildren buzzing about the house and lawn. But one of our blessings was missing this year. For the first time in 27 years, our oldest son wasn’t home for Thanksgiving and a much loved tradition of our family hunting together over this particular holiday was broken. It set me to thinking about the heart-warming anticipation of traditional gatherings we’ve established over the years, the shooting and fishing activities we’ve inevitably incorporated into them, and the many fond memories we’ve made year upon year.
One more duck.
That’s what I told myself Sunday afternoon as I crept through a patch of nut grass in the marsh, bent low over the water to minimize my outline, straining to keep an eye on the birds without them seeing me.
It is now December, and here in the Northeast where I live, December marks the beginning of winter. Winter can be a difficult time to be outside, and the added layers of clothing will change the geometry between you and your gun and can restrict your range of motion.
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