Zenhunting

Mike probably got tired of hearing it all throughout our hunt this Wednesday, but so much about it reminded me of my very FIRST waterfowl hunt, on another Wednesday past…

I had just decided I wanted to try waterfowling. I’d hunted pigs, some upland, and when I attended a Quail Unlimited meeting and all they talked about was duck hunting, I KNEW I had to try it.

Found the waterfowl forum at Jesseshunting.com, learned a lot, virtually, theoretically, but it all helped a lot. Got my season-long refuge application in too late for the opener, but miraculously got drawn for the first Wednesday: a #22 card for Wister. Showed up alone with some borrowed decoys. Driving out to Wister the Tuesday night before the hunt, the wind was bending and whipping the palms and flags at the car and RV dealerships something fierce all along the way…

Again this past Tuesday, before the first Wednesday of the waterfowl hunting season, the wind was hitting the flags and palms hard. Driving past the check station and parking lot on Davis Road, I could almost see me parked there, back then, the white Volvo with the trunk full of borrowed decoys and brand new never used waders from Cabelas. Excited, scared (especially after two old Asian guys in the parking just shook their heads and walked away, muttering to themselves, when they heard I was alone and had never hunted ducks — or Wister — before). In the morning I asked for a pond where there were “mostly teal” so I wouldn’t shoot the wrong kind of duck. I figured I could identify the small, fast teal. No way could I tell a Canvasback or a Pintail or any duck with a restriction on it back then. Before going out, through an amazing act of providence and Old Max at the sportsmens shack, I connected with Matt Berg and ended up hunting with him. Who knows what mishaps that saved me from.

That was six years ago. And on this windy Tuesday as I was rolling along the 10, the 111, down Davis Road, past Wister, with the 4WD, the high-tech shotgun, the latest feeder decoys, heading for a Wilderness Unlimited property I had satellite snap shots of, feeling all that, cocky, it was good to be reminded of a more uncertain time, of stepping into a great unknown, and the never-to-be matched thrill of that first Wednesday hunt.

~ by SpeakingZenaphorically on October 31, 2009.

Posted in hunting, Waterfowl, Wilderness Unlimited