The one kind of gunning that I look forward to with the most anticipation and bank on with the most mixed emotions are the days I spend with Canada geese.
I like offshore blinds, muddy grainfield pits, and being hunkered down in a ditch. I like hip boots, a necklace of calls, and the heft of a three-inch magnum shell. I like warm down parkas and the taste of bad weather. I like the kind of wind I can lean into and the slap of sleet on my earflaps. I like the promise of dawn and the memories that come with sunset. I like oversized decoys, boats I can pole, and the excitement in the thumping of a Labrador's tail. I like the smell of salt water, gunpowder, and wet dogs. I like the wonder and the waiting. I'm a goose hunter.
What other creature is always prefixed with the word "wild"? What other creature combines such mysteries of sight and sound? A flock of geese seems to be in command of the sky and their arrogant trumpeting calls our attention to the passage of majesty.
A friend of mine said that the passing of geese always filled him with wonder because they seem to come from a place that only they really know about. A place that could only exist in his imagination--a place that was on no earthly map--a place as gray and mysterious as the geese themselves. A place no human eye was fit to see.
When folks say "as silly as a goose" I'm sure they don't refer to the Canada. The geese I hang around with have been outsmarting me for years. They either fly 10 yards out of range over the center of my blind all day--honking constantly to make sure I know they're there--or pass just over my head so silently that I never know they've been too close until they're too far away.
Geese not only outsmart me, they scare me. I can go through more shells with less effect in a goose blind than anyone else I know. But I'm learning. One thing I've learned is that the goose I discover sitting, swimming around in the decoys, is as safe as a goose sailing along in the stratosphere.
I remember a blue-finger morning that was chunking sleet the size of pea coal when I discovered that somehow a goose had slipped in among the blocks about 30 yards from the blind. I nudged the old buddy next to me, pointed out the bird and whispered the plan: He should stand up, flush the goose, then take him. He rose up according to plan and the goose flushed according to plan. Carefully taking his time, carefully swinging through, he emptied three loads of magnum 2s six feet, 10 feet and 15 feet behind the bird. That's pretty good shooting under the circumstances. I almost never get much closer than 20 feet. But, as I said, I'm getting smarter. I would never take a chance on that shot--too easy--to miss a fine goose.
A perfect goose day is not only a test of skill, but more importantly an exhibition of enthusiasm and pure endurance. At its best the day must be marginal for human life. When I'm shivering under my down pants, down shirt, down vest, down coat and my feet are cold enough to frost a 20-gallon martini then I know I'm doing the right thing, in the right place at the right time. Just add the frosting of a 30-knot snowstorm and remind me that I've left my Thermos of tea and my handwarmer four miles away back in the car.
I admit that a good goose hunter has to be smarter than the goose. I will also admit that I'm not. I only get the dumb ones on my dining-room table, with lots of plum jelly on the side. That leaves the smarter ones for the other guys, which is as it should be since most of the other guys I know can call better, shoot better and know more than one way of putting out decoys. They don't leave their hot tea in the diner and they can make a handwarmer stay lit. Their lighters always work and their tobacco never gets soaked.
I don't know too much about a lot of things, but most of all I don't understand geese. I can't tell a goose from a gander unless I see one laying eggs. I don't know why I can miss a nine-pound bird flying about 10 miles an hour in a headwind when I can bring down a pair of teal hitting the speed of sound in the other direction. I don't understand why I can build a blind so perfectly hidden that even I have trouble finding it and flock after flock will flare away to circle low over the hide across the cove where there are two guys sitting out front drinking coffee.
I don't know why I'd rather sit--semi-submerged in a flooded pit blind that I've walked two hours through mud to get to, carrying enough stores for a trans-Arctic trek--and never fire a shot and talk all night about the wonderful day I had after geese, than take my limit of a lot of other stuff. It's just because I'm a goose hunter. But if you're a goose hunter too, you'll understand.
It's not the hunting--it's the geese, and if that's where they are, that's where we'll be. And we'll be listening to try to come to understand what it is that the geese are so mournfully tolling. I believe that being there is important. And every so often--too seldom, too seldom--I believe I can hear the story in the chanting of a single goose. I think he's talking about the same things old men like us will like to talk about--to anyone or anything that will listen.
They talk about old friends, strange lands and storms...how no one pays them any mind...about the distances that he must travel to return where he belongs.
And then I think about my friends and storms and the distances that I have yet to go--and for a little while there is the weather and the biting wind, I know that there is more in common, goose and man, man and man, than we care to think.
This essay originally appeared in Mostly Tailfeathers by Gene Hill.
Copyright 1971-74 Gene Hill. All rights reserved.
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