This recent spell of cold weather has brought back lots of memories, some good, some not so.

Apparently Willis is not on the migration route of the geese who fly over Huntsville to Lake Livingston for a couple of days of rest on their way to the rice fields along the coast.

Lord, I used to love to hear them pass over during the night, honking and carrying on. Sometimes at night I could see their bellies shine in the lights of town. And to watch a V cross a cold-sharp blue sky, the sun blazing on their undersides, is to know beauty at its best.

To think of geese is to think of ducks, and to think of ducks is to think of hunting them, which I used to do. I never killed many, not enough to brag about. Never killed a goose . . . .

Ages ago I hunted ducks with my father-in-law (now ex) on the Mississippi Coast. We’d take his small boat with outboard and go out into the Sound, round the point at Standard Oil, and approach one of his favorite duck ponds from the sea side.

When we had pulled the boat up on the sand and tied it off to his satisfaction, we would hoist the bag of decoys and trudge across a stretch of muddy sand, weave our way to the blind a few yards out in the marsh, and set up business. His two sons usually went along.

Brought up inland, well out of the major flyways, I didn’t really know a duck from a duck. Some had green heads, I knew, and some didn’t, and my knowledge of them essentially ended there.

Our first trip out there, my first real duck hunt, yielded much of the information I needed to know if I intended ever to be decent at the sport.

After a brief flurry of shooting early on, none of which brought down a duck, my father-in-law suggested that I might slip out of the blind that I shared with him and ease over to a canal a couple of hundred yards or so to our west. Several ducks had landed over that way earlier, and we had not seen them leave. He really wanted me to kill something.

So I carefully exited the rear of the blind and slogged toward the canal, periodically pausing and listening and watching. A pair of ducks spun in from the north, veered west, and flared to land somewhere near the canal, whose levee was now visible. I crouched and waited, then inched toward the spot where I had seen the ducks go down.

In a few minutes I was against the levee, beyond which I could hears ducks quacking.

“Lord, Lord,” I breathed steam as I eased up the berm, “let them swim this way.”

I hurled myself up and over and saw raft after raft of ducks strung out on the canal before me.

Oh, my Lord, what a dream come true! I rose to my knees, swung the shotgun before me, and fired until it was empty. Ka-bloom, ka-boom, ka-boom. Strings of shot skittered across the water in oblong patterns toward ducks, most of which were just laboring into the air. When it was over, four black ducks lay floating.

I carefully eased down to the edge of the canal and fish the ducks out with reeds, tied them by their necks on the length of parachute cord I had brought for that purpose, tied the cord to my belt, and headed back toward the others, who had fired a few times while I was gone.

“Y’all do any good?” I asked as I approached them. They were leaving the blinds and heading toward the beach.

“Couple of bluebills” answered one of the brothers. “You?”

He was straining to see my stringer.

“Yeah. Got four black ducks.”

“Naw. Not black ducks. Man, I haven't seen four blacks out here in ten years.”

“Sure as hell did.” I lifted the heavy stringer.

The brothers snickered. My father-in-law just studied the ducks.

I glared at them. “What?”

One of them finally blurted out: “You got four coots! Those are not black ducks.”

“What the hell is a coot?” I asked.

“What you got on that stringer,” the other one said.

“What I have is four black ducks.” I held them high. “Good eating here.”

My father-in-law was in management in those days, a director in the largest shipyard in the South, Ingalls at Pascagoula, and he had had the Carnegie course.

“You can eat ’m,” he said.

“Yeah,” one of the brothers said, “and you can eat one of those boots you’ve got on — if you get hungry enough.”

“Strip it out, roll it in flour, deep-fat fry it, you could eat it,” her other brother said. “The boot, I mean, not the coot — you can chew a boot, but not a coot. And the boot would taste better.”

He was just out of high school at the time and had not had the Carnegie course.

“Is that duck black?” I asked Sharon’s father.

“It’s not a duck,” her younger brother answered.

“I’m not talking to you,” I said. I looked straight at her father. “Is that duck black?”

“Yes, the bird you are holding in your hand is black,” he answered.

“All right, then. I shot four black ducks.”

“No,” her older brother said, “you shot a black coots, the only color they come in. There’s a difference. A big one.”

“All right. Can one of you turkeys give me an example of a noun clause used at a direct object? Any subject will do.”

“Like we give a good flying--”

“No, Son, we can’t,” my father-in-law cut in. “You’ve got us there.”

I came away from my first duck hunt with mixed feelings. I left the coots for the alligators, who, we figured, could handle them, tough and vile-tasting or not. The lesson I learned, I quietly carried home.



Paul Ruffin, 2009 Texas State Poet Laureate, is Texas State University System Regents’ Professor and Distinguished Professor of English as SHSU. His web site is pauldruffin.com.