No. of Recommendations: 15
Are you deer hunting ?
Nope. My last deer hunt was thirty years ago. My thing was duck hunting.
Strangest thing happened. Even now I can’t explain it….. I’d set out from home like I usually did, about 3 a.m. Was living in Tulsa at the time….. drove an hour south to the Deep Fork River, at the point where the Deep Fork bottoms broadened out into an arm of Lake Eufaula.
Put my canoe in the water, loaded the dekes and gear- again, as usual, paddled a mile through flooded timber the an opening I often hunted from…. Slipped over the side in my waders, checked the wind and laid out my spread of decoys….. then retreated to a pile of brush, hid my canoe under camo, then backed int the brush to wait for “shooting time”.
I could hear them in the darkness, their wings ripping air. Soft chuckling as those on the water called to those in the air. Here and there, a splash, announcing the landing of a mallard….. the sky lightened. Shooting time arrived…. and here came a circling flight of six or seven. “Tica tica tica” I called… their circle tightened as they dropped from the sky, circling a last time, floating down, legs extended, and into the wind. Wings cupped, just six feet over the water now, 40 yards away.
I swung my Remmington 870 to my shoulder, swing down and through the mallard to the aim point just below his webbed feet. It was all instinct at this point.
Except…… just before I pulled the trigger, as I had pulled it hundreds of times before…. I realized with a surprising, unbidden certainty…. that I didn’t want to kill it..
And that’s the last hunt I ever went on.
