New Year, New Hunt, Old Friends

Doug, the author and a group limit

I just returned from the duck hunting trip to Stuttgart, Arkansas, that I mentioned to you a couple weeks ago.

My friend Jay Riley and I took a leisure 720 miles (1.160 Km) road trip from Michigan to Arkansas, and in the way down we first stopped at Cabela’s in the Indiana/Illinois border in order to acquire a couple items that we could not live without (including a new hat for me), and then overnighted in Mount Vernon, Il. We arrived late Tuesday afternoon, and after meeting Dave Helge and his son Josh we went to Mack’s Prairie Wings to buy licenses and some other toys.

Upon returning to the lodge for dinner I met Doug, the guided that I hunted with last year and that owns Rudy, the brown lab that I “bravely” rescued from an iced pond. Until now I never gave much thought to last year’s incident, but clearly it meant something very imported to Doug, as he warmly saluted me and said that we would hunt together this week. All the newcomers were already aware of the story, and Lyle Zetterlund, the organizer of our annual duck hunting trips, mentioned that he considered bringing me a pair of “floaties” to keep me safe.

As usual we stayed up too long during the night, some of us had one too many drink, and everybody was up for breakfast at 4:30 AM.

It is impressive how much a place can change and still be the same. In 2010 Arkansas had record high floods and I never had seen so much mud in my life, last year we had record low temperatures and whole country side was frozen solid, and with so little open water ducks were very concentrated and the shooting was frantic. Now this year we had some unseasonable warm weather through most of the Midwest, and ducks were scattered all the way from Minnesota to Arkansas, all along the Mississippi flyway.

On the first morning Doug took us to a blind on some flooded timber overlooking a lake, but duck’s were just avoiding us and our decoys, and after about one hour we relocated to some minnow ponds just south of I-40, and there we had a blue bill day. Basically only Blue Bills were decoying, and we shot our limit plus one Golden Eye hen that Dave shot.

On that evening Doug really honored me by inviting me to join him at the guide’s lounge where we talked hunting and shared some excellent Patron tequila.

During the night the temperature dropped to below freezing and the wind picked up to over forty miles per hour (65 Km/h), so we found a pond with a levy high enough to protect us from the wind and had to face the rising sun and increasingly blue sky. Ducks were shy of the decoys and flying hard on the wind and shooting was challenging to say the least. (Not that our shotgunning abilities help a lot!)

On Friday the temperature dropped a bit more but the wind calmed down and it was much comfortable than the previous day. We hunted a pond by the “Millionaire’s Club”, a very exclusive duck hunting and bass fishing club with an admission fee of one million two hundred fifty thousand dollars!

This time we had the sun to our back, almost no wind, ducks that were decoying every time they flew by, and by 10:00 AM we had our limit of Shovellers, Gadwalls and Mallards. Rudy performed brilliantly with some really long retrieves and I don’t think that we lost a single bird this day. We drove back to the lodge to pack and start the drive back home.

We left Arkansas with a balmy 41 Fahrenheit (5 Celsius) and the temperature dropped hour by hour as we drove north, and by the time we reached Michigan the temperature was around 20 Fahrenheit (-7 Celsius) and we were in the middle of a snow storm.

One final note before I tire you. Over the last three years I tried all sort of different non-toxic ammunition from several different manufacturers, and my observation is that they all lack in killing power to good lead shot that we use on upland birds and, when hunting in Uruguay, waterfowl. I believe that all over the country a lot more wounded and crippled ducks are lost and die, than ducks that would be potentially poisoned by lead shot.

A Very Cold Bath

Todd Graham and a very cold decoy

With the coming of the New Year I am looking forward to my first 2012 hunting trip and, like the last two years, in about a week I will be driving from Michigan to Arkansas for three days of duck hunting with colleagues and friends around Stuttgart, the proclaimed and acclaimed “Duck Hunting Capital” of the world with Primm Springs Wildlife Co. (http://www.primmspringwildlife.com/).

In 2010 the temperatures were well above freezing and the amount of red mud reminded me of the raining months of my childhood in Brazil, and the torrential rains before we arrived caused significant damage and losses to the local fish farm industry.

The sight of the continuous waterfowl “V” formation as the sun rose was as meaningful and unforgettable to me as when I saw my first tumbleweed rolling through the open North Dakota prairies when pheasant hunting many years before.

Last year on the other hand there were record low temperatures, and the guides had to wake up at 3:00 AM to find open water or break ice to have open water to attract ducks. If the cold weather made the guides’ life miserable, it made the shooting fantastic and frantic, as ducks would flock to any open water allowing us to fill our limits in very short time even in face of our rather poor shooting.

In the first morning we hunted an inundated grain field and had our limit in less than one hour, and oddly enough we shot only gadwalls. We also found out that the case of beer that we “forgot” in the truck bed was almost completely frozen.

On the second day we went to a very large fish farm and had to drive around a bit before we found open water. We set the decoys and shot a single canvas back from that spot as the water started freezing and closed the small opening in almost no time. We relocated to another pond less than a mile away that had a very nice open area. We set few decoys and had some great shooting, but after sometime the guide said that we should relocate as we were shooting too many small ruddy ducks.

After we grabbed our gear we move to another a nearby pond, and this was a very odd place. There were two large ponds divided by a road, one completely open with half of the ducks of the state or Arkansas on it and the other completely frozen and totally bare.

All the birds flew away when we arrived, but we had a simple plan. We would not set any decoys and would hide on the bank of the frozen lake and shoot the birds when they returned to the open water flying over us.

There was just a small problem. Rather than flying from the frozen lake towards open water, the ducks flew over the road and when we shot at the first incoming birds one of the ducks fell over the ice some two hundred feet from the bank.

The guide sent the Labrador retriever, and she really had more sense than all of us together, and at first refused to go for the duck, but she finally accepted the challenge. As the brown lab approached the duck the ice broke. She was enclosed in a small pool and could not climb back on the ice.

The guide immediately tried to reach her and started braking ice with his shotgun, but before he reached half way the water was coming close to the top of his waders and he had to come back.

By this time the dog was getting distressed and crying for help while swimming around the small pool. While two of the guys went out looking for a boat and I decided to try to reach the dog, as I was a bit taller than the guide. I had to use the shotgun stock to break the ice that was over an inch thick and after quite a bit of effort and with the water at the very edge of my waders I reached the dog and she immediately swan back to shore.

As the dead duck was just a couple yards away I decided to fetch it myself. I grabbed the cold bird and as I started back I stepped in a hole or some other depression and had the coldest bath of my life as the lake water inundated my waders, all the way to my socks.

By the time I reached the bank everybody was back with a boat that we no longer had any use for. They pulled me out of the water and helped me out of the waders and the wet clothes and immediately put me inside one of the trucks with heater running at its maximum and we started back to the lodge.

When we arrived they told me to have a hot shower and just leave my wet clothes and gear for them to take care of. By the time I finished a very long and very hot shower and put some comfortable dry clothes on my wet clothes were on the dryer and the there were two hot air blowers working on my waders. Moments later I had a glass of warming amber liquid in my hands and was being served good hot chili.

I am not sure that I saved that dog or that I was in real danger, but at least we had a good high tale to talk about for the next couple days, and when we were saying good-bye James, one of the head guides, told me that this was the first time that a client went into the water for a dog, and that I would be welcome back. And I will be back in another week.