The hunt started as a whim…  Something to do after we’d done everything else.  What began as an impromptu hunt ended up reconnecting us with our boyhood.  For a few moments, we were teenagers once again and it was cool to jump shoot ducks.

“This is the way people hunted ducks before decoys and calls,” we’d later lament and I suppose it is true. In an archaic fashion, we’d sneak up over a tank dam, spook the ducks, and take our shots as the waterfowl flew away at breakneck speeds.

If you’ve ever been a puddle jumper, you know that the shots are typically low percentage.  That is if you even get a shot off at all.

Once the ducks flush, we try to call more back in hopes of a few shots.  Sure, purist may claim, “That’s not duck hunting!”

 

In a way I suppose they are correct.  After all, any self respecting duck hunter is equipped with a well trained dog and a passel of decoys.  But for one glorious morning, me, my brother William and his army buddy Shannon, broke all conventional rules and simplified duck hunting to its purest form.  And it felt right…

For a while the water was sandwiched between thick mud on the bottom and thick fog on the top.  Magical is the most apropos word I can conjure to describe what the wetland was the minute the sun slathered its faint glow.   Even after the first bunch of ducks flushed we hung around.

Whether any one cares to admit it or not, I don’t really think we stayed on the pond dam thinking that very many ducks would fly past.  We stayed because we enjoy each other’s company.  It may sound sexist but in a measure it is true:  women bond by talking with each other and men bond by doing things with each other. 

For there, on a cold December morning on a muddy northeast Texas tank dam - if just for a moment - we were teenagers and it was cool to jump shoot ducks.