Hunting Moon

by WILLIAM WISTER HAINES

1

THERE’S no proper guide in three hundred miles,” said the proprietor of the tiny hotel. “But Tony knows the country.”

“Does he know ducks and geese?”

“He should. They ruined him.”

And so we met the gaunt grave ancient we were to cherish as a companion. In the unpaved village street Tony’s first glance repudiated the alien gear our ignorance had brought so far — boat, decoys, waders.

“Fine, for some places, I’ve no doubt,” he concluded.

Impressed but still not convinced, we asked him how he proposed to shoot.

“You can muck up the odd one anywhere,” said Tony. “But for a proper shoot, we’ll have to find a bunch.”

We eyed each other, scrutinized Tony again, and told him that we were in his hands.

“Mind, it’ll take hunting before you shoot.”

“We’ve come two thousand miles for just that.”

“Then we’ll lighten the car,” said Tony, “for the roads will not be good.”

Experience dies hard, but he spoke with the conviction of authority. We stripped the car to guns, shells, and emergency rations for blizzard or disaster. Then, at Tony’s further insistence, we put chains on the tires and set out together through the multicolored, frosty splendor of a Canadian autumn.

October gives the grain belt an oceanic vastness of gold, expanding to every horizon, Closer scrutiny reveals harmonious subtler shadings of stubble, swath, and standing grain. Barley patches show a tawny burnt orange. Here and there a section of summer fallow sparkles greenly. And through it all are the crazy quiltings of original unbroken prairie sod, glistening with the silvery frosting of whitened grasses.

You approach the upper grain belt over several hundred miles of table flatness. But roughly along the fifty-second parallel the spacious reaches begin to undulate with long low moraines. Grain still yellows the shoulders and slopes; the troughs glitter with the blue waters of innumerable sloughs, potholes, and lakes, ringed with the green of willows and the flame of frostbitten popple copses.

The symmetrical checkerboard of secondary roads as shown on the map simply ignores the countless glacial gougings which separate grain from water. The roads repeatedly disappear into water. At the edge, you study the latest tractor trails and circumnavigate cautiously, hub-deep in mud and boulders.

“Sorry abput the roads,” said Tony.

“You shouldn’t be — that’s why you have ducks,” we replied.

We had begun raising them at the town limits. Teal, shovelers, gadwall, widgeon, and sprig scarcely fluttered up from the roadside ditches, innocent of man in a land that considers only the mallard fit for gun or table. A mile out, mallards themselves in increasing numbers jumped from the icy edges of every water we skirted, to join the rafted acres darkening the larger lakes.

Above us the sky wore necklaces of fowl returning from the morning feed to roost in sunny indolence until evening sent them afield again. In the first hour, we saw large flights of every common American duck excepting only the black ducks, which are almost unknown west of the hundredth meridian.

Gradually our eyes found statelier skeins; our ears picked up the fox-like barking of honkers, the laughter of specs, the incessant chatter of the little cackling geese. The larger lakes echoed with the metallic clanking of sand-hill cranes.

We passed a score of places where boat and decoys would have assured limits even to our inexperience, and ground slowly southward through alternations of talcum dust and quagmire.

“No use mucking about for the odd one,” said Tony.

On the crest of every moraine he paused for long scrutiny of the endless valleys ahead. We stamped the chill out of our feet and soothed impatience with the sharp tonic of the air and the subtle fragrance of wild rose, sage, and prairie grasses. Finally, on the fourth top Tony pointed quietly. “There’s a bunch—beyond that train and town.”

Slowly our eyes found the shimmering steel rails, the toy train with its brave plume of smoke and fifty cars of wheat chugging patiently toward the spire-like granaries of the distant wheat village; and beyond, the dark smudge. We thought it was smoke, but wind was dispersing the smoke from the train; this darkness stayed put.

“They’re on Ignatz Polchensky’s place,” said Tony.

“Will he let us shoot?”

“Let you? He’d pay you if he could.”

2

IGNATZ’S cluster of unpainted wood shacks squatted behind a V of evergreen windbreak around a yard full of gleaming new machinery. Ignatz, a stolid, broad-faced giant, crawled from under a tractor, wrench in hand, to stare impassively at our foreign license plates.

“Broke down or want gas, Tony?” he asked.

Harvest time is wasted on no social amenities in the grain belt, but distress is sacred.

“No trouble; we seen you had ducks, Ignatz.”

“I’m eat alive with them.” He spat, swore, and scowled again at our car.

“All the way from the States to shoot ducks?”

“To hunt them,” we told him.

His shrug dismissed such frivolity. We were to learn that we were a miraculous deliverance for him, but he accepted our presence stoically.

“I’ll have to take youse out,” he said.

We protested, but Ignatz was already hooking a hay wagon to his big tractor. Guns in hand we rode the wagon, struggling for balance as it careened through boulders and mire.

A hundred yards from the house Ignatz mired the tractor. Its six-foot wheels spun crazily, digging steadily down until the transmission lodged in ooze. Ignatz jumped from his seat, stripped the tongue off the wagon, and lashed it cunningly with chain across the fronts of the embedded wheels. This time as they began to spin again, the whole tractor lifted slowly on the buried tongue, teetered crazily on top, and slithered forward three feet to firmer bog. Ignatz cut his throttle, and the wagon tongue stopped its lethal circle a foot behind his head.

“What if you’d slipped and given it a little more gas?” we asked.

“Bust my dumb head,” Ignatz grinned, “just like my brother. Now I got his kids.”

He unchained the tongue, caught the wagon by the chain itself, and we slithered on. He repeated the operation twice more en route; we timed the last performance at six minutes.

Most of Ignatz’s bunch of ducks seemed to have evaporated as he led us afoot into a half section of thin, blighted wheat. Only a few thousand mallards circled above it, squawking angrily at our intrusion before flapping off reluctantly to join ihe blackened acres on the mile of roosting slough below us.

Untimely rain had delayed planting in this field. A more recent cloudburst had left the ground too heavy for harvesting machinery. In this condition, a bunch had found the ripened grain. Every sheaf we passed was chewed, many stripped clean. The denser patches were trampled nearly flat. Some areas bore almost solid coats of duck droppings. The clanking tin cans and flapping garments on a dozen scare-ducks had availed nothing. Mallards still circled us just out of range; they were used to threshing crews and were getting ready to resume their feeding a hundred yards away.

“Shoot just in there,” said Ignatz, pointing to a slightly denser patch.

We were explaining that we hadn’t come two thousand miles to groundswipe ducks, when it happened. One second we could see nothing but ravaged wheat; the next, we could see no wheat for the density of the sprouting snaky heads that obscured it. The preponderance of drakes among them gave an illusion of solid green. Then they sprang with the swishing roar of a locomotive, casting a solid shadow across the sun as they rose, just out of range.

“Now youse’ll have to shoot flying,” said Ignatz reproachfully.

He slithered off in his tractor while Tony instructed. We were late for the morning feed but some of these birds would return from the slough all day. He would lie in the hedgerow downwind where the breeze would carry our kill. We were to take cover in the wheat itself.

Cover? We scratched duck droppings and rocks aside and lay on our backs in the frosted mud, covering bodies and glinting gun barrels with wisps of wheat straw, hoping we looked enough like the many rock piles in the field.

We did. Tony was still walking in the lower end of the field when six mallards, more brazen or voracious than the others, whipped out of the sun, streaming downwind across us. In the hard clear light they looked as big as geese; the white collar markings on the drakes were vivid.

We struggled up, fired together, and got one faint slapping feather rattle for our feverish haste as they arrowed off unharmed to the slough.

“Maybe we could learn croquet,” said Dutch.

We reloaded, using the old alibis. It was journey fatigue, the wind, the sun, the sitting position, the light, the absence of cloud in the sky for tracking — it was all of these things and the sum of them, which is bad shooting and we knew it.

“Down, lads! More coming!” shouted Tony.

Our shots had spooked the field, but a mile away their reverberations were raising the slough itself. Up they came in clouds that obscured the landscape beyond. Most of them merely milled around before dropping back to water. The top thousands, as if reminded by the gunshots of the grain, circled higher, and then a steady phalanx of small flocks strung out in procession straight for us.

We took our first ones breasting the wind high above us. Massive three-pounders, they swished down through the clear air with an impact that broke the frosty crust of the ground. They were mature birds, full-feathered from emerald heads to ebony tail curls, their craws distended with wheat to the rigidity of heavy rope.

We ruffled back the feathers to study our patterning and then propped the pair on wheat stalks about fifteen yards downwind of us, lit our pipes, cleaned our sunglasses, and waited.

Two more pairs dropped dead beside our new decoys were enough of that; decoying birds was too easy. Raising our sights to our situation, we progressed into postgraduate work: high drakes only, high downwind drakes only, high downwind pairs only. Every shot cleared the field for a moment; but often before we could pick up, new flocks were driving in on us.

We let dozens land in the decoys and explode out, unharmed as we accepted ever higher challenge. As he absorbed confidence in our drop, Tony deserted his downwind hedgerow to smoke his pipe beside us in the field and discourse, between shots, on the institution of the bunch.

3

ESTIMATES of size, like the bunches themselves, vary from five thousand to a quarter of a million birds. Photographic count has seemed to justify both limits: the naked eye might as well try to count snowflakes in a blizzard.

They begin to congregate in family groups soon after the hatch in bush and tundra hundreds of miles north of the grain belt. Concentration itself depletes their natural vegetable food. Frost and the immemorial migratory urge do the rest. Snaky thin and still feather-mottled with summer molt, they sweep in from beyond the rim of civilization to encounter at the grain belt a banquet table roughly three by five hundred miles in extent. Horizon-crowding grain is broken only by the second imperative of innumerable waters for roosting sanctuary. Here, until ice closes the waters, they fatten, feather, and harden with long daily practice flights for the further migration ahead, gathering up the local hatch and trading casual thousands with other bunches. We shot a bird that had been banded that summer three hundred miles south of us. But the preponderance of them were red-legged wilderness hatch.

The general habits of a bunch are consistent. Just before daybreak and sundown they roar up from the roost with wing thunder audible a mile downwind, and string out in orderly procession of small flocks for the feeding field.

From a moraine top one afternoon, with the granary spires of two distant hamlets for solid markers, we measured part of a bunch at seven miles in length, a flock crossing our heads at regular intervals of about ninety seconds. They were still crossing when darkness closed the sky. We had marked that crest with confidence for a pass shoot. We never fired our guns. Every flock passed at a uniform height about fifty yards above range. A week later, amid squalls of snow on a driving wind, we dropped a limit apiece on that same pass in fifteen minutes.

The difference between general consistency of habit and particular feeding fields is what makes it hunting. Big as the bunches are, the country is bigger. The birds choose; the hunter guesses at a selection that defies logic.

There is metabolistic necessity, as well as practice for migration, in the daily flights. But none of this explains why a bunch will fly thirty miles, over car-sized piles of shelled wheat standing in undefended fields, to storm like a multicolored blizzard into the scant gleanings of cutover stubble. Next day the same bunch will decimate the uncut acres beside its roosting water while you smoke your pipe in the deserted section of three days’ swarming.

Until the leading flocks choose a field, one untimely shot may deflect a flight line five miles long. With selection made, half a dozen gunners may shoot as fast as they can load in the same quarter section. Every flock in the bunch will come straight to the barrage.

Too easy? In a hot field, indeed it is. But one shoot will usually burn a field. The birds that storm your muzzles tonight will breakfast forty miles away in a field that has never known a feather.

In two weeks we had several limit shoots and, in the midst of incredible opulence, some very thin scratching. We were to spend as much as three days in utter frustration: miles of searching, horizon scanning, marking and mismarking, miring the car and walking till our legs hurt — only to shoot the odd straggler.

We were to abandon the car altogether for a remoter trek by tractor and hay wagon to the very borders of bush and grain. There we rolled our sacks out in willow clumps and broke slough ice for morning coffee water, and the same ice again for Martinis when the guns were cased and the fat fowl roasted on the fire. Two days of it brought us back to civilization and the nearest hospital, not for succor but to give away our limits.

All this was still ahead of us as the flight of Ignatz’s bunch began to thin out with the advancing morning. Tony had been studying the skies beyond our field. Two birds short of the provincial limit he stopped us.

“Different bunch yonder, lads, and geese among ‘em. One of those could teach us something.”

Half a mile’s walk put us in good buckbrush cover precisely under the flight line. But this bunch had fed farther away. They swept down over Ignatz’s moraine with eyes only for the roosting slough, each flock thirty or forty yards out of range above us. At greater intervals and height, honkers and specs arrowed down the wind with the same single-minded course to water. We were giving up when an overthirsty bunch of pintails started lowering from the crest of the moraine. We still estimated them at seventy yards but we had goose loads in the guns now and a morning’s practice on high downwind birds.

As we shot together, two white frock-coated drakes somersaulted over and over slowly before swishing down with a crash that burst their overstuffed craws. Tony turned the wet grain over in his hand thoughtfully.

“Barley. Ignatz will know who planted it.”

4

ONLY twenty?” Ignatz scowled. “Can’t they shoot ?”

“Fair,” said Tony. “We only shot flying.”

“You ought to got twenty to the shell,” said Ignatz severely.

We held our peace, for we had seen enough to know that legality and moderation take on a different perspective in the light of Ignatz’s troubles. We had very literally been making sport of his salvation.

Ignatz’s father, like most of the colonists of this township, had left Lemberg fifty-odd years ago, the hot breath of the Czar’s recruiting squads accelerating his quest for the promised free land.

He had validated his homesteader’s papers with the erection of a soddy fifteen miles from rails, forty from a doctor. He had exchanged labor for his turn at the steam plow that broke the prairie sod, planting new acres each year, harvesting at first with a scythe as he saved for machinery.

Five times in that span his crop had been ravaged in varying degree by ducks. The last time, Ignatz estimated the loss at four thousand bushels of wheat in one night.

“We burned the straw piles, two sheds, and a corner of the field. The beggars still come. I like to see you kill every one.”

“I’d not,” said Tony. “It’s still rare sport.”

“Sport for some, starving for us,” said Ignatz implacably. “And you had it worse than me, Tony.”

Ignatz had had seasons without a duck on the place. Tony’s disasters had fallen in three successive years. A flood had climaxed them, but it was ducks that added his homestead to the melancholy numbers of abandoned farms dotting the wheat.

“I’ve not starved,” he persisted stoutly, “and I’d not see them exterminated.”

“Why you say this morning hunt, not shoot?” demanded Ignatz.

We explained that our father had seen concentrations of ducks like this in our native Iowa. He had thought it an extravagant excursion to travel two hours by horse and buggy for his fowling.

With a model T we had extended that range to about fifty miles: forty-eight on primitive gravel, two in hub-deep prairie mire. To shoot at Ignatz’s, we had driven seventeen hundred miles of highspeed concrete and three hundred of graded gravel before putting on tire chains.

We were fugitives from more than our own mobility. Concrete and gasoline are the prime culprits, but we told our hosts the rest of the sad recital: the tiling, ditching, dredging, and draining of our waters, the five-millionth serial number already on America’s most popular shotgun, the two million federal duck stamps sold annually, the forty-nine different sets of laws, the sanctuaries and fences.

Without laws and fences our wild fowl would already have followed the passenger pigeon and buffalo. Conservation is imperative; its price is our heritage of free hunting. In a few favored places the American gunner may still shoot. He no longer hunts.

The grain-belt farmer, pinched between a late growing season and early snow, has little time to spend on sport. We left most of our kill in grateful hands on the farms, but we were more welcome for the protection of our guns than for the meat. We had come to hunt, and in the lushest abundance we shot with rigid restraint. Happily, the grain belt offers diversity as well as elbowroom.

“Got any Huns, Ignatz?” asked Tony.

“Not here,” Ignatz apologized. “For them you’d have to go a mile. But plenty chickens in the rough.”

We walked the tough prairie sod with which windborne silt has long since covered the gravelly rough of the moraine. Knee-high buck and badger brush, clumps of wild rose still showing frost-nipped flowers, and low copses of popple make a perfect cover. We heard indignant cackles before the heavy gray lumps sprang high to labor away on stunted wings. It looked too easy and it was: another deception of light and size. They were eighty yards out before we shot. They flapped and soared a tranquil half mile more without a loosened feather.

“Quiet, lads, they’re lively with the sun.”

Four times in the next mile we flushed again, pairs and singles always just out of range. Then, at the base of the moraine, a late or lazy pair rose almost at our feet.

Chickens they were not, as a glance at the sharp tails and bare legs showed. We were still a couple of hundred miles short of the pinnated grouse’s continuing retreat from the plow. Prairie lore adds another factor, insisting that the importation of the pugnacious Hungarian partridge has hastened the retreat of the native bird half again its size.

True or not, Huns and chickens are seldom found together; but it would take a purist to cavil in a land full of sharptails. They exceed a pound and compensate for a ponderous flight by elusive skulking. Again and again they rose wild on us and soared a half mile to bare popple tops from which they blinked with unapproachable disdain.

We took two more singles on the far side of the moraine and were resting over a pipe at its end when a low-soaring red-tailed hawk exploded a covey of Huns out of the stubble in the long valley below. We watched them glinting gray and silver across the golden field, knocking out our pipes as they pitched by a willow-fringed pothole.

“They take a main of walking without a dog,” warned Tony.

Walking they take indeed, but they reward it nobly. Only the grain-growing states of our northern tier know the Hun, and even there his foothold is precarious. Despite the fiercer winters of the Canadian grain belt, he has so multiplied in it that dog fanciers bring field-trial champions from as far as Florida to train on him.

Like our bobwhite, he leaves a scented feeding trail and holds well for dogs. Finding him without one is arduous. At sunrise and sunset the ear can locate his querulous cheeping along the borders between grass and grain. Feeding, he ranges widely into the grain, returning when full to the shade of willow thickets. One covey may hold till your feet are among them. The next will rise a hundred yards from you, fly a quarter of a mile, and run another two hundred yards while you beat the cover into which they vanished.

We took our first lesson from the covey we had just marked into pothole willows. They had pitched to the west end but were not there. We walked parentheses around its perimeter and were facing each other at the east end when they rose between our guns with a disconcerting brrr and, doubling back, glinted off unscathed through the bush.

“They’re artful,” Tony consoled. “But there’ll be more.”

We drew blanks at the next three pothole willows and then stumbled into them in mid-field a hundred yards from the fourth clump. Calmer this time, we saw the feather puffs and short drops of two clean kills on the covey rise.

“Small, but they make a rare breakfast,”said Tony with a truth we verified next morning. Midway in size between our bobwhite and pheasant, the Hun is a conservative little dandy of beautifully shaded browns and grays. On the table, his white meat makes the perfect complement to the darker flesh of sharptails.

5

JULIAN KLABOWSKY planted barley,” said Ignatz, “but the road there ain’t good.”

It was not, but our laborious progress discovered still another of the grain belt’s diversities. We had slithered down a mucky road allowance to what should have been an isthmus between two large lakes, only to find a foot of water concealed by marsh grass over the last tire tracks. We were turning, to backtrack, when we heard the wing roar and saw the weaving, wavering chain across the pass.

“Just brownies,” said Tony contemptuously.

The grain-belt gunner expects to shoot and pick up dryfooted. For hundreds of miles, the waterfeeding diving fowl that darken his lakes enjoy relative immunity at the expense of the ubiquitous mallards. For us, however, the flashing formations of red, black, and white were stirring evocative memories.

“You’d be over your boots,” protested the scandalized Tony. “Why bother with brownies?”

Bother, for a natural canvasback pass? Limited with ducks, we contented ourselves for that day with a firm mark on the map. Our return confirmed Tony’s morose prophecies and our own delighted surmise.

He clucked unhappily on the bank while we cut heavy popple poles and inched warily out onto the isthmus. The flooded roadbed was possible wading, but the deep borrow pits on its flanks precluded picking up anything but the narrowest of drops.

Returning to shore we divided, one each side of road and pits, and worked slowly outward again, wading at our very boot tops until, half leaning, half kneeling on muskrat houses, we found precarious stands a hundred yards apart.

In half an hour we had four boots full of ice water and a mixed limit of diving fowl that ran the gamut of cans, redheads, three kinds of scaup, goldeneye, and bufflehead.

It was wickedly hard shooting. Every bird was taken high overhead at the full-throttle velocity which some authorities insist is the divers’ only speed. Traffic was continuous; in singles, pairs, and flocks ranging up to fifty we could see them rise a mile away across the shimmering waters and, gaining height, hurtle directly toward us.

Even with fine visibility there was scant time to gauge the angle of their passing, thresh frantically for another foothold in the slime, and then swing ahead of them through a quadrant of fire limited by precarious balance. We dared take incomers only, picking up for each other as momentum carried our kills across pits and road. Each of us managed to drench the other with the heavy splash of high, hard kills, but the man who has taken his divers only as they circle decoys will account a wetting to the waist small price for a diver pass.

Julian Klabowsky reckoned himself a lucky man. His section and a half of barley had been harvested before migration, but his laughter was sympathetic.

“Millions,” he assured us. “You can’t drive ‘em out of barley. But for geese you must pit.”

We borrowed shovels and walked, lifting a babel of mallards, sprigs, and gadwall in angry waves ahead of us, to the center of his field. There, in a small area that might have been surveyed for equidistance from protective buckbrush or willows, we found acres of goose droppings the size of a twenty-gauge shell.

A backbreaking hour with the stiff loam cut parallel shallow graves just deep enough to hide the outlines of our bodies. Covering fresh earth and ourselves with barley straw, we settled to the numbing chill of our vigil as the evening flight began to pour in around us.

At ducks, if we had wished, I believe we could have shot until our shoulders rebelled. As the supper flight approached climactic intensity, they poured over the moraine from Ignatz’s slough in a profusion that mocks the cliché itself. They did, for solid minutes at a time, hide the red setting sun. They did swish and roar and thunder around us until we had to shout across our two-foot separation.

They lit to the very edges of our pits until all visibility was red legs and white bellies. When we waved them out, they barely fluttered fifty yards before pitching once more in a density that turned the tawny field into an emerald sea of nibbling heads.

Through this pandemonium we heard the geese before we saw them, higher, warier, and majestically larger than ducks. Slowly the black hulks of honkers and specs loomed in; the undersides of snows flamed with the refraction of sunset on pure white feathering. Steadily their babel rose in wild, sweet clamor.

“Say when,” said Dutch as we burrowed down and shredded prepared wisps of straw over our faces.

The honkers led, and their first pass was high, perhaps three hundred yards. But even there, the purposeful V of traveling formation was breaking into blocky, bunched density, the arrowy line had begun to circle.

Faster and more reckless, the snows cut in under them; changing angles showed us black wing tips, yellow bills, and pink legs. Alone, the snows would have accepted the treacherous testimony of the undisturbed ducks around us and dropped in willingly. But the suspicion of the honkers was contagious. Checking, the snows strung out behind them in lowering but still wary circles.

Down and ever down they spiraled around us, the throat patches on the honkers and black breast barrings of the specs becoming bolder with each pass. We could watch only half the circle without moving. When I estimated a hundred yards I let the last of the long stream pass visibility again and then, as quietly as possible, slipped the safety of my gun for the next pass.

Did they hear that faint click? It seemed incredible in such a clamor, but wild fowl live in clamor. More than once I have seen incomers flare at a smaller alien noise. Can their ears have a mechanism that filters out their own commotion?

No one knows, but the behavior of these at least sustained the question. They did not flare or cry alarm, but what should have been their last circle became a cautious tangent. A quarter of a mile downwind of us they banked hard, set their wings, and dropped almost vertically into the field.

Now we were in trouble. To spook them out was to alert the whole procession of stately skeins clamoring in after them from the horizon. To leave them where they were was to accept probability that every bird in the feeding flight would go straight to them.

We counseled in whispers and raised slowly. Most of the flock was already feeding ravenously. The old watch gander still kept a stiff-nocked vigil. At our move, he jumped high and hard; his clarion call scarcely reached our ears before every wing in the flock was following his retreat.

We raised our chilled bodies upright in the pits and launched another sea of startled ducks around us, but this time they did not flutter back into the field. The cries of the departing geese seemed to communicate to them a graver alarm than the shouting and hand-waving which would not drive them away from us an hour ago.

Now the whole mass lifted and strung out after the geese, who were already circling another field a mile away. We were not the only watchers. Behind them the flight line that still reached the darkening horizon swung slowly across wind to a course corrected for the new field. In five minutes not a feather was left in ours.

“Did you hear my safety?” I asked Dutch apologetically.

“No. I didn’t even hear mine; but they did.”

We broke our guns and sat laughing together as darkness enveloped the distant flight line and the sharp yapping of a coyote on the moraine became audible through the receding swish of the endless wings.