The Country Ahead of Us, the Country Behind (3 page)

“Trail gets worse every year,” Pop said. “No cattle in it anymore.”

Sean said, “You don’t need a trail out here, though. Just make a beeline for the wasteway.”

“Trouble with that is a bee don’t have to walk. He doesn’t get sand in his boots.”

A quarter-mile in, Pop’s load went; it sprang away from his back without warning and flopped down into the bunch grass. We waited while he got his knots just so, Sean gouging the sand with his boot heel and weighing the shells in his pockets. I was overdressed and heating up quickly, so I unbuttoned my jacket and took off my cap. The three of us hiked through chickweed and Johnson grass. The sky had already gone from black to purple when Pop pointed out the morning’s first birds—a flight of mallards wheeling toward the northwest, eleven or twelve in silhouette. “They’re coming in from The Potholes,” he told us, following their sleek dip and swerve. “Those birds are definitely looking for a place to set.”

“Let’s get up there,” Sean said. “Come on.”

He moved on ahead of us. Pop and I sat against the base of a sand bluff for a while.

“How’s the knee? Bothering you?”

Pop rubbed once or twice beside the outside tendon. “Not too bad. Not yet.”

We followed a ridge, conjuring everywhere the bustle of pheasants in the sage. We climbed over a black dune, worked down to a section marker, then crossed between two pieces of cattail marsh where for years we’d gotten creditable jumpshooting just by splitting up and combing the shallow margins. Pop had put in plenty of good days here; I’d watched him get a triple more than once. I was driven to recall a flight of mallards that got up in the south pond, scattering, twenty years ago, Pop taking a left and then a right and at the end, incredibly, a going-away. I wondered if he remembered it. If all the ducks and even the upland hunting faded together in his brain.

It was light enough to move without the flashlights now. Strands of honkers, broken Vs, skated past darkly a thousand feet overhead. It didn’t matter how many times you witnessed them in flight, their speed, their unity of purpose, their impressive altitude, the faint but audible sound from fifty throats—it left you with a pounding in the rib cage. Pop watched them, too, from under his pack load. I could hear him breathing. We traversed the last black dune side by side, slowly, and stood gazing out across the wasteway.

“There it is,” Pop said. “Damn.”

Marsh reeds, golden cattails, pockets of gray water for as far as you could see north and south. The sage desert, impossibly large, rolled away to the east and behind. While we watched a string of teal angled in, just where we’d had
our set so many years. We heard shooting, first shots of the day, a teal plummeted like a ball of coal, and soon, shooting from every quarter.

“We’re a little late,” I said. “It’s open season.”

“What happened to Sean?”

“Getting into his waders.”

“Channel moves further out every year. Deeper, too.”

“We can lay our set this side of it, Pop. No reason to try and cross.”

We scrambled out a point of sedge and worked our waders on. Sean had his things beneath a thorn willow, neatly. “Let’s go,” he said to us. “Come on.”

I let him lead. Bunched tight we followed the bracken margins, hip high a quarter-mile or so, going laterally with the pull of the wasteway. We were in it, guns aloft. You could feel it sucking against the backs of your waders. I watched while a pair of trout shot away, more silently than in dreams I’d once had of them, moving in tandem toward the reeds.

Pop found us a dependable set—high marsh just upwind, good drift, thick bracken; we anchored the decoys at the low end, down current but well out in the open. It was belly-high work to get them placed so I did the deep wading myself. Pop had his pipe lit and stood in the reeds, tossing the decoys out to me; then each of us took up a twenty-yard stretch and faded into the camouflage.

The first ducks came in before an hour had gone by; there had been shooting everywhere, and now it was our turn. They were mallards, a group of four wheeling over too high to be heard, jumping across from the wheat fields having fed beneath the stars, and skittish because all the familiar places swarmed, this day, with the echoes of desperate gunshots. I beckoned them first with a feeding call, a series of low,
gradual chuckles, and then with the harsh cry of hen to drake. They circled twice, wide arcs in order to cover the high reeds to the north; on the third pass all four set their wings beautifully and rode in with the wind bucking them up a bit. I saw them fluff up their breast feathers; there was some splashing confusion about the decoys. Sean stood in and took the lead bird with a close wing shot, and I took a hen going away to the left. She zagged once, then plummeted head over heels with her wings folded up, propelled away from me for a half-second, no more, by the violent thrust of the shot. The two remaining singles veered off climbing powerfully; Sean wasted a second shell on the hind one.

“Yours is swimming,” Pop called from his blind. “Go on, son. Finish what you started.”

Sean sluiced his wounded drake, looking sheepish, I thought, and reloaded afterward on the spot. We let the two birds drift out past the decoys until in the end they were awash against the cattails.

“Can I go around and pick them up?” Sean called. “I want to see how big mine is.”

“They aren’t going anywhere,” Pop answered. “Leave them be, why don’t you?”

The battle went forth all around through midmorning; hunters were gunning away at the high flyers, and Pop cursed them once or twice. Nothing would come down in this rain of steel shot; the ducks were going to stay skittish. I tried calling in a stray set of teal, but they weren’t falling for it and scurried away over the bluffs. Everything else was dumbfounded high flyers.

Then at noon, sure enough, we got the winds Pop had prophesied, and suddenly, funneling low and hugging the
terrain, no fewer than thirty teal passed through our set with their wings drumming the air above the water, a whole flurry of them, dark and flashing, and nobody getting a shot off but Sean, who emptied his gun at them to no avail. They peeled off to the east with a unified grace, climbing in a long bank of silhouettes, until distance erased them from sight.

“What happened?” Sean asked.

“Caught me sleeping,” I said. “They were moving too fast I never got shouldered.”

“Working on my pipe,” Pop called out. “Damn!”

When the air teased down a bit we stood out for lunch—sliced beef sandwiches, a wedge of pie each. Pop lit his pipe and held his knee in his hand. The sun had come up strong over the desert—bad for hunters, but pleasant at lunchtime. We opened our jackets and passed the water around, cold and tinted with the canteen taste. Pop watched while Sean lit into his pie, and so did I, pouring from the thermos.

“I wonder if we shouldn’t try some jumpshooting,” Sean said. “Maybe that’ll be the ticket.”

“Better not wander,” answered Pop, sipping coffee. “Some of these skyshooters might mistake you for a stray and try to pot you in the brush.”

“There’s ponds over yonder.” Sean pointed toward the southeast. “Nobody’s shooting down that way. Singles have been going in all day over there. The strays get confused and end up along the margins. I’ll bet we get some shooting down there. I’ll bet we do, Pop.”

“How much?” asked Pop. “You might and you might not. But you go ahead and find out, why don’t you?”

“With three of us we just might get one up.”

“You can do it just as easy with two, boy.”

Sean and I tracked down a nice string of ponds to walk,
and I took another mallard hen going off on the diagonal. She had trouble gaining altitude and gave me plenty of time to establish my lead and squeeze off without relying on instinct. I did it all in my head, which was satisfactory enough. She tumbled, a blur of feathers, and splashed behind the reeds. I let Sean go in to pick her up.

We walked a mile and a half of sage; there were no birds anywhere and it seemed just as well. Sean had his eye out for ringnecks, I could tell, though he knew they were impossible to flush without a bird dog. But he was very young, only twenty.

Finally we sprawled on the highest of the black dunes. Here you could see the whole length of the wasteway, its pools of sunlight, its matted rush, glistening down toward the Saddle Mountains.

“We’re not getting the shots,” Sean said, lying back with his hands behind his head. “I hate a slow day. I really do.”

“It’s good just being out,” I reminded him.

“You know something? Pop hasn’t fired a shot all day. You’d think he would’ve by now.”

“He’s shot his share over the years, Sean.”

Sean pumped a shell loose and blew sand from it. “Still,” he said. That was all.

“He’ll get a shot before the day’s out,” I predicted. “We all will. At twilight.”

Heading in we worked the margins of the wasteway together, cutting up the bracken quietly. I remembered what Pop said about the shallows on a busy day: because flight had proved itself too precarious, strays holed up and refused to bounce out unless you nearly stepped on their tail feathers. I figured if they flushed it would be with the wind under them, so we spread and beat the edges with the
breeze in our faces. Sure enough a pair of pintails towered, and Sean took them both, a head-on and a going-over. They were good shots and he gave a shout when the birds fell, holding his twelve-gauge aloft.

We brought the three birds in and retrieved our two drifters from where the current had pinned them to the reeds. Sean thrust his pintails up for Pop to see, and Pop answered by raising his pipe above his head.

Gusts came up again in the late afternoon. I stood in with Pop to keep him ready, knowing he would sit on the bracken when he tired. “Where was it we got our Christmas goose?” he asked. “I believe it was down toward the reservoir from here. Just this side of those big bluffs.”

“It was back that way. The twin ponds. Up underneath where the butte bulges.”

The first of the blackbirds began to work now. Solitary pairings, gliding after insects, then clouds of them, wave after wave, undulant and synchronized, like schools of fish. They dropped steeply, then banked, spun in a whirlwind, exploded toward the twilight heavens. Mallards began to move in flurries. A pair circled, once, twice—their arcs enormous, elongated coils—then set from behind, so that we had to take them late, a drake and a hen dropping in from over the shoulder, two rough going-away shots in the end. I left the lead bird for Sean and told Pop to let fly, but he hesitated and Sean missed altogether; they banked and whirled on a fortunate draft and we had no birds to show for it.

“Mark,”
Sean called out. “They’re coming out of the woodwork now.”

A lone mallard hen, skimming low, nearly set among our decoys before Sean fired at her—neatly and with the proper composure. It was a rare display of patience on his part, I
thought, but he missed at any rate and she veered over the cattails, skimming still, before he dropped her cleanly with a long second shot. He was still reloading when a group of eight began to circle the upwind reeds, turned away as if to give it up, then coiled back again, suspicious, circling twice more and then angling in uncertainly, pulling up at thirty yards and stroking hard over our blinds; I fell back in the bracken and squeezed off at a going-over without giving her the proper lead time and the eight of them soon cleared gun range.

“Call them in!” Sean screamed.
“Mark!”

I gave out with the feeding call, as anticipatory as any boy, for it seemed to me, with the coming darkness inevitable, that these would be the last birds of the day. They were green-winged teal, two dozen or more, listing to the right and approaching on a low slant, a tight flock swift in flight but apparent from far off, so that I had time to remind Pop to get shouldered and fire when I did. When they dropped precipitously against the wind I knew Sean would hold himself; then they were settling down on the water, then trailing up away from the still decoys with their wings bucking, breasts opened, then floundering in slow motion over little splash pockets on the pond, tails dripping quicksilver, and I stood in and fired with perfect ease. Sean put two birds down, firing too quickly in succession when he had time—missing on the second shot—but I took a triple with the kind of slow deliberation I have found myself in recent years capable of. I have no quick shot any longer.

“Nice shooting,” Pop said, with his hand on my arm. “You did it just like I would have. Pretty as a picture shooting.”

In the final light I hauled out our decoys and wrapped their anchors, and my son collected, on the drift, the six
birds still on the water. I didn’t ask my father why he hadn’t shot, but Sean did, with the blind ease of youth. “I don’t lead so well,” Pop told him. “It’s just opening day. I’m a tad ragged, I guess. I can’t get onto them yet.”

But we had plenty of birds, eleven for the day; things felt right and it had been a perfect hunt. I let Sean carry them strung and draped over his shoulders, and I knew—or rather, know—what illusory thing he felt wading. Pop sloshed along behind us with his burlap bag across his back and his pipe clutched between his front teeth. “Beginning to get cold,” he said once.

The day reversed itself; it was dark again and, freed from our waders, guns emptied of shells, we sojourned back across the sage and black dunes. Sean explained to Pop how he’d come by his pintails, how with the head-on the barrel of his gun had temporarily obscured the bird from sight, how with the going-over he’d swiveled and planted to take him nearly on the going-away. Chains of geese reeled overhead. The blackbirds had settled in for the night. When the first stars came up a coyote began to cry; I stopped to listen, smelling the sage, and Sean left me in his boot tracks. He went off with all the birds over his shoulders and his flashlight broadcasting across the sagelands.

Pop limped up behind and we sat down. “Knee,” he said. I gave him my canteen; we rested in silence. “Down in there,” I said, pointing below us, “are the ponds where you got that good triple jumpshooting. It was the south pond. Nineteen sixty-five, I believe.”