Ranch-style Duck Hunting

Young John Harms makes a heck of a duck hunting partner. He knows which trail roads lead to the marshy side of lakes and the quirk of every gate tightener on the ranch. Best of all, he doesn't seem to mind opening gates. John thinks of opening and closing gates the way most of us think of opening and closing doors.

John's duck shooting partner is Dave Hintz. Dave has about 50 more years of hunting and fishing wisdom than John. Dave knows it is a fine thing to hunt with someone who doesn't mind opening

To John, gates are just outdoor doors, something to open and close.

gates. From John's perspective, Dave's wisdom and friendship is valued. That shows. Also valued is Dave's chocolate Lab, boat, decoys and, as necessity requires, the loan of a handful of shotshells, all of which Dave shares freely. John and Dave are not what you would call a matched set; they are more like two pieces of a jigsaw puzzle that fit together.

Listen to their pickup talk as they bounce along a trail road in the pitch of predawn to a willow blind on a bulrush point. Share a blind with them on a balmy October morning or a sleety November afternoon when birds are rushing out of the Dakotas. If you've read Robert Ruark's classic book, The Old Man and the Boy, a fictional telling of a salty old man's education of his grandson, passages from it rush to mind.

The thing I like best about the Old Man is that he's willing to talk about what he knows, and he never talks down to a kid, which is me, who wants to know things. When you are as old as the Old Man, you know a lot of things that you forgot you ever knew, because they've been a part of you so long. You forget that a young'un hasn't had as hard a start on the world as you did, and you don't bother to spread the information around. You forget that other people might be curious about what you already knew and forgot.
- Robert Ruark

John started tagging after Dave to duck blinds when he was only four years old, carrying a popgun. Shot his first duck, a mallard, when he was 10 using an old single-barrel 20-gauge with a hammer.

The morning hunt over, John checks a stock tank overflow valve. Later in the day he might watch where ducks feed or roost from a tractor seat.

The next year he moved up to a 20-gauge pump and last year to his dad's 12-gauge Weatherby automatic. "I'm shooting real good with it," said John, who extracts maximum shooting opportunity from every duck venturing within 50 yards. He only shoots once when there is one duck and he kills it with his first shot. "This year, something is not gelling for me," Dave said, unashamed to admit birds don't always fall when he shoots. "I shoot alright, but I should be shooting better. First shot is John's. I've already shot a lot of ducks in my life."

Serendipity brought Dave and John together. Dave graduated with a forestry degree from the University of Michigan with an emphasis on wildlife. His specialty during his 28 years with the USDA Soil Conservation Service was windbreaks for livestock protection, wildlife and controlling soil erosion. He traveled all 50 states training federal and state employees. When Dave retired, he and his wife, Roberta, a teacher, toured the northwestern states looking for a retirement home. They were disillusioned. California had spread north. A friend suggested they look in the Valentine area, and they did. Roberta wanted to continue teaching, and after years in urban schools, a one-room school appealed to her. She was offered three jobs and Dave began looking for a place to live close to areas to hunt and fish.

During his career, Dave had worked with enough ranchers to know that many had vacant houses, and he found one on Jim and Barbara Harmses' ranch south of Valentine, just down the road from one of the rural schools that offered Roberta a job. That was in 1987. Only a sandy driveway separates the Harmses from the Hintzs. That John and Dave would end up hunting and fishing buddies was predestined.

"John kind of grew up with my Chesapeake," Dave said. "He would always come over and if I was

Molly fetches a lesser scaup dropped from a flock that buzzed the decoy spread.

doing carpentry work, he was doing carpentry work. If I was going hunting, I'd take him. There's two little ponds just east of the house and when they have water we always shoot something there. That's where John shot his first duck. I guess Roberta and I have been like grandparents to John and his sister, Heather. Heather wants to hunt now. Roberta teaches in the rural school just down the road where John and Heather are students. We're more like family than neighbors."

"Might as well learn not to talk too much in a duck blind," he said. "Maybe it don't make any difference, but it takes your mind off watching. And four-fifths of shooting ducks is watching."
- Robert Ruark

If there is one aspect of his duck hunting education John has mastered, it's watching. He's more watchful than Dave, even more watchful that Dave's young Lab, Molly. John has young legs and his back still bends without crackles and pops. He spends most of his time standing in the blind or boat, humped over so his head is barely covered by dried leaves of sandbar willows or the plumy heads of phragmites, his eyes dancing across the horizon in search of incoming ducks. For John, most flocks, even those going away, are incoming, at least for a while, and warrant a measured quack-quack-quack-quack-quack-quack of hopeful comeback call.

"There're coming this way. No. They landed. There's a big bunch over there, flying."

John has mastered the art of watching for ducks, his eyes constantly dancing across the horizon in search of incoming flocks.

"Something will happen pretty soon, John. This place has been awful good to us."

"That ruddy is still out there. He's swimming this way. He's close enough."

"They're hard to kill on the water, John. And if you stand up and yell he'll just dive or swim away."

"But you got to remember that a duck in the water is like an iceberg. About eight-tenths of him is under water, and the water sheds shot like a tin roof. You practically got to hit him in the head to kill him, because his wings are folded and the wing feathers and the back feathers'll shed shot just like water. I've noticed that in all sorts of bird shooting it's a heap easier to shoot a flying bird than a sitting bird, all questions of sportsmanship aside. A flying bird opens up his vulnerable parts, his softer-feathered parts, and he spreads his wings enough to give you a chance to bust one. Sitting, wings folded, he's damned near armor-plated."
- Robert Ruark

"John, swinging this way, but I don't think . . . maybe. Let 'em come. Shovelers. Let 'em come as far as they will. One's pulled off. Wait. Wait."

Youth waits for no slow-flying ducks.

"I put a BB in it."

"You could have let him come a little closer. He would have kept coming."

"I hope some ducks got up when I shot. Here comes one. A couple of 'em."

"Watch your muzzle and don't push that safety off until you're ready to shoot."

"Habit is a wonderful thing," the Old Man said. "It's just as easy to form good ones as it is to make bad ones. Once they're made, they stick. There's no earthly use of slipping the safety off a gun until you're figuring to shoot it. There's plenty of time to slip it off while she's coming to your shoulder . . . The older you get, the carefuller you'll be. When you're as old as I am, you'll be so scared of a firearm that every young man you know will call you a damned old maid. But damned old maids don't shoot the heads off their friends in the duck blinds."
- Robert Ruark

"Last year we lost our duck hunting the second or third of November when that big storm hit and the lakes froze," Dave said. " I always figure you're safe until about the fifth or sixth of November. The best time is usually right before ice-up and that's generally by about the second week of November. Sometimes later. If you got any open water left there can be some really good hunting for a day or two. But you know, we've had it freeze and the lakes open up again and the duck hunting is no good. They're gone. We've got six blinds . . ."

"Seven blinds," John corrected.

"Seven blinds," Dave continued. "And we move around depending on which we think is going to be best with that day's weather. And, like this year, with the lakes down, a couple of those blinds don't have much water in front of them. Usually at the end of our season it's mallards and

Dave is philosophical about duck hunting, reveling in each sunrise and sunset and good companionship in the blind.

gadwalls. The teal, shovelers and widgeon are gone. Last year, though, we were shooting shovelers right up to freeze-up. This year, on the opening weekend, we must have caught the tail end of the early migration. We never saw so many ducks, they just kept coming and coming. We don't kill many divers, mostly puddlers. This year we've been shooting one lake where we kill some diving ducks."

John interrupts. "A whole bunch!"

"Coming?"

"Nope, they sat down."

"There's a couple coming in on your side, John. Look like shovelers to me."

"Me to."

"Let 'em come. Let 'em come. Don't get excited. Take him!"

John empties the Weatherby. The two shovelers continue on with their business, just a bit faster. Dave suggests John consider a little more lead on passing ducks.

"Quail are reflexes, like I told you. There isn't time to do any figuring. But ducks are ballistics. A ballistic," he said, "is sort of hard to explain. Let's see, can I. Suppose you take the speed of a bird and the angle of flight and the speed of the wind and the direction of the wind and the height of the bird and the size of the shot pattern and the speed of the shot or the strength of the powder, and then you grind them all up in one mill and the right answer comes out. Maybe that ain't the book definition, but it's my definition. I can explain it easier to you after you've missed a few ducks."
- Robert Ruark

"The wind just isn't right for us here, today," Dave said. "Blowing right in our faces. But we've killed ducks here on days just like this. You wouldn't think so, but we do."

A snipe sweeps by, tucks its wings and plunges into a patch of flooded, knee-high bulrush. "That's our snipe," John said. "He always comes over and lands right over there. Some ducks landed up the shore a ways. I'm going to walk up there."

"He's working on patience," Dave said.

Ten minutes later there is one shot. Five minutes after that John returns to the blind with a drake shoveler and a grin. "At least we're not going to get skunked."

The next morning Dave and John left in the dark for the diving duck lake. Dave drove, and John ran the gates. The trail road petered out and they followed parallel tracks of broken down bluestem, then nothing but memory and maybe a dash of celestial navigation. The sky was full of more stars than anyone not from the Sandhills can imagine. Venus hung above the grassy dune in the east, the brightest object in the predawn. There was no moon, no hint of land features, only impenetrable black beyond headlight beams that wildly bounce up and down and vanish in the night.

Their spread of decoys was bobbing off a little island of phragmites, and Dave's boat was tucked into a patch of bulrush on the south shore. Dawn came as a deep orangish-gold in a cloudless sky. They discussed wind direction - light from the southeast - and how it might affect their shooting opportunity. There had not been enough cold in the Dakotas to send birds south since the third

Molly, Dave's two-year old chocolate lab, peers into the water for sunken decoys while the hunting partners pick up for the morning.

week of October. The year before, Sandhills lakes were locked in ice and covered with snow for a week on November 11. In 2001, through October and well into November, the days were warm and balmy with sunshine and southerly winds. A wad of buffleheads drifted on the east end of the lake as mallards exchanged morning pleasantries from the little pool cut off from the lake by a band of cattail. Canada geese called as they landed on the meadow to the east to graze. Shooting or no shooting, it was a grand morning to be in a boat on a Sandhills lake.

"Molly is not two yet," Dave said while John bounced from one side of the boat to the other looking for birds. "She's probably retrieved 35 or 40 ducks already this year. She retrieved a little bit last year and she wasn't even a year old. Now, she'll do those crazy things. A couple of mornings ago I sent her across a bunch of bulrush to get a duck. I thought she had it but she didn't bring it back. So John went around with her to look. Well, then she went and sniffed something, and it was kind of stuck in the mud, and it was the duck. It wasn't where I thought it was."

"There are two things got no place in this world," he said, "an old dog and an old man. They perform no useful function, and generally smell bad, too. . . . I will tell you a very wise thing. If a man is really intelligent, there's practically nothing a good dog can't teach him. But a dumb man can't learn anything from a smart dog, while a dumb dog can occasionally learn something from a smart man. Remember that."
- Robert Ruark

Two Canada geese left the meadow and landed in open water a hundred yards east of the decoys. They swam closer. John and Dave shucked duck loads out and put goose loads in. Sixty yards out the geese turned north, swam another 40 yards, calling, talking up enough ambition to fly, and then they did, vanishing over the north ridge. John has shot two Canada geese in his life. He would like to shoot the third. Today rather than tomorrow.

A flock of 15 to 18 diving ducks swept down the middle the lake only a few feet off the water. Scaup, maybe ringnecks, but probably scaup. Too big a flock for ringnecks in the Sandhills. John called.

"I don't know that they liked that," Dave said after listening to John call. "You need to keep working on your calling. You got the tape. You bring it over and we'll work on it together. We'll

Nestled in an island of phragmites and waiting for ducks, Dave and John watch as sunlight crawls across grass-covered dunes.

sit on the back step and work on calling. If it looks like they are just going to keep on going, I say, go ahead, give 'em a call, but if they're coming, no sense taking a chance."

Five minutes later the flock of scaup was back, careening down the middle of the lake, then veering to buzz the decoy spread. John was already standing in the boat, ready to shoot. He's young with a good set of sea legs. Dave shot while sitting. Each dropped a bird. "I don't think they were going to swing and land," Dave said.

The shooting made the buffleheads nervous and they started trading about the lake, plopping down first on one end and then the other. Already fat for migration, they had nothing better to do. Twice, wide-flying squads from the troupe swept over the decoys. On one pass John killed one, on another pass both John and Dave dropped a bird. The remaining buffleheads had enough, gained a few

John holds a scaup and bufflehead from a morning on the diver lake.

feet in altitude, enough to clear the next fence and vanished up the valley. That was the last of the morning flight. John was satisfied. He had ducks to clean on the bench nailed to the tree in the front yard. Then there were bales to bunch up on the meadow before snow came. Winter could come next week. "Better get your work done before the late-migrating mallards get here," Dave said. On the way back Dave stopped at a stock tank half full of water and surrounded by cattle. John, still in hip boots, bailed out to check the overflow valve. Just another day on the ranch.

As I remember the Old Man, he never said anything at all that you couldn't walk away from three ways and still find a fresh idea in it. I got to where I could listen to him with only one ear, separating the meat from the philosophy, and it wasn't until a lot of years later when I grew up to be a man that I found I remembered more philosophy than meat.
- Robert Ruark