End-of-Season Hail Mary

I hunt to exhaustion at the end of every duck season, in search of one elusive thing.

It happens every year. After carefully pacing myself for the first two months of duck season, I go completely insane in the final month and start putting a LOT of time and effort into hunting.

The freezer is always full of fish and game at this point, so if I had any sense whatsoever, I’d sleep in and start doing the yardwork that starts feeling urgent around mid-January (because: California).

Instead, I hunt even more.

Why? The maddening elixir of scarcity and abundance.

Typically all of the millions of waterfowl that plan to winter in California will have arrived by January, so this is when hunting can be its very best, and the ducks their fattest. The desire to take advantage of abundant, fat game is hard-wired into every predator species on earth, so I make no apology for it.

Simultaneously, the remaining days of the season are growing inexorably more scarce, and this is the unnatural phenomenon that drives my frenzy.

I know the purpose of limited seasons is conservation, but the effect is like a store that you love advertising a going-out-of-business sale: It warps your decision-making process.

It’s not just about piling up more game. One of the things I hunt for, besides the meat, is a certain kind of experience: a hunt that is so deeply satisfying that I will revel in it for days. For me, this means seeing a good number of ducks in range; making effective decisions about location, decoy placement and calling; shooting really well; and the absence of conflict with other hunters.

Having three or four hunts a year like this is enough to sustain me. Going into the final weekend this year, I'd had two such hunts in twenty-six outings. And my hunt on the final Saturday was a real loser: demanding, frustrating, and nearly fruitless.

Did I really want to end my season with a womp womp?

If I went out again the next day, I’d risk wiping myself out for another disappointing hunt. Duck hunting, the way I do it, is exhausting, involving tromping four to six miles in clunky waders, carrying a gun and a pack laden with up to thirty lead-weighted decoys, and fetching my own ducks because I don’t have a dog. (I lose ten pounds during duck season!)

On this day, the weather forecast did not portend good duck hunting. And the hunting is almost always worse on Sundays anyway, because the ducks are jumpy from being shot at all day Saturday.

But the potential, albeit unlikely, reward would be a glorious hunt that I’d relive over and over, filling the next nine months with contentedness instead of regret.

Pfft. Easy call.

I knew trying to hunt the dawn would be impossible - too much competition - so I headed out mid-morning to the Gray Lodge Wildlife Area, about 80 minutes north of our house. There I found hunters checking out of this refuge at the foot of the Sutter Buttes with one or two ducks apiece. It was warm and sunny - terrible duck weather - so not much was flying. But I was able to get in without waiting.

I headed to one of my favorite parts of the refuge, set out and ended up alone in a gorgeous willow-lined unit - classic Gray Lodge habitat - that could easily accommodate four parties. Thank you, NFL, for scheduling the championship games that afternoon.

I set decoys and pressed myself into the shaded side of a bank of tules - what we call bulrush.

Between sitting there and wandering around my pond a bit, I soon had a snipe, two green-winged teal and a pintail.

If you hunt ducks in California, you know what that means: With my limit of pintail in hand, I was soon covered in pintail and nothing but pintail, gliding 15 yards over my head (repeatedly), landing right behind my tule patch.

While this can be frustrating if you’re hoping for other ducks to come by, it’s actually kinda cool because a filter in your brain changes when you switch from looking for the opportunity to kill to just watching the show. You go from tunnel-visioned intensity to a relaxed state of peripheral enjoyment and appreciation.

That pleasing buzz, combined with the fact that I had four birds in hand, might have been a fine way to cap off my season, a big improvement over the day before.

But I kept seeing pairs of mallards flying high over me, then dropping into a little hole about 500 yards away - one I’d been meaning to explore since the previous season.

I knew what I had to do: It was time to go on a sneak.

Before I tell you what happened, I need to tell you my history with sneaking up on birds: I’m really good at the sneak. I’ve been doing tai chi for three years and it is unbelievably helpful, because moving slowly requires exceptional balance. The soft mats of my studio's floor don’t come close to the degree of challenge of walking through squishy mud under water in giant wader boots, but this is my strong suit.

What I completely suck at, though, is what happens when the birds finally realize I’m there and flush. In that moment of intense chaos, I lose my shit. I empty my gun wildly, and instead of getting the three birds that seemed inevitable moments earlier, I pick up one, if that.

So this was a gamble. I had about an hour and a quarter left, and this would likely take all that time. It was possible I’d get nothing, head back to my spot and discover a flock of wigeon in my decoys that would flush long before I got in range. More realistically, though, if I stayed here, it was going to be all pintail from now to sunset.

I began creeping, on my knees, across mostly open water, toward the little tree-ringed area where I’d seen the mallards go in.

As I neared the hole, I saw a mallard pair on the water, toodling around between bits of picturesque bunch grass. Crap, there was still so much distance to cover!

They also saw me, but they weren’t sure what I was, thanks to the fact that I was on my knees and wearing a ghillie mask topped with a hat I’d covered with tules. I waited for them to go behind some vegetation so I could move in a little more aggressively, but they caught my movement and took off.

All was not lost, though. We don’t have a ton of mallards in California, but I'd hunted them enough to learn they’re sticky - they don’t all evacuate at once. So I kept moving, and when I was close enough to peek around a tule patch into this hole, I saw two ducks on the water, in range.

Pintail. Dammit.

Might as well keep moving in case something else was there. That’s when everything flushed. Half dozen ducks had been sitting on the water near the pintail, just out of my sight. All I saw was brown at first, and by the time I determined that the brown ducks were not pintail, but hen mallards with their boyfriends in tow, they were too far away to shoot.

Not shooting is a good thing, though. Like I said, mallards are sticky, so there could be more just around the next tule patch. I walked 10 yards, flushed a teal, got him. Not what I expected, but a tasty little duck I’ll never turn down.

The hole was now empty for sure.

But I kept hearing more quacking another 300 yards away near some more trees, so I headed that way. I was able to use a dirt road to close most of the distance - no branches or twigs to snap and betray my approach, but also no water to muffle the swish of my wader legs rubbing against each other. I walked slowly, legs splayed a bit, the sun starting to descend behind my back.

As I neared the pond where I heard the quacking - so insistent and obnoxious that I wondered if it might not be a hunter - two pairs of mallards in open water flushed, one after the other. But not the one I was trying to sneak up on. That hen kept quacking, helping me zero in on the location with precision. It might be a single hen, but it was more likely a pair, and possibly a group.

I made it to water's edge without alerting her, and it was clear now she was in thick cover. She couldn’t see me, but she might hear me, and if she flushed now, it’d be a long shot. I really needed to get into the water to get closer. I had to navigate a muddy bank loaded with twigs, branches and loose rocks - each one a potential alarm to trip. But I made it into the water quietly.

Now I was really close. My heart was hammering hard.

HOLLY!

Stop, I told myself. Don’t lose your shit. Stay calm. They’re going to flush from someplace you don’t expect, in numbers you don’t expect. STAY CALM.

I took a deep breath and continued, and that’s when the ducksplosion came. At least half a dozen mallards, really close.

A greenhead flew away to the left, in range.

Bang! Hit, but still flying, getting farther away...

Bang! Down. Dropped in thick stuff. Mark location. Turn back to the rest.

Most of the group was putting distance between me and them, but a hen mallard burst straight up, in range.

Bang! Down. In the edge of some tules.

My gun was empty. I rushed to the tules where the hen dropped, afraid that if she weren’t dead, she’d get so deep into them that I’d never find her, and daylight was fading rapidly.

But she was dead, and just inches inside the tules.

I made my way back to where I’d shot at the drake, gauged his flight path and beelined through increasingly thick vegetation, fighting that sinking feeling. There are few things worse than taking a bird's life for nothing because you can’t find it.

But the drake was right where I thought he should be - on the right line, in the right place.

Finally, I exhaled.

It had gone perfectly. I mean, not gonna lie - I wouldn’t have minded getting a third mallard to finish my limit, but I’d snuck beautifully, I’d stayed calm, I’d shot well, I’d found downed birds in thick cover, and I now had three warm, great-eating ducks in my hands, to go with the four birds back where I'd started.

This wasn’t the experience I’d expected, but it was the experience I’d craved. The sun would be setting in 15 minutes, and technically I could still shoot one more duck, but I needed nothing more. My season was complete.