Walking Away. For Now.
Walking Away. For Now.
Wrestling with change and being at peace with it
This will be my worst duck season ever. And I’m OK with that.
I shot 6 ducks and a snow goose last weekend, and another 6 ducks in North Dakota back in October, but that’s it. This is a first for me. I’ve hunted 21 seasons, and in most of them, the vast majority of my time spent in the field has been, more accurately, been time spent in the marsh. Not this year.
How I got here, and why I am at peace with my decision, took some doing.
Chance started it. Didn’t really get an opportunity when the season began in late October. Oh well. And then Slow-vember came, and I never really hunt then. But then as November faded and December began, something in me changed.
I didn’t want it anymore. I found myself happier sleeping in than standing in a muddy marsh three hours before dawn, swinging around my flashlight like a light saber to ward off the Sith, who are, at least on public land, your fellow hunters.
Holly’s epic struggles this season haven’t helped, either. She’d come home day after day, frustrated, sore, sometimes gas-lit, and with few or no ducks. Why would I want a piece of that?
But at the end of December, the ducks finally arrived and hunting finally got good. And yet, I couldn’t care less.
OK, that’s not 100 percent accurate. The daydream of returning home with a strap full of mallards, pintail, wood ducks and maybe some specklebelly geese is still appealing. But even this fantasy has lost the siren song it used to be.
The practical reason is obvious, at least to me, the cook in the house. Our freezers, plural, are nearly full. I shot a big buck in Oklahoma and lots of upland birds in Alaska and North Dakota. I still have some bison left over from when I shot video for my Venison 101 video class. Then there’s the fish.
I’ve been cooking as much as I can almost every day, working through this bounty. But it’s just the two of us. Were I out there every weekend whacking waterfowl with Holly, we’d have twice as many birds to clean and eat. Fact is, we simply do not need that many birds.
So I’ve been opting out.
But this is not just me being practical. It’s that “not wanting it” that I’m wrestling with. Without getting into too much detail, life has been complicated lately. I have much on my mind, and not all of it good. Much to work through.
Last weekend I did get out, however. And it was good. Holly and I were invited to a rice club near Marysville – a “rice club” is a rice farm with duck blinds placed strategically throughout it; it’s a way for farmers to make money off their land in winter. It was spitty and windy, so good conditions to hunt the rice.
I had zero expectations coming into it. In fact, I almost didn’t go. I was feeling crappy the night before, like I was fighting a bug, and was pretty down, too. I slept like shit, and somewhere around 2 a.m. I convinced myself not to go.
But at some point thereafter, I fell into a dream, woke up… and felt OK. Not great, but OK. Good enough to go. So I did, to Holly’s surprise.
I purposely took the spot in the blind we all thought would be the quietest position because, well, I am not terribly concerned with killing ducks right now. But as it happened, my spot was the prime spot, not the quiet corner.
As I’d mentioned, I ended the day with the snow goose, a hen pintail, a drake mallard, a drake gadwall, and three drake spoonies – which I was most happy about because my friend Brian from Michigan had made me a hen spoonie decoy whose name is La Shovita. Nice to see she’s hawt to the Hollywoods…
It was a good day. It scratched an itch I didn’t know I had. Does one hunt solve all my problems? No. Will I hunt again before the closer at the end of January? Maybe. Maybe not.
When I step back and sit with my thoughts a bit, I realize that this is just one of the stages of a hunter’s life. That stage where it’s OK to walk away — either for just a season or two, or forever — and deal with life’s other concerns.
I will not be setting down my guns anytime soon. Hunting and fishing are how I feed myself, and at some point, the larder will thin. But I needed a break from the grind. I realize that now. And it’s been good.
Ammunition doesn’t go bad, waders store well in a closet, and next year I may well feel differently. Chances are, I’ll return to my marsh rat ways. But if not, I’m at peace with that, too.
Excellent. I've got a few years on you, and I've laid a lot of things aside, sometimes for years. There are worse things than not going somewhere or doing something. Going and doing when you are not so inclined is wasteful of peace of mind.
Raising a family of five there was never enough fish or venison in the freezer. Now, as an empty nester, I find myself having very similar thoughts. When it is cold and raining out at 4 am I am now more inclined to roll over and dream about great hunting days of old. Where I live in New York you get a buck tag and four doe tags which I used to fill and my family would enjoy for the year. Now the freezer is full and I only settle for a nice buck. Similar with fish....I had so much trout and salmon that I used your smoking recipes to smoke at least a dozen fillets and gave them away to friends as a holiday gesture. It is also a different sort of energy when you have family with you cleaning fish and processing dear than doing it alone. So many good memories I think reduces my desire to fight the elements for deer and/or fish. :-). Great read~Thanks