NORTHERN FLIGHTS   by R.E. Massey

Field & Stream, Midwest Edition, December 1985 – Vol. XC No. 8

The old man laughed.  “Three ducks the limit now I hear,” he said, and I admitted he was right.  The old man leaned back in his chair and his eyes went to the wall behind my head.  I knew where he was going now, I didn’t need to look.  There on the wall hung a watercolor print, a big picture in a big oak frame.

“There was a time,” he said, “when we had it all.”  His black eyes centered on a drake mallard, feet down, that hung forever suspended above the decoy spread that stood off the lee side of an island of rushes.  Like that moment in the print, one day has remained forever in the old man’s mind.  He was about to take me back there again.

It’s a game with us now.  Each time he spins out the story, it’s the same as he’s told it so many times before.  And each time, I settle in too, stuffing a pipe to fiddle with while we drink our coffee.  But then I’ll ask him a question, something that may get me a new insight on what it was like to live back then.  That way the story never gets stale.  What would it be this time? I asked myself.  How about, “Where’d you put the horse when you got to the slough?”  His answer surprised me.

“I tipped him over in a haystack to keep warm,” he spat.

“Say again,” I said.

“I hobbled him and pushed him over on his side in the hay.  When it was time to go I unstrung him and up he jumped,” the old man said.  “That way he stayed both still and warm.

The old man is always a surprise.  To see him now, bent over from his ninety winters, it’s hard to believe that in that other life he was an athletic young man.

The men before the Great War were intensely competitive hunters who shot for reputation and meat at the same time.  The old man laughs at me when I explain how I was upon a flock and could have “cleaned house” had it been the old days.  I tell him about our triumphs with the goose population, and he reminds me of his fifty-bird mallard limits and his spring season before 1913.  It’s hard to compete with the old man.  He had it all and he used it.  He won’t  back down when I wince at his descriptions of hundreds of birds bagged per day and cases of shells being burned every day when the northern flights were in. 

Barrels of ducks, cream cans full of ducks, standing on the depot platform being loaded on the Great Northern for the cities prompt me to say, “The ducks are gone now because of some people’s greed.”

“But whose,” he always asks, “the drainers or the gunners?”

No, he won’t back down and take the blame for the birds being lost, and the longer I listen to him, the more I know he’s right.  The habitat is shot, don’t kid yourself.  We could still be doing a large amount of gunning if we had our sloughs back.  Yet the gunning and the sloughs are still there in the old man’s mind.

They’re there because of the “farewell hunt.”  It was late fall 1917.  The old man and his younger brother, Glen, had enlisted, and this was their last hunt together.  The old man didn’t know it that morning, but he and Glen would never have another hunt together.  The Great War would take them away and would swallow them up.  Oh, Glen came back all right; it’s just that forty days of bombardment in the mud of the front near Paulliac, France, had done something to him.  He took his life shortly after he returned.  The old man always takes a little time here in his narrative to blink away the mist over his eyes.  You see, Glen was his favorite brother, and it hurts the old man to remember him.  I guess that’s part of what makes that farewell hunt so memorable.

In his mind we’re wading now on the Schoolhouse Slough, north of town.  He had come to the slough in the dark.  He had driven the 2 miles from town; a lantern had served as headlamp and now it lit his way through the rushes to the blind.

“It was the northern flights,” he tells me.  The fires kindle behind those dark old eyes, and his hands clench with the thought of the clouds of birds that came south each fall back then.  He doesn’t even try to explain it any more.  It’s a litany now, and after all, how can you explain what it was like to have so many birds come through that a sensible limit was thought to include “fifty mallards per man per day,” as the old man always recites it.

“And there was Glen,” the old man says.  “He’d slept overnight on the blind, curled up in a buffalo robe with his dogs, Pal and Bess.  Glen was a real hunter.  He had twin rattail spaniels.  Those spaniels were curly-coated, and the three of them looked like a momma bear and her cubs.  Two little curly-coated dogs and Glen in that curly buffalo robe!”

That part of the story always warms the old man, and he remembers the good days he and Glen had.  He’s through the bad part of the story now, and we’re back there with Glen, breakfasting on a double-boiler of cold roast teal on a bed of wild rice.  The raised blind tucked into the reeds of the Schoolhouse Slough was aglow with lantern light and laughter that late fall night.  Model 97s were slipped out of their greasy sheepskin-lined cases to be examined and admired.

“We leaned our hammer-guns against the wall of the blind,” the old man tells me, “and looked it all over.  Solid in the muck of the slough stood the poles that supported the grain doors which were the floor of our blind.  Under the floor was our skiff full of live mallard decoys to stake out with the blocks.  How would you like to shoot over that rig?”

I let my mind slip back there with him, and I imagined a world with tamies to do the calling for you and a limit of fifty greenheads ahead.

Again the old man’s eyes travel to his Les Kouba print on the wall.  There’s a slate-gray sky in the picture that is just opening up slightly to reveal streaks of morning sun.  The morning on that print threatens snow, as did the morning of the farewell hunt.  The old man watches Kouba’s mallards dropping in just ahead of the skiff holding two hunters.  Once again, he sees the greenheads mobbing in just ahead of an Arctic blow.

“They had been chased out of Canada all together and all at once by a big blow,” he says.  “Glen and I knew they’d stay only long enough to gobble corn and move on ahead of the blizzard.  We’d have to time things just right or we’d get caught out in the open ourselves!”

There was a third member of their hunting party who was to have joined them at dawn, but he didn’t arrive until 8:30 and missed all the action.  “I wouldn’t have come at all,” he had informed the old and Glen, “but Mother Massey asked me to drive out to the slough quick and see if you boys needed help getting in before the storm hit.”

“He pulled up in that new Diana automobile of his,” the old man says.  “He was just in time to load up his limit of fifty mallards and some oddballs we had shot for him, then we sent him on home.”

The old man and Glen had shot 167 ducks and three geese that morning.  They were in town, in the back room of Father Massey’s livery barn, picking ducks by 9 that morning, but now I’m getting ahead of the story.

“The wet flakes that always start those blizzards got us a little leery at first,” he tells me.  “Weather reports came through old men’s knees in those days.  A hunter’s life could depend on his accuracy as a weatherman!  Timing was what counted.  Timing and toughness.”

It was the first snowstorm of the fall.  The two brothers crouched side by side and split the snowy air with the bark of their Winchesters.  Flocks landed with the hissing snowflakes on the Schoolhouse Slough.  The birds jumped and flew to the nearby corn and wheat surrounding the water.  They fed fast, ahead of the storm, hoping for a meal of ripe corn to take them south.  The old man and his brother knew then that they had time for this hunt.  Not much time, to be sure, but enough for the Massey boys.

“We’d let ‘em land,” the old man says.  “Then we’d let the tamies toll ‘em in.  Then we’d jump ‘em and let the next flight come in.  There wasn’t a break of 10 minutes in the gunning.”

A rugged independence marked the men of that generation.  They did the grandest things of life in a grand style.  Their autumns were spent as country gentlemen should spend the duck season.  On fair days the ladies joined them in the sloughs, being rowed about and positioned by their men.  They were never far from an enclosed bus-wagon in which they could escape the elements, though.  None of the Massey women would be persuaded to venture out on that threatening day, but they were tolerant when the old man and Glen had gone.  The Massey women understood a man who wanted to take advantage of a yearly opportunity called the northern flights.  Those devil-may-care young “rake hells” would have gone out in the middle of the fast-approaching blow, the women knew, because that next day the boys were to board the train and leave their beloved prairies.

“Life is full of adjustments, isn’t it?” the old man muses, staring at his walker standing there beside him.  “After ’17 everything started to go downhill.  When the drought in the ‘30s wiped the birds out, I never thought they’d be back, and I was right.  The drains and draglines finished it off, and here we are.”

The light fades in the old man’s brooding eyes momentarily, but they kindle up again just as quickly.  He’s looking at his picture again and smiling.  He’s here with me, sitting in his chair, but he’s not with me.  He’s back in his mind on the Schoolhouse Slough again.

It’s times like these that the years weigh heavy on the old man.  He longs to be younger now so he could teach his grandsons the sport he knows so well.  I long for that, too, but both of us know that will never be.  There’s only one way he can be young again, and that’s the way he takes now.  He can’t move well on his old legs any more, so he travels the only way he can, with his mind.

I’ll go with him many more times.  Back to the farewell hunt.  Something died for him then, and something grand will be gone from the family when the old man goes.  Something fine will be left behind, though, because my sons have heard the story.  They’ve been there with him and have seen the young man that the old man once was.