PROTECT AMERICA’S HUNTING HERITAGE –

                   A Time for Tough Guys                         By R.E. Massey

Petersen’s HUNTING, Dec. 1989 

It’s easy to be tough when you’re young.  Young men aren’t afraid of anything, it seems.  That’s not always smart.  With age comes caution—you’ve seen it all and that includes plenty of trouble.  When the wind blows, you get off the lake.  It doesn’t matter if the ducks are flying.  No duck is worth your life.  That’s what my old man used to tell me.

Lately it seemed he had forgotten that lesson and went out of his way to court trouble—this from a man who bragged that he hadn’t been caught in the big Armistice blizzard.  He always claimed he could smell trouble.  I wondered what had happened to his nose.

I already suspected trouble when I horsed the big 1950 Chrysler New Yorker through the last drift and reached the shore.  Marsh Lake was running high in a late November storm.  Leaving the heater on and the car running, I switched on the headlights and stepped out.  Staring out across the black waters I listened for any sound of him, knowing there would be none. 

With this hard wind, I would see him before I heard him.  His boat would grate ashore beside me and Pal, his water spaniel, would be nosing my hand.  Bluebill ducks would be thrown on the sand in a heap, and he’d be there.

The gunning would have been good that day, and any Minnesota prairie boy, as I was then, would have given an arm to get in on ducks in the snow.  This day, unfortunately, I had missed it.  With a football game this evening, I had had to be in school.  Part of me, at least, had been sitting there in class, but most of me had been daydreaming about gunning ducks.

“What a day this would have been,” I said to myself.  However, standing in the headlights I realized that the day wasn’t over yet.  What if the old man couldn’t get off the island?  How could he make it through a night like this?  Cold water was icing the sandy beach before me and the snow was blustering.  There was still no sign of him.

I knew what this was.  I was used to it.  Retirement had not set well with my old man.  The situation had quickly become a crisis.  Dad had not liked having nothing to do, and he had gotten sore.  He had hit the bottle for a while, and he had hit it hard.  Then he had come to his senses and had turned to a better form of excitement—the outdoors.  He had made his comeback as an outdoorsman and I had watched it all.  Now he was doing things he hadn’t done since he was 35.  I felt good about it, but I knew there was always the risk he might push it too far.

Seventy-three was a ripe old age back in the 1960’s.  That was when most old men packed it in and took to their parlor chairs, but not my old man.  It’s not that he didn’t like a hand from a young horse like me with all the hunting paraphernalia, it’s just that when I wasn’t available to go along, he’d go anyway.

I wasn’t sure if my old man, who had been battered by the operations he’d been through, would be up to this kind of a night.  Sheets of snow swirled across the headlight beams, and I retreated to the heater of the Chrysler.  Ma had packed a thermos for him, knowing that his nose would be dripping and his cheeks would be red-blue with cold.  “He won’t need it all,” I said to myself, unscrewing the top.

Suddenly it struck me.  What if he wasn’t coming?  What if he was planning to weather over on the island?  He’d done it before—flipped the boat and pulled rushes until he had an insulated windbreak.  With the dog he had waited it out until dawn.  None the worse for wear that time, he had broken skim ice with an oar to finally get back to shore.  It had been a cold one!  He had stayed in bed for three days to get warm after that.  Still he went back!

I was proud of him, as crazy as he was.  He wouldn’t let us slow him down.  Ma and I had done all we could to get him to let up a bit on the kind of hunting he was fond of. 

We had let him know the change that had taken place was normal and that a man naturally slows down with age.  He had turned red every time we had begun to try to reason with him.  He hated the fact that we had appeared to doubt him.  I had been proud of him even though I knew he had been only delaying the inevitable.  I had seen his point, though.  As he had said: “I’m taking every day!  I’ll go till I drop, so don’t get in my way!”

Old men are a special breed, and my old man was a classic.  He was still a dead shot at his age.  It would have been enough for me, I know, if I could post a cornfield and bust five roosters as they tore past, as he had done only a week earlier.  It would have been enough for me—but not for him.  He had to hunt hard like he used to.  Nothing less than bluebills in the storm would do for him.  Well, this time, I thought, it might do him in.

My thoughts were interrupted as a green pickup came bouncing along the ruts and scraping through the willows behind me.  It was my old man’s friend, Jimmie.  Jimmie was an old-timer, too, and we all were hunting buddies.  In fact, Jimmie, my old man, and I had hunted pheasants together all season.  We had driven from cover to cover in Jimmie’s old green pickup and had listened to Bud Grant’s Vikes and hunted roosters.  We had spent some golden fall afternoons in that truck.  But this wasn’t a golden afternoon.  This was after dark in a snowstorm on Marsh Lake.

Jimmie stepped out of his truck, and his eyes spelled trouble.  He hunched forward into his parka and ran up to the door.

“Get in,” I yelled to him.

“Is he dressed for it?” Jimmie asked.

I pulled the thermos aside as he slid in beside me.

“You know him,” I offered.

The windshield wipers clacked back and forth as we peered at the snowy lake.  Breakers hissed and shot foam across the beach, but still no Pa. 

“Darn it!” I barked.  “It’s as bad as having to worry about a kid.”

Jimmie glanced at me and chuckled.  “Your old man does what he has always done,” he said.  “It’s you who will have to change.”

“What do you mean?” I asked him.

“He’s got to do it,” Jimmie began.  “You’ve got your game—that’s football.  He’s got his—that’s a night like this.  This is what he’s good at.”

“Was good at,” I corrected.

“Don’t count him out yet,” Jimmie continued.  “Watch that water—you’ll see.”

He was smug.  He couldn’t imagine the old man failing, it seemed.  But wait.  If he was confident, why was he here?  I was here because I was scared.  He must be, too.

“Jimmie,” I said, “you’re here because you’re worried.  You know you are.”

“No,” he said, “I’m here to help the old man lift his boat.”

Suddenly Jimmie threw open the door and ran down the headlights to the shore.  There he was!  My old man.  Jimmie grabbed the prow and pulled the little skiff out.  Its canvas body was a sheet of ice as Jimmie dragged it in.

The old man couldn’t move.  His hands were “froze to the oars,” as he sometimes said.  His old brown jersey gloves were crusted with icy spray, and Jimmie had to beat him free by pounding the old man’s hands with his fist.  When he stood up, he could barely move.  We lifted him by his elbows and walked him over to the Chrysler and in by the heater.  Gradually he began to loosen up. 

“Ahhh,” the old man began.

“Pa,” I said, “you’re a lucky man.”

He couldn’t talk yet.  He began fumbling in his coat for his chew.

“Couldn’t spit,” he mumbled as he tucked a gob of tobacco leaf into his cheek.  The heater was getting to him now and he was stretching out, working his old joints around:  knees first, then elbows, and lastly fingers.  “Mmmm,” he mumbled, rolling down the window and spitting.

The old man unbuttoned his parka and shrugged out of it.  Then the two of us watched Jimmie pull in and stow the anchor—that was one of Pa’s tricks in this kind of weather.  Sailing with the wind from the island as he had been, he had thrown out the anchor to slow things down.  It had dragged behind, roped from the stern, and had kept the duckboat headed straight.  He had not needed to do much but hang on.  If there had been skim ice forming, he could have turned by using his paddle and slowed up before he piled into a sheet of ice that could have ripped that canvas duckboat wide open—he was canny, my old man.

Through cupped hands, Jimmie yelled, “Get out and help throw this boat into the pickup!”

“Where’d you put the ducks?” the old man asked Jimmie when we gathered around the boat.  “Don’t try and steal ‘em,” he said.  “I’ll give ‘em to you, but I’m not that done in—you can’t steal ‘em!”  Jimmie rocked with laughter.  The old man could barely straighten up in the snow when we slid his skiff into the pickup, but he had enough left for a wisecrack.

“Pal!” I yelled.  The water spaniel was somewhere about, I knew that, but she never seemed to listen to me.  Pal was an American water spaniel.  My old man loved that ugly but tough breed and had made them a part of his life.  He had raised his first litter back in 1904, and had had ‘em ever since.  They reminded me of a muskrat with that hairless rattail and chestnut color.  “Pal, come here!” I bellowed.  I was always having trouble getting that dog to mind me.  She seemed to take pleasure in being stubborn with me, just like the old man.

“Pal,” the old man mumbled, and the dog walked up and sat.  “Hup,” he said, and she climbed into the car through the open door he had offered.  We backed up and swung in behind Jimmie as he led the way out.

The old man sat there in his old cape-collared sheepskin coat and tickled Pal’s ear.  I looked at my watch.  Six-thirty—time to get to the locker room and tape up for the game.  He would be in the stands, I knew.  He always was.

He’d join with Ma and tell me to be careful and try not to get hurt in the game.  At such times he would be on her side, of course.  He would see plenty of danger ahead in every game—just as she would.  He had seen me through broken collarbones and a broken nose, but he had not gotten in my way, and he had not let my mother stop me, either.

She was right, of course; I was wrecking myself.  Now, 30 years later, her predictions of arthritic knees have come true, but I wouldn’t have traded it.  The danger of injury just gave it spice—like the old man’s hard hunting after bluebills.  It was a once-in-a-lifetime experience—pain and all.

Now, every life has its lessons and I think I’ve learned a few.  Sometimes you have to hurt some to get what you want.  Sometimes, like in football, you have to get slammed around, belted, and nicked by flying objects.  You have to play through some pain and cold sometimes to be the person you want to be.  It hurt the old man—I saw that, but he let me know it was worth it every time.  He took pride in the beating he took to get at the sweet parts of a duck hunter’s life.

The old waterfowler?  I didn’t get in his way, and he carried on for many a year after that.  Me?  I learned many lessons in endurance at that stage of my life, and now I see before me that very special time in life when the hours are few that I’ll have in the marshes and the cold times will tend to get to me.  I can feel it myself.  I’ll take it like the old man and Jimmie.  I’ll meet it head-on and go as far as I can go.  The end can be as good as the beginning in life.  I learned that by watching my old man.  He played his game to the end, as we all hope to do.  Old age is a feeling—a state of mind.  I’ll be out there like the old man with the anchor draggin’, going home with the storm.  I want to grate onto shore and hop out to friends who didn’t think I’d make it.