By Taylor Wilson
“You know I like duck hunting best, right?”
This from my nine-year-old when we were hunting something other than ducks.
“Why’s that?” I asked.
“Well, because you can talk a whole lot more,” he said.
I laughed and thought of his mom, and realized the gene pool is indeed split 50-50. (When the kid was a baby, he babbled so much that I figured he would probably have no other career choice than auctioneer.)
“I also like it because you get to be in the blind with your friends, and cook stuff and have fun. And if it is really right, we get to shoot a lot, together,” he added.
I agreed, with him, and as a dad, enjoyed his word “together.” Then I added that if forced to choose, my leanings were more toward waterfowl as well. And then it hit me.
Clubhouse?
A duck blind is no more than a clubhouse, really. Not unlike those places we would build out of scrap lumber as kids and go hide from the rest of the world with our best buds and our dogs.
Why had I never seen it that way before?
Maybe I had listened too much to some who believe blinds to be nothing more than a foliated box where they sit and wait?
Or maybe it was because it had been too long since I saw it through the eyes of a child?
This year, according to waterfowl surveys, looks to be a bang-bang, bang-up season; so clubhouse time could be prime.
But I have heard the “Mega Migration” predictions before, and to tell the truth, I have actually experienced better seasons in the reportedly lean years, than in those forecasted to be fantastic. So I am skeptical, in a cup-half-empty, one-hipboot-leaks, one-doesn’t kind of way.
Yep, you see enough seasons, greenhouse theory included (gaseous as that may be), and you’ll witness all the cycles of cold weather, rain/water and crop production/food. You’ll notice they pretty much chart all over the place. And at such times, it doesn’t matter how many ducks are north (or south) of you.
Then too, on the other side of the johnboat, just have all the ’fowl factors line up, and it can become the kind of season where clubhouses/blinds become crowded.
So it comes down to: We can only hope and keep our trigger fingers crossed.
But either way—lots of dead ducks or only a few—at Show Time I am mainly shooting for some time in the clubhouse/blind, with good buds, good food and our dog.
What? Some of us will never grow up?
Probably not, if we had been given a choice. But even all grownup, we can still catch a hint of being able to travel back, now and then, especially when occupying a camouflaged clubhouse.
