Late Show

A sure skunking at an icy pond turns into a winter waterfowl bonanza

- Phil Bourjaily

YOU CAN’T SHOOT ducks from the couch, but you can’t shoot them with the truck stuck in the road ditch either, so I waited until the plows cleared the roads and finally ventured out around sunrise. Now that I’m here, I can’t even seem to shoot ducks from my layout blind.

The mallards trading up and down the river swing over the half-frozen pond I’m guarding and look down from a safe height, but that’s all. I know they can’t spot me. I dug the blind into deep, fresh snow at the water’s edge with a bank behind, and I tucked grass into the stubble straps of the hide’s snow cover. I even remembered to wear my white beanie and neck gaiter. I’m like the picture of the polar bear eating vanilla ice cream in a blizzard. There’s nothing to see, save a few inches of gun barrel sticking out of the blind doors. I’ve picked an inertia gun, Browning’s Wicked Wing A5, as the semi-auto in my cabinet most likely to shoot three times, every time, on a cold and snowy day.

The spread is my usual smallwater setup, a C of 18 or so mallard decoys. I’ve added five Canada goose floaters for visibility and because there are geese around. I put them downwind of the ducks because the old-time gunners believed that ducks will fly over geese but geese won’t fly over ducks—and I’m happy to go along with that wisdom.