Bo Whoop Comes Home

After being lost for 57 years, Nash Buckingham’s legendary shotgun goes back to work in a Mississippi duck blind.

- Will Brantley

The mallards catch us at midmorning, when our guts are growling and our guard is down. Typical of late-season ducks, the pair is within gun range before anyone notices them. Someone in the blind hisses “ducks” with the urgent tone that voids all gentlemen’s rules of calling the shot. I grab and shoulder the gun leaning up next to me. It’s not your typical duck gun. It’s a big double, a 90-year-old HE-grade Super Fox with stamped barrels. The right one reads MADE FOR NASH BUCKINGHAM; the left, BY BURT BECKER PHILA, PA. I pull the front trigger, and the gun’s report ripples through the green cypress and button willows. From here, it sounds like any other 12-gauge. But the guys at camp a quarter mile away later say they heard something different—a distinct, two-note report that they swear sounds just like it does in the legends: bo-whoop.

LOST AND FOUND

 Tunica County, Miss., has changed a lot since Nash Buckingham’s day. U.S. Highway 61 South long ago replaced the railroad and Limb Dodger as the primary mode of transportation for sportsmen traveling from Memphis to Tunica. The thickets full of quail are mostly gone, replaced by laser-leveled cotton and soybean fields. A strip of failing casinos sits on the banks of the Mississippi River, skeletons of promised economic progress in a region that consistently ranks among the country’s poorest. Yet, the iconic Blue and White Restaurant is still here. It still opens before sunup and it’s still where many duck hunters like to eat breakfast, just as Buckingham did. And if you jump in a boat and motor a few hundred yards into the cypress trees of Beaver Dam Lake, you’ll see a world that hasn’t changed since Buckingham’s day—a world the ducks still haunt every winter.