DUCK DAYS IN FLA-TOUT NOWHERE

Tallahatchie Hunts takes hunters far from modern comforts—which is precisely why it’s become such a big name.

- BOYCE UPHOLT

It’s not yet dawn, and the ATV we’re riding is squirming over wet, loose mud. The wind is howling—spitting, really, with rain turning to ice. We’re wrapped head to toe in three layers of camouflage. Just the evening before it had been 70 degrees out. Now it’s 40 and dropping. And Mike Flautt is grinning. “This right here is what I call a duck day,” he says.

After we park the ATV, Flautt wades into a knee-deep pool, a stand of frigid backwater that has overflowed from the Tallahatchie River and filled a small plot of farmland. Two clients trail behind him. The sky, smeared with clouds tinted just slightly by the sunrise they obscure, is doubled below us in a blue glow atop the rippling water.

A freight train howls somewhere nearby. It will not be stopping anywhere near here. The nearest hotel is 20 miles away, and as Flautt likes to note, there is no stoplight anywhere in Tallahatchie County. He has been telling me again and again—bragging, really—that he’s brought me to the middle of “flat-out nowhere.” But the hunters who stream into this county each winter—arriving from all 50 states and a long list of foreign countries, and including movie stars and television personalities, politicians and some of the world’s wealthiest businessmen—attest to the fact that, at least for 60 days each winter, flat-out nowhere is just the place to be.

After the decoys are set and the hunters are tucked in the duck blind, after the blue glow has conquered the sky, Flautt wades back out of the water. He loves being in a duck blind as dawn arrives and the hunt begins—but by 7 o’clock he’s ready to move, he tells me, laughing.