Word: ducking
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...last shoot come back to hunters with the turn of the season. Memory rides south with the migrating waterfowl on the first clear days of fall. Then the wind veers into the northeast, the barometer drops, grey clouds scud into rain, and that old feeling returns. It is fine duck weather-time for a man to be paddling out into the marshes in the predawn cold, waiting with frostbitten impatience for a long V of honkers, watching them wing into the breeze and flare out as they drop down to feed...
Cold beyond help of padded clothing or any flask of liquid warmth, a hunter can still come alive to the heart-moving sight of "White Wavys" (snow geese) settling into range or the whisper of duck wings in the reeds just before the birds take off. Last week, as wintering waterfowl beat their way south, hunting seasons were opening along the ancient flyways: the Atlantic seaboard, the Pacific and mountain states, down the Mississippi Valley and south across the Great Plains. Everywhere the birds stopped, they matched wits with well-equipped adversaries. Guns belched bird shot from cramped duckboats...
...Hemingway says, they all fly different ways. A man who can plug a teal zigzagging upward out of marsh grass may have a tough time sighting in on a flight of mallard drumming toward him. Learning to lead a speedy pintail is another trick entirely from following a wood duck through trees. For all the instruction a hunter may have had, all the trapshooting he may have done, lining up a wing shot, says one expert, "is something like learning how to balance peas on the edge of your knife, or kissing your wife. Only practice and a species...
Sturdy Protector. Aside from their hunters' ineptness and their own evasive skill, migrating waterfowl have another sturdy protector: the game laws of almost every country that they pass over. Unlike the fisherman, the duck hunter cannot throw back the one he takes just for kicks; carefully calculated hunting seasons and bag limits guard the birds from overenthusiastic sportsmen...
Fortunately for the duck hunter's friends, they seldom have to listen for long to the fat glories of "the one that got away." Most of the time, a beaten, bone-weary gunman will simply explain: "That big mallard I missed had most likely been stuffing himself with fish. He would have tasted terrible anyway...